The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution (26 page)

The next day, after touring an aircraft carrier, Sack returned to the Continental to check his mail and found a telegram from Harold Hayes informing him that his story would take up the entire feature well for the next issue. A second telegram read: “Send any and all pictures of company M both in training and combat. Vitally important please do your best. Hayes.”

Sack was ecstatic, but he had not taken a single picture during his time with M Company. He would have to go on another operation, possibly risking his life, to get the shots he needed. Borrowing a camera
from Associated Press photographer Horst Faas, Sack joined M on something called Operation El Paso, hopping a helicopter along with Dimirgian and a few other soldiers. When the copter landed in enemy territory, Sack quickly jumped into a shell hole so that he could get shots of M disembarking from the helicopters. It turned out to be a cold landing zone—no VC to be found anywhere—but M formed a perimeter, and Sack had a perfect photo op to take advantage of.

When he returned to Saigon, he had over seven hundred pictures, and he sent them along to Hayes. The
Esquire
editor was now hearing rumblings from the magazine’s legal department that the story could perhaps trigger an avalanche of libel lawsuits. Sack’s portrait of army life in Vietnam left nothing out; his protagonists’ most closely held thoughts about the war, marriage, combat, leadership in the field—it was all in there. Perhaps, Hayes suggested, Sack could go back into the field and get legal releases from his ten most prominent characters? That way, if anyone else complained about Sack’s story, the magazine would have some leverage.

Sack agreed, but his mission to track down M Company would be considerably more difficult this time. They were now in war zone C, right on the Cambodian border, an area so dangerous that no helicopters would go near it. Sack’s only recourse was to take the press helicopter, with a pilot who was under orders to fly anywhere an accredited journalist told him to go, but he needed five passengers in order to reserve it. Sack’s girlfriend, a French baroness named Anne Rousseau de Prienne, was eager to break in her tailor-made camouflage outfit and agreed to join him. Sack had learned that M Company was going to burn a huge cache of rice, the largest yet found, in Zone C, and he convinced Dan Rather to bring his crew along.

That made five, but when Sack showed up at 7 A.M. to fly over, the helicopter pilot begged off: it was too risky. Sack pleaded with him, and they cut a deal: the helicopter would touch down, allowing them just enough time to disembark, but it would take off right afterward. They would have to make it back to Saigon on their own.

No sooner did they get close to Zone C than they were hit by machine gun fire; a .50 caliber bullet pierced the helicopter blade as they touched down. M Company was surrounded by VC, but Sack had a job to do. The baroness and Rather and his crew headed down the road to
see the rice burn, leaving Sack to get his releases signed. Dimirgian, Sullivan, and a few other subjects were there, and Sack made swift work of it. He spotted a brigadier general in a bubble helicopter and hitched a ride back to Saigon that way, leaving Rather and the baroness to fend for themselves.

Hours went by, and still no sign of Rather or the baroness. At five that afternoon Sack retired to the bar of the Hotel Continental, where correspondents gathered daily for an informal happy hour, and he regaled his friend Dan Minor, a radio journalist, with the day’s adventures. Minor found it worrisome that Sack would just leave his girlfriend and Rather in the lurch like that. Sack told him, “Don’t worry, she’ll prance in here shortly saying, ‘How could you do this to me?’”

“I’d be worried,” said Minor.

Sack told him, “No, I promise you.”

A half hour later the baroness trudged across the square in her tiger suit, stomped into the Continental, and screamed, “How could you do this? I have dinner tonight with the French ambassador at seven. It’s a dress party. I need to put my makeup on, I need to fix my hair, it is six o’clock, and I don’t have time to put on my dress or makeup!”

When Sack returned to New York in June, he sent his longer, revised piece to Candida Donadio. This time she was sold, and made a book deal at publisher David Segal’s New American Library. Sack spent the summer adding scenes to the book at his aunt’s house in Ocean Bay Park on Fire Island while Hayes and the
Esquire
staff prepared the publication of his story.

In the end, none of the pictures that Sack snapped in Vietnam would be chosen for the piece; the story would have no accompanying art at all. Sack’s notion for the cover—pasting Beetle Bailey’s face over the heads of real soldiers—was rejected outright by Hayes, who told Sack, “You don’t understand your story at all.”

The cover would break ranks with the usual whimsical mockeries that
Esquire
had become famous for ever since it hired George Lois in 1962. Lois—whose firm, Papert, Koenig, Lois, had revolutionized American advertising with its sharp-witted, graphically bold designs for all manner of consumer products—was a master of bitter irony and the use of typography as a graphic element. The September cover had showed a male underclassman applying lipstick, with the headline “How Our Red-Blooded Campus Heroes Are Beating the Draft.” That was the old
Esquire
approach to Vietnam. The October headline augured something darker and more menacing, the new twisted reality of the war. It was a slightly altered quote from Sack’s story, written in white letters against a black background—a device that Lois had previously used in a cough syrup ad:

“I just plucked out the line,” said Lois. “Putting people in harm’s way—that’s what the war was all about.” When Lois first presented the cover to Hayes, “Harold nearly fell to the floor. It was the first antiwar cover in a mainstream magazine.” Lois warned Hayes, “You’re gonna lose a lot of advertisers over this.” Hayes paused, look up at Lois, and whispered, “You nailed it.”

It was the first mainstream magazine article to discuss civilian casualties at any length, but not everyone at
Esquire
was thrilled with Sack’s impressionistic technique. Bob Sherrill felt that it was a “fucking good story” that got “mired up in detail.” He took issue with Sack’s lead, which began, “One, two, three at the most weeks and they would give M company its orders—
they
being those dim Olympian entities who reputedly threw cards into an IBM machine or into a hat to determine where each soldier in M would go next, which ones to stay there in the United States, which to live softly in Europe, and which to fight and to die in Vietnam.” It was in Sherrill’s view too fanciful, designed to “lead you away from the story instead of getting right into it.”

Among the editorial staff, Sherrill was a minority of one. Hayes loved the story so much that he threw a party in Sack’s honor at the
Esquire
offices. “It’s a much better story because you were for the war,” Hayes told Sack. “If you were against the war, it wouldn’t have come across as strongly.”

Published by New American Library in February 1967,
M
was the first great Vietnam book, and it’s unquestionably the first great New Journalism war book. Layer by layer, Sack peels away M Company’s thin veneer of resolve and courage, because it was absurd to pretend that soldiers in Vietnam were somehow made of sterner stuff. Soldiers weren’t superheroes; they were just unfortunate conscripts, forced to endure ungodly privations and accept death as a given of wartime life. Sack’s
grunts were scared, they were vulnerable, they cared a little too much. This was a major break from the time-honored tradition of war reportage, especially that of the World War II correspondents who pumped up the heroism of our boys on the front until they effaced every vestige of realism.

Guadalcanal Diary
, Richard Tregaskis’s chronicle of the U.S. Marines’ crucial strategic battle in which an undermanned division defeated the Japanese and gained control of the Pacific island, was a massive bestseller when it was first published by Random House in January 1943. Tregaskis, a correspondent for the International News Service, attached himself to the First Marine Division during the six-month campaign, the only journalist to do so. Tregaskis’s narrative is a smooth upward trajectory of victories both small and significant, building to a final, victorious crescendo. Tregaskis doesn’t linger too long on the injured and the maimed soldiers; they are just the prelude to a successful counterattack. His soldiers are no different from those cardboard cutouts Sack had referred to in his query letters to Hayes—lean, mean, and looking for a fight.

The book is a diary of everything Tregaskis saw or heard, written in a clipped, straightforward style. Any speculative attempts at taking the emotional temperature of the situation are limited to Tregaskis’s own observations. Sack, in contrast, removes all mediation between reporter and reader; the story is not his, and thus not for him to tell.

“I don’t put myself in the story,” Sack said. “I don’t want the reader to even be aware that I’m there…. I want [the reader] to feel they’re getting undiluted reality—that they’re getting absolutely objective reporting. Of course, this is a trick—because I have my own values, as to what’s important, what’s worth saying, and what isn’t worth saying. I’m choosing what I want to write, and I’m choosing the order it goes in, so though
it pretends to objectivity it’s really subjective, and this is a trick on the reader.”

For Sack, reportorial objectivity was one of the great myths. “If one million people threw roses at Khrushchev when he came to the States, and one person threw an egg and hit him, the Russian press would say one million threw roses, and the American press would say one threw an egg … and both of them would think they were being objective.” It was all about sifting through the information and choosing your own version of the truth.

To merely describe the activities of M Company in the verdant thicket of Laikhe was insufficient, because inertia and boredom was the story. The enemy was a wraith, unseen but omnipresent. Campaigns became tense waiting games, followed by a flashpoint cataclysm. This, Sack discerned, was slowly driving the members of M Company to seek refuge inside their own heads, which were being cross-wired by the confusing nature of their mission.

When M did encounter the Vietcong, the army’s rules of engagement faded into insignificance. The intuitive, improvised tactics of guerilla warfare left M Company confused and frayed, with no other recourse but to “burn, burn, burn” everything within reach.

Demirgian got the worst of it in-country. After he narrowly escaped an ambush, his animus curdled into something irrational and murderous—and Sack probes his running inner monologue, a continuous reel of malevolence.

Sack wasn’t present during such incidents, but he didn’t make anything up, either. The use of interior monologues in the work of Sack and other New Journalists would become a common complaint among the genre’s critics: how can a writer know what his or her subject is thinking at any given moment? The answer is that the writer merely has to ask. “I hate to use the word
reconstructed
because the word
reconstructed
means that I make up the conversation,” said Sack. “But I just mean that … every conversation is something somebody told me they said, and I’m putting that together with what somebody else has told me.”

The critics had another phrase to describe
M:
“documentary novel.” “Sack manages to make M Company both vivid and human, deeply human,” wrote Leonard Kriegal in
The Nation
. “He has written a superb book.” The
New York Times’s
Neil Sheehan had problems with Sack’s “hyperbolic” style but still found plenty of “fine” and “often powerful” writing.
Publishers Weekly
was taken with the “satiric bite” of M’s Vietnam experiences; Sack’s “quietly written” humor, the anonymous reviewer wrote, packed “a cumulative punch.”

M was a watershed story for
Esquire
, both formally and thematically. Harold Hayes would no longer flinch at confronting the horrors of Vietnam in the pages of the magazine. And the worst was yet to come.

HELL SUCKS