The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution (25 page)

For John Sack, the Madrid bureau chief for CBS News, the notion of going to Vietnam as a correspondent was an appealing one. George Goodman’s profile of Halberstam left a lasting impression on him. Sack had been Halberstam’s friend when the two attended Harvard together in the early fifties. They had shared girlfriends and their dreams of literary glory. Now the image of Halberstam was staring at Sack from the pages of
Esquire:
in country and on combat patrol, waist-deep in the mud, looking over his shoulder at the camera with a satisfied grin as if to say, “Ain’t this the life?”

“Of course I’d read that [George Goodman story] about David, and that picture of David crossing a swamp with the hat on and turning back to look at the camera,” said Sack. “A pang of nostalgia, maybe even jealousy, went through me, and I thought: I’m supposed to be there.”

The Korean War had been a pure adrenaline rush when Sack, fresh out of Harvard, covered the western front for the Army newspaper
Stars and Stripes
as a volunteer infantryman. He loved diving in and out of foxholes, driving his jeep to Seoul and back, fraternizing with the soldiers in the cold, and then rushing back to his barracks to get it all down in his stories. The CBS job was steady income, but it had become a bit
sleepy, and now the network was downsizing, leaving Sack with even less work than usual. When Sack returned to New York from Spain in September 1965, he found himself with little to do but read magazines, which in his view provided a trussed-up Hollywood version of warfare in Vietnam that didn’t square with his experiences. In a pitch letter to Harold Hayes proposing a different approach, Sack articulated his beef with the mainstream press:

Where, Sack wondered, were the “sad sacks, boneheads, goldbricks, loudmouths, paranoiacs, catatonics, incompetents, semi-conscientious objectors, malingerers, cry-babies, yahoos, vulgarians, big time operators, butterfingers, sadists and surly bastards”?

Sack, who had written one piece for
Esquire
in 1959 and had published pieces in
The New Yorker
and
Harper’s
, proposed to Hayes that he attach himself to an army company, travel with them by troop boat to Vietnam, and head into combat—“combat with all of its wild inanities, and I’d like to write about it my way. I’d have to get a leave of absence from CBS for this; I think I could.” Sack thought only of
Esquire
for his story, because it was the only magazine that would empathize with his approach (he once sent a darkly humorous and utterly factual story on Andora, Italy, to
The New Yorker
, but the magazine held the story for six months because the editors couldn’t decide if it belonged in the fact department or the fiction department; Sack sold it to
Playboy
instead).

Hayes responded: “Jesus Christ, how much would all this cost?” Not much, according to Sack: $145 for airfare to San Francisco, then a $664
ticket back to Manhattan from Vietnam. The troop boat would be free, room and board taken care of. “These would be the only expenses outside of Bamoubia beer.” (In fact, the final tally was close to $5,000.) All Sack would need from Hayes was an introductory letter to the Pentagon so that he could get his press credentials. Hayes agreed, and Sack was on his way to Vietnam.

In December Sack flew to Arlington, Virginia, to determine which infantry company would provide him with the best cross section of soldiers. Despite Sack’s reservations about Fort Dix, New Jersey—he had trained there for Korea and was worried that it would be loaded with white kids from New York and Boston—Pentagon brass assured him that he would find what he was looking for there. Company M, with almost a month of training ahead of them before they would be dispatched, seemed the perfect fit.

Sack arrived at Fort Dix on January 3 on CBS vacation time, just to test the waters and determine if indeed there was a story to be written. Going to Fort Dix and interviewing the soldiers before they headed into the jungles of Southeast Asia was essential for Sack; if readers were going to care about who lived and who died, then he had to establish them clearly beforehand, set up the social dynamic, and get a feel for the leadership hierarchy. It was the first rule of all great war stories: readers had to identify with the soldiers to the extent that they cared about what lay in store for the young men. This wasn’t going to be a boilerplate story about military strategy; Sack simply wanted to show
Esquire’s
readers what the soldier’s life was really about, the complex matrix of military, social, and economic factors that come into play. Sack was intimate with war, and bloodless heroism had very little to do with it.

Sack was put up in the guest quarters at Fort Dix and took all of his meals in the officer’s mess. Every day he would wake up at 4 A.M. with the soldiers and stay with them until 9 P.M., when they turned in for the night. Interviewing the soldiers was easier than Sack had anticipated, but there were skeptics. Most of the members of M Company thought of
Esquire
as a fashion magazine, and why would a fashion rag care about them? But Sack was one of them, a veteran, and they opened up readily to him. A few of them mistook him for a father confessor, an unintended consequence of the
C
emblazoned on his black armband. The
C
stood for
correspondent
, but some of the soldiers thought it stood for
chaplain
. “I
remember that I felt that I had fallen into a goldmine,” said Sack. “As I was writing the notebooks, clutching onto these notebooks, thinking it’s gold, it’s gold. People were tremendously accessible in the army.”

What struck Sack immediately was the fact that no one at Fort Dix talked about Vietnam. No one even alluded to it. It only confirmed what he already knew, that writing the story for
Esquire
was the only approach that made sense. His bosses at CBS wouldn’t accept such tight-lipped nondrama. They would probably send someone like Charles Kuralt to stick a microphone and a camera in the faces of M Company’s soldiers and ask them how they felt about Vietnam, and thus manufacture responses that way. But their silence
was
the story—Sack knew it in his bones. Roughly 105 of them, or half the company, would be sent to Vietnam, but none of them knew who among them would be so chosen. The ultimate decision had already been made in Arlington, among the “stiff IBM cards the size of a British pound note, one apiece for every soldier in M.” A Pentagon functionary had fastened those cards to other white cards that denoted where the soldier would be assigned, and that’s how M’s fate was determined. Sack had witnessed this process firsthand at Arlington and was thus equipped with the terrible knowledge of knowing who was going before M Company did.

