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

by Marc Weingarten

  The balkanization of Vietnam was, for the most part, transpiring under the news radar; the majority of Americans at the time couldn’t even locate Vietnam on a map. In the fall of 1961 President Kennedy, under the guise of a counterinsurgency policy called Project Beef-Up, sent advisors, including a detachment of the 440th Combat Crew Training Squadron, to fight alongside the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) against the newly formed National Liberation Front, or Vietcong. Most news organizations barely flinched, but a handful of correspondents sensed that Vietnam might become an important Cold War crucible. “We have to confront them,” Kennedy confided to the New York Times’s Washington bureau chief, James Reston. “The only place we can do that is in Vietnam. We have to send more people over there.”

  “You couldn’t believe anybody,” the New York Times’s Homer Bigart recalled years later. “Half the time the Americans didn’t even know where they were, let alone know what to tell you, and the South Vietnamese government made the Kremlin look like an open society.” The information embargo imposed by military leadership considerably hampered efforts to piece together the most fundamental news stories. American field advisors, disgruntled over the fact that the military rank and file was ignoring their negative reports on the war’s progress, turned to journalists to get the word out. Military subterfuge was now being countered by a kind of press-driven counterinsurgency conducted by stealth and prodigious legwork.

  In short, it was an ideal reporter’s war. The official line diverged so sharply from reality that it left enterprising journalists a lot of material to work with; every aspect of the war was fair game and open to debate. Hundreds of reporters converged on Saigon, setting up camp in the two de facto press lodgings in Saigon, the Hotel Continental Palace and the Caravelle Hotel, and each one set out to stake his or her own claim on a story so rich in intrigue that it verged on the mythic.

  In the early years of America’s involvement, events in Vietnam were shape-shifting at a rapid rate, and early correspondents—including David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, and freelancer Stanley Karnow—had the story to themselves. Halberstam’s earliest dispatches for the New York Times were hugely influential among his contemporaries, straightforward assessments of the war’s grinding futility straight from the newspaper of record.

  Harold Hayes was both a fan and a casual friend of Halberstam’s, and assigned a profile of the writer for the January 1964 issue of Esquire. Written by George Goodman, “Our Man in Saigon” included an introductory sidebar called “Background for Revolution” that summarized developments for uninformed readers and pointed out that Halberstam’s dispatches were not regarded as gospel by a large portion of the mainstream press. Old-line flag-flyers resented Halberstam’s seditious reporting. Hearst columnist Frank Conniff called Halberstam’s work a “political time bomb” that could mislead the president and destabilize the war effort on the battlefield. Never mind the twisted logic of a news reporter somehow nudging policy makers into ill-informed decision making; Halberstam, according to Conniff, was subverting the inexorable progress of civilized democracy.

  With its three-month lead time, Esquire couldn’t possibly keep pace with the news developments in Vietnam, particularly the chaotic period leading up to and following South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem’s assassination. Nor did Hayes and Gingrich view the magazine as espousing any political point of view. Hayes thought of Vietnam as a minor skirmish, a war that would quickly resolve itself. “I never heard Harold passionately discuss politics,” said George Lois, the design guru behind Esquire’s great covers of the era. “I considered him a liberal, but he wasn’t a very vocal liberal. We used to have arguments about Vietnam, because he was convinced that it would be a short skirmish, and he was worried about running covers on the war that might be out of date by the time they were published.”

  For Esquire’s Christmas issue in 1962, Lois suggested that the magazine run a picture of the one hundredth GI killed in Vietnam, but Hayes resisted the idea. “What if we wind up with egg on our face,” Hayes asked Lois, and the war was over before the issue ran? The cover was killed.

  But Hayes threw Vietnam into the editorial mix just the same, treating it much the way Esquire treated all of the incipient developments of the decade—with a heavy dose of irreverent humor. Early satirical pieces such as “An Armchair Guide to Guerilla Warfare” were snarky attacks, Catch-22 style, against the very absurdity of war itself.

  “Well, I don’t think any of us were too heads-up about the war at first,” said former senior editor Robert Sherrill. “But it wasn’t like we were sitting around laughing our heads off about it, either. That kind of funny skepticism can be a very effective weapon.” Former editor Tom Ferrell felt that the magazine spread “an overlay of irony” over its early war coverage, a safe and tenable position for both Hayes and the magazine’s advertisers. It was easy at the outset to treat Vietnam as Lyndon Johnson’s folly, but by 1965 the United States had committed two hundred thousand troops to the war, and Operation Rolling Thunder, the three-year air bombing campaign against North Vietnam, had begun in earnest. America had both feet in now.

  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:

  This week’s Time has [the soldiers] getting off their troopship “lean, laconic, and looking for a fight,” and in Esquire they’re “cool” and they sound so. And here in the afternoon paper: one of them is quoted saying, “I heard I was going to Vietnam. I liked the idea. I wanted to get some action.”

  Look, this is the army, I’ve got to assume that a couple of things are still snafu, that the cooks are getting eggshells in the scrambled eggs, that the back-of-the-barracks conversation is about making it with girls, that a sergeant’s most awful anxiety is over the sheen of his combat boots … that a certain number of them haven’t the foggiest of where Vietnam is or why they’re going there.

  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.”

  “Peoples, all of your khaki shirts. I want everyone get himself an iron and iron the left sleeve,” because in the wall lockers that is the plenary sleeve, the plenipotentiary sleeve, the sleeve that the Captain or Major would see as he trotted by—the be-all and the end-all sleeve. No names, but Mallory knew of footlockers in M whose immaculate toothbrushes lay in their permanent showcase like a little Cellini necklace, totally untