The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution (28 page)

The general chides Herr for his morbid obsession with death: “‘That way lies you-know-what,’ he says, tapping his temple.”

The South Vietnamese eventually took back the Citadel at Hue, but it was an inconsequential notch in the holster, another bloody battle with no appreciable net results. While Herr’s empathy for the infantrymen comes through, his version of the quagmire was relentlessly bleak, more bleak than in
M
, even—a corrective for what Herr felt was the anesthetizing slow drip of the television and mainstream print press, with its refusal to break through the distancing “fourth wall” of objectivity. “I
think the [television] coverage turned the war into something that was happening in the media wonderland that we are all increasingly living in,” Herr said. “Unless we keep ourselves extremely alert, we’re going to be utterly consumed by that horribly homogenized, not real and not unreal, twilight world of television.”

Hayes was blown away by Herr’s story, passing it on to Arnold Gingrich with a note that praised Herr’s “extraordinarily perceptive and thoughtful battle report.” This “John Sack-type sleeper” was obviously not going to work as a column; “better as a straight piece,” he wrote to Gingrich. Fiction editor Bob Brown captured the tone of the piece with his headline, swiped from something that one of the grunts scrawled on his helmet: “Hell Sucks.”

The magazine’s legal department vetted the story, but they were troubled by the last section, Herr’s conversation with the unnamed general, the one who Herr wrote “was seen … leaving the house of a famous courtesan in Dalat, driving off in a jeep with a Swedish K across his lap.” Hayes circled this passage and scrawled “No—if the general is identifiable” in the margin of Herr’s manuscript. Could the writer reveal his source?

From Hong Kong, the writer sent a wire to the lawyers and a cable to Hayes with an explanation. “He’s fiction—I hoped that that would be obvious—made up out of a dozen odd types I’ve run into around Vietnam, most especially a Special Forces colonel I knew in the Delta who was a Persian scholar and a fanatic about things like the late Beethoven quartets (‘The purest thing in all of music!’). There were others, too, the party intellectuals of the Vietnam war, and they all went into the General.”

Hayes signed off on it.
Esquire’s
policy on scene reconstructions and composites remained consistent during this period, when the magazine’s best nonfiction writers were pushing their reportage into murky territory where creative interpretation mingled with straight documentation. The approval of composites was largely a matter of trust in the writers themselves and of the editorial staff’s instinctual sense that the copy being sent in was not made up out of whole cloth. Composites had to be constructed from the raw material of interviews and observation, lest the reporting move uncomfortably close to pure fiction. “Harold was a good lie detector,” said Bob Sherrill. “He knew almost immediately if something was bullshit.”

The soldiers at Hue of whom Herr had written approved as well. Shortly after “Hell Sucks” was published, a number of Marines gave Herr an inscribed cigarette lighter as a token of their appreciation.

Herr’s next two articles took on a darker cast as he told the grim story of Khesanh, the combat base for the Twenty-Sixth Marine Battalion perched in the Highlands along the Laos-Vietnam border. Khesanh had been under siege by North Vietnamese troops since the summer of 1967. A continual series of attacks against the NVA’s entrenched positions had done little to squelch the enemy’s firepower or resolve, and the North’s attacks only ratcheted into heavy artillery offensives against the Khesanh base. As reinforcements poured into Khesanh by the thousands, the Vietcong fortified their positions in the surrounding hills and along the nearby infiltration routes.

Assigned to a base whose medical detachment was planted “insanely close” to an airstrip that had been repeatedly shelled, with no solid intelligence regarding the Vietcong’s troop strength or their precise location, the troops at Khesanh were hiding in plain sight and blindly groping for whatever small victories they could muster.

Khesanh was even worse than Hue. Herr sensed an existential dread that had spread like pestilence: exhausted soldiers narcotizing themselves with dope and booze, “animals who were so spaced out that they began taking pills called Diarrhea Aid to keep their walks to exposed latrines at a minimum.” Body bags were covered with flies, and the debris of aircraft lay sprawled near the dangerous airstrip; the jury-rigged medical detachment looked like a rickety lean-to with no air cover whatsoever. The Highlands were “spooky, unbearably spooky, spooky beyond belief.” Long, sustained silences were interrupted “only by the sighing of cattle or the rotor thud of a helicopter, the one sound I know that is both sharp and dull at the same time.”

In Khesanh Herr witnessed some savage scenes. While ducking for cover in a trench during an air attack, Herr watched a solider get hit in the throat, “making the sounds a baby will make who is trying to work up the breath for a good scream.” Another grunt nearby was “splattered badly across the legs and groin.” Herr pulled him into the trench; when Herr told him that he was not a fellow grunt but a correspondent, the soldier replied, “Be careful, mister. Please be careful.”

Herr was a magazine writer; he had no deadline pressure, no mandate to file daily dispatches. His intention from the start was to somehow get a book out of his experiences, even if he hadn’t made his intentions explicitly clear to Hayes, and he positioned himself at a remove from the other journalists. After the triumph of “Hell Sucks,” Hayes gave Herr his head to write whatever he pleased. “My ties to New York were as slight as my assignment was vague,” he would write. “I wasn’t really an oddity in the press corps, but I was a peculiarity, an extremely privileged one.”

He had little use for the daily press briefings by the military brass—what the press corps referred to as the Five o’Clock Follies, an “Orwellian grope” through the day’s events. While his writer acquaintances, such as the
New York Times’s
Bernie Weinraub and Peter Arnett of the Associated Press, would head to their respective bureaus at day’s end to write their stories, Herr would retire to the Continental Hotel to grab a drink, write some leisurely notes, maybe not write anything at all. He was drawn to what
Esquire
writer Garry Wills regarded as a key tenet of New Journalism, the centrifugal instinct … to “get to the sidelines and watch,” and that yielded his best material.

“A lot of us never really knew what Michael was up to,” said Weinraub. “Everyone else had a work rhythm that they were into, and Michael had this long lead time, and he was a little bit on the fringe. All the newspaper, newsweekly, and wire guys hung out together, but Michael was so much more offbeat than all those guys. To be a freelancer in Vietnam was to have no home base, as it were, no support system in the field. So you had to be pretty unusual to want to do that.”

Years after the fact, Herr admitted that, going in, he “had no idea what the subject was.” But the latitude that Hayes had given him allowed Herr to roam freely and indulge his literary whims, which meant inventing composite soldiers whose personas were stitched together
from what Herr observed during many zonked-out late-night bull sessions over cheap scotch and locally procured marijuana, the psychedelic rock of the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead pounding out of radios and soundtracking this dreadful episode in the soldiers’ lives.

For the Khesanh stories, which were really designed for the forthcoming big Vietnam book, Herr invented a black soldier who called himself Day Tripper (so named because he hated going out on night missions) and his white running buddy Mayhew, two worn-out grunts whose devil-may-care fatalism squared with Herr’s attitudes about the detached confusion that Khesanh had bred in its entrenched troops. They were a far cry from John Sack’s disillusioned idealists, who, Demirgian notwithstanding, had been careful to keep their insurrectionary tendencies in check with a measure of cautious optimism. Day Tripper and Mayhew bore a closer resemblance to the deserting soldier in Stephen Crane’s
Red Badge of Courage
, subjugating their fear into a demotic sense of the absurd.

Herr portrayed Day Tripper and Mayhew as the dark side of Abbott and Costello. The soldiers’ plainspoken, schoolboy jive was a shot across the bow to all those deadline humps writing about the “lean, laconic fighters” that John Sack found so distasteful in
Time
magazine’s coverage. When Mayhew signs up for a four-month extension, Day Tripper lays into him:

Herr captured perfectly the slangy cadence of the soldiers’ speech— and their coarsened psyches as well. Instead of soldiers sending pictures
of themselves to their girls back home, Herr wrote of a grunt sending back “a gook’s ear,” soldiers procuring clandestine pot from Vietnamese dealers, men grabbing snatches of haunted sleep that provided no reprieve from their waking nightmares. It was rough stuff, but Hayes let him keep all of it, except for the
fucks
and
motherfuckers
, many of which had to be excised.

The specifics of warfare weren’t as crucial to Herr as what it
really
felt like to be in that godforsaken place, fighting a meaningless war. The ominous crepuscular sounds, the smell of death everywhere—Vietnam was a pincer movement on the senses, and it was enough to slowly drive strong men mad. But television couldn’t convey that feeling sufficiently in two dimensions, and daily journalism never had the time or the space for it. Having internalized the horror, Herr used a savagely poetic style that appealed to the reader’s emotions rather than his intellect.

Herr knew that, like John Sack, he was shooting down well-worn myths about the implacable stoicism of upright American soldiers, but it was the only reality he saw fit to report. He also knew that his whip-saw prose, which darted around on a Benzedrine bender, was radical even for
Esquire
. “I say to myself, ‘Oh, no, you can’t say that! It isn’t done,’” he said. “‘You can’t move from this to that. So and so never did it. And since he never did it, you can’t do it.’” But you reach a point where you realize that of course you can do it. You can do anything. You just have to issue yourself a license to do those things. And then you do them.”

Herr carried the voices of the soldiers in his head long after he had arrived back in New York. Herr regarded himself as a literary person, almost to a fault, but the grunts’ words had moved him more profoundly than the most powerful war literature. He didn’t have to unduly probe, or ask them leading questions; they would locate the stories on their own, and it was all so terribly eloquent, so eloquently terrible. The dialogue in the Khesanh stories wasn’t directly transcribed from notes; the scenes were drawn from the hazy, half-lit dream world of Khesanh that still burned in Herr’s subconscious. Herr readily admitted that his version of Vietnam was some mutant hybrid of fiction and reportage, but however outrageous it might have read on the page, it was all culled from what he had seen and heard. “Everything … happened
for
me, even if it didn’t necessarily happen
to
me,” he said.

The Khesanh stories, as well as his April 1970
Esquire
story “The War Correspondent: A Reappraisal,” were ostensibly a jumping-off point for the book that Herr always intended to write, and even
Esquire
, in its “Backstage” column of September 1969, had announced that a volume was imminent. Herr was indeed writing, but it wasn’t coming quickly. Shortly after Herr had left Vietnam, photographers Sean Flynn and Dana Stone, two of his closest compatriots in Vietnam, were killed in Cambodia. Herr had been full of hubris and the weird, jangly energy of the war when he returned in the summer of 1969; he felt confident that he could channel all he had witnessed into the book. But now the weight of all that horror was pressing down on him, and he fell into a debilitating clinical depression—what Herr called a “massive collapse”—that led to writer’s block.

“Sometimes I was crazy in a very public way,” Herr recalled, “and after I crashed, I was crazy in a very private way. Except during the very worst of it, I always knew that it was redeemable. There was a certain point at which I realized that whatever I thought I was doing, I wasn’t completely conscious of what I was actually doing. So as long as I didn’t know what I was doing, I would do whatever came up. I always believed that there was another door on the other side of me that I could go through and come out of with a book under my arm.”