The army tried to spin the story for Sack’s benefit by replacing M Company’s Sergeant Shaw, a hard-nosed bad-ass, with a charmer named Doherty, but the army eventually stopped thinking about him, and he melted into the scenery. Armed with only a notebook, Sack took everything in, furiously scribbling notes that he would decipher and organize every night until at least one in the morning, and sometimes much later. “I didn’t have a tape recorder, and I was scribbling notes, and I sometimes had to scribble so fast all I could scribble were notes on the notes, notes to remind me of the notes,” said Sack.

He watched M Company endure the rigors of training, and sat with them after hours, when they pined for their girls back home or imagined themselves confronting the unknown enemy. Soon a few major characters began to materialize out of the more than two hundred soldiers Sack was interviewing and recording detailed notes about: Demirgian, the Armenian roughneck who wanted more than anything to be discharged, and offered twenty dollars to the first man who would break his jaw; Smith, the good Christian son who enlisted in the army because it was
God’s plan; Mason, the street-tough Harlem kid; Sullivan, the cocksure ladies’ man. The story was laying itself out for him like a tidy Hollywood movie, Sack thought, with a cast that represented across section of class and social attitudes, but he knew better than to prematurely impose neat parameters on it.

M Company’s training regimen was a triumph of cold military logic, but given the impending fate of those who would be shipped off to Vietnam, it seemed to Sack an exercise in illogic, a futile imposition of protocol for a war that followed no clear rules of order. In two full months of basic training and two of infantry training, no sergeant had addressed a basic tenet of warfare: how to avoid dying. Here is how Sack described a typical barracks inspection conducted by a sergeant named Malloy, “the purist for whose sensibilities all of M’s craniums had to be austere as the pyramids, its footlockers parallel as the pedestals of Karnack.”

After three weeks, 105 members of M Company were assigned to Vietnam, and Sack flew with them into Saigon. The first operation involved going behind enemy lines into a Michelin rubber plantation, a place where “the Vietnamese in the village did the tapping, providing American motorists with rubber tires and killing American lieutenant colonels evenings.” M’s mission was a cut-and-dried search-and-destroy job, “to kill, wound, or capture its negligent enemy or drive it into the western river like a pack of distracted lemmings.” Sack watched Demirgian throw hand grenades into thatched huts where “a sniper or two might inconceivably lurk,” but no such snipers ever materialized. M Company was fighting an enemy it couldn’t see, but the omnipresent
clump clump
of distant fire became the soundtrack of their mission, the persistent footfall of impending danger.

As Sack moved with M Company into thick jungle territory, observing them torching rice caches and hamlets where no VC lurked, the morale of the soldiers hardened into something feral and irrational. “In actual fact, the cavalry’s big lieutenant colonel had given the or der,
insure that positive identification be made:
a sniper in the house destroy it, otherwise spare it. But through the iteration of imperatives … and a wise apprehension that the colonel couldn’t be serious, his order was almost unrecognizable when it got through channels to Demirgian’s Sergeant Gore. Gore heard the order as, ‘Kill everything. Destroy everything. Kill the cows, the pigs, the chickens—everything.’”

Then M Company finally notched its first casualty.

The writer, who had always felt strongly about America definitively resolving any war that it entered, and who felt that Vietnam was a just cause worth dying for, had now borne witness to a pointless exercise in civilian savagery. But surely, Sack thought, it had been an anomaly.
When he returned to the first brigade of the first division, he contritely explained to Colonel Sam Walker that it was his intention to cover the operation and file his story. The operation had turned into a big mess, but Sack was stuck with his story. “I know it isn’t typical,” Sack told Walker, “but I have to do my job.” Walker paused for a few seconds and then told Sack, “It’s typical.”

Sack was incredulous. “I couldn’t believe that with this vast army in Vietnam … with this huge thing going on … that all it was resulting in was the occasional death of seven-year-old girls.”

Sack returned to the Continental Hotel in Saigon and wrote up his twenty-seven-thousand-word story. In early June 1966 he sent copies to Hayes and his literary agent, Candida Donadio, in the hopes that she might see the potential to turn it into a book. Donadio turned him down, and Sack was despondent. What was missing? Sack thumbed through some other Vietnam articles in the army library and came across another story on Fort Dix in
Holiday
magazine by a young writer named Michael Herr, a former assistant editor at the magazine. What struck Sack about the article, called “Fort Dix: The New Army Game,” was his powerful command of language and character, the way Herr infused everything he wrote about with tremendous dramatic power. Herr described things, whereas Sack just reported the facts. Sack was taken by the way Herr wrote about happy hour in the officers’ club and how the senior officers resembled “Rotarians, perhaps highly skilled laborers—lathe operators out for dinner before a night of bowling.” Sack was intent on writing in scenes—that’s the way he had structured the TV documentaries he had made for CBS—but it wasn’t enough to simply string dry scenarios together. Herr’s story made him go back and look harder, push himself to elevate his prose to Herr’s level.