The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution (27 page)

T
he positive critical response to M convinced Harold Hayes that covering Vietnam without tears or irony was the right thing to do. Troop levels had escalated to 485,000 by the winter of 1967; military casualties had doubled from the previous year, to 11,153, with over 100,000 North and South Vietnamese civilians dead. Hayes didn’t want
Esquire
to tip too far in the direction of far-left publications such as Warren Hinckle’s
Ramparts
magazine or Paul Krassner’s
The Realist
, but the magazine’s gentle mockeries of the war were clearly untenable now. John Sack had seen to that.

No writer was as eager to go in-country as Michael Herr. He wanted not only to cover the war but to produce a modern-day
Nostromo
. He wanted to write the greatest book to come out of the war. Herr, whose Fort Dix story for
Holiday
magazine had compelled John Sack to become a better writer, was a native of Syracuse, New York, who had attended Nottingham High School with John Berendt, who would become an editor at
Esquire
. Herr was charismatic, a natural-born leader, elected president of the student body in his senior year. “Michael was brilliant in high school, already a terrific writer,” said Berendt. “Even then, he had a way of expressing himself that made it clear he was a talent to be reckoned with.”

The son of a jewelry store proprietor in Syracuse, Herr’s great ambition in life was to become a literary eminence. Herr graduated from Syracuse University in 1961; after a six-month stint in the army reserve,
he did some freelance writing, mostly movie reviews for the
New Leader—
from which he was fired for writing positive notices on films that his editors disliked—and travel stories for
Holiday
magazine.

Herr applied for an editing job at
Esquire
in 1962, only to lose out to his former Nottingham classmate Berendt. He was probably better off not chained to an editor’s desk; the urge to travel to far-flung areas of the world and write about them was too strong. He got his wish after a short tenure as an assistant editor at
Holiday
when the magazine made him a roving correspondent.

Herr’s global dispatches for
Holiday
were competent efforts but hardly an indication of his special gifts. Herr was
Holiday’s
intrepid adventurer, filing stories from Guam, the Amazon jungle (where he interviewed a snake hunter), Venezuela, Taipei, and elsewhere—solidly written stories redolent of atmosphere and finely attuned to the rituals and folkways of the people. But it wasn’t until Herr observed basic training at Fort Dix in early 1966 at a time when conscription for Vietnam was being ramped up considerably that his latent skills emerged.

For Herr, Vietnam was
the
story, but a benign general-interest magazine such as
Holiday
wasn’t exactly the right forum for what he wanted to do. Aside from
M
, which Herr admired, no one had really tackled the war by writing what Herr called “higher journalism.” In a May 1967 pitch letter to Hayes, Herr talked of writing “the best kind of journalism” from Vietnam to “make it seem more real.” Herr had a number of potential approaches: perhaps a story on the press in Vietnam, or General Westmoreland, or the Green Berets. He wanted to be
Esquire’s
man in Vietnam, roaming the country for stories that could be published in a monthly column: “extended vignettes, set pieces, geographical sketches, personality portraits … even battle reportage.” What Herr wouldn’t touch were straight news stories—the piles of statistics and body-count roll calls that explained nothing and which, Herr thought, made “conventional propaganda look innocent.” If
Esquire
wanted the real news, then Herr would tease it out from the players in a format unmediated by army censors or the dictates of wary editors.

Herr didn’t regard himself as a journalist in the conventional sense. “I don’t have a journalist’s instincts and have absolutely no training or discipline as a journalist,” he once told an interviewer. Herr could respond to events in the fullness of time and free of odious deadline
pressure, sniffing out the hidden currents at work, the subterranean angle. Herr would later write:

“As an overwhelming, unavoidable fact of our time,” he wrote Hayes in the summer of 1967, “it goes deeper than anything my generation has known, even deeper, I’m afraid, than Kennedy’s murder. No matter when it ends or how it ends, it will leave a mark on this country like the trail of slime that a sand slug leaves, a lasting taint.”

Esquire
wouldn’t even have to advance that much money for Herr’s trip;
Holiday
magazine had assigned him another story, and he had a little advance check from a contract that his agent, Candida Donadio, had sold for a Vietnam project. The press accreditation would allow him to travel with the military, roaming freely as he saw fit. Berendt vouched for Herr, and Hayes figured it was a risk worth taking.

It took four months for Herr to get to Saigon.
Holiday
kept holding off on his money, but Herr welcomed the delay; he needed to steel his nerves, gird himself for the big plunge. He bought a gun while staying with some friends in San Francisco, then flew to New York in November. In a November 15 cable to Hayes from Taipei, Herr confided, “This lapse of four months since leaving New York has made me sit bolt upright in the middle of the night, all sweats and bad nerves, more times than I care to remember.”

Herr left for Vietnam on December 1, 1967. “I was twenty-seven years old when I went there,” he recalled, “and I had spent all the time previous traveling and writing pieces about places, but not writing what I felt I should be writing. So I believed before I ever got there that that was the time and the place and the subject. I was very ambitious for the work and had large expectations for it.”

During the first month of Herr’s stay, things went pretty much as he had anticipated. He tagged along on a few offensives, hung out with the
infantrymen, and gathered material for his first column with virtually no interference from the military brass. But on January 30, in the early hours of the Vietnamese lunar new year, more than one hundred South Vietnamese cities, including Danang and Qui Nhon, were rocked by a series of North Vietnamese mortar attacks. Saigon, the country’s safe house for the press, was attacked the following day. The Tet Offensive, as it came to be known, was a well-coordinated and overwhelming show of force that laid waste to any assurances of an imminent U.S. victory. Herr was in a compound in Cantho with the Special Forces when the Tet offensive was launched, and he knew at once that the first column he had filed, as well as a Vietnam establishment chart similar to the establishment charts that
Esquire
had run in the past, in which a hierarchy of civilian power brokers would be mapped out in a splashy graphic, would be of little use now.

“Tet changed everything here, and made the material I’d filed seem like it had been written from a different war…. I’m sick about it (I never worked harder on anything in my life, and I think the text was good), but I don’t see any real alternative to crapping it,” Herr wrote to Hayes on February 5. “As for the column, or that mess of stuff I sent in as a column, I’d rather not see that run right now, either. It is not the same war, not in any way. Before the Tet offensive, the war had a predictable rhythm and tone, and the two month lead time wasn’t an issue…. Now, all the terms have changed, all the old assumptions about the war, about our chances for even the most ignoble kind of ‘victory’ in it, have been turned around.”

After enduring five sleepless nights when he couldn’t even find the time to slip his boots off, Herr found his way back to Saigon, where about fifteen hundred Vietcong troops were occupying much of the city that had until then provided a buffer zone between the correspondents and the war. He sent a cable to Hayes laying out the situation in some detail, but the mails had been suspended, and Herr wasn’t even sure if Hayes had received it. After a few days of “getting my head together,” Herr traveled to the city of Hue, where he was caught in the crossfire between ARVN and North Vietnamese forces for control of the city.

Though he had “passed through so many decimated towns and cities that they all get mixed up in my mind,” Hue was even worse. “The
destruction has been incredible, air strikes knocking out whole blocks of the one really lovely city in Vietnam, destroying the university, the walls around the Citadel [an ARVN military headquarters], and, probably tomorrow, the Citadel itself.”

While Herr’s jeep was passing through the district of Cholon, a mortar round exploded ten yards away, burning a four-inch piece of shrapnel into his backpack, which he was wearing. Another shrapnel fragment blinded the jeep’s driver in his left eye. Everywhere Herr looked, there were desperate scenes of sickening destruction and human displacement—refugees wandering aimlessly away from burned-out homes while South Vietnamese soldiers looted abandoned businesses. Herr chalked it up to U.S. hubris and arrogance, the government’s persistent underestimation of the enemy. “Where we have not been smug,” he wrote Hayes, “we have been hysterical, and we will pay for all of it.”

There were scores of civilian casualties sprawled across the countryside: a little girl who had been killed while riding her bike, an old man hunched over his straw hat. In Hue, Herr saw a dead Vietnamese man whose skull had been sheared off by shrapnel debris, so that the top of his head resembled an open flap loosely hinged to the back of his head. The image spooked him. “I knew that if I stayed here he would drift in over me that night, grinning and dripping, all rot and green-black bloat.” Herr now viewed Vietnam as a bifurcated war: “There are two Vietnams, the one that I’m up to my ass in here and the one perceived in the States by people who’ve never been here. They are mutually exclusive.”

Herr was appalled at the cognitive dissonance that existed between the cushy major press outlets in Saigon, with their lavish budgets and extensive R&R excursions, their “$3,000 a month digs at the Continental or the Caravelle,” and the horrors that were taking place within the city and nearly every other major city in the South. “I have colleagues in the press corps here, some of them incredible fakes, fantastic hacks, who live so well on their expense accounts that they may never be able to adjust to peace.”

Herr, on the other hand, was out of money and begged Hayes for at least a small stipend to tide him over for a while: “I’m not after a lot of money, only enough.” Hayes complied via Western Union, and Herr traveled on to Khesanh and Danang, two cities that were caught in a death struggle in the conflict between North and South Vietnamese
forces. He finally made his way back to Saigon, the cosmopolitan city that was now a hollowed-out war zone, its streets besmirched with human feces and dead foliage. American engineers and construction workers, “who were making it here like they’d never made it at home,” were now openly brandishing AK-47s and .45 Magnum pistols, “and no mob of Mississippi sheriff’s boys ever promised more bad news.”

Herr had seen too much to bring it all into focus in a single story, but he had to file another piece for
Esquire
now that the other column was being spiked. “For all the talk about Vietnam being a television war, I never believed it was television’s war,” Herr recalled years later. “I always believed it was a writer’s war. And in my arrogance and ignorance I wanted to be the one to prove it.” The truth, as Herr saw it, was that the entire country had been engulfed and absorbed by the war as if by a virulent viral strain.

The Tet offensive, he wrote, had changed everything, “made this an entirely different war, made it Something Else … Before Tet, there was some clean touch to jungle encounters, some virtue to their brevity, always the promise of quick release from whatever horror there was … Now, it is awful, just plain awful, awful without relief.”

Herr described what he had seen in Hue with graphic clarity: the refugees huddled against the side of the road heading toward nowhere, the bombed-out houses, the ARVN looting. In south Hue, Herr had accompanied the Marines across a large public park along the banks of the Perfume River, where the university had been totaled and the picturesque colonial-era villas destroyed. Crouched with the troops behind a crumbling villa that served as flimsy cover, Herr watched the Marines, who had secured the central south bank of the river and were now moving westward, try to capture the Citadel, the headquarters of the First ARVN Battalion, which had been commandeered by the Vietcong during the Tet offensive.

Herr wrote about the friendship he had cultivated with an unidentified general, a veteran of the Indochina war and a lover of Beethoven and Blake, a fellow adrenaline addict, like Herr, repelled by but also drawn into the war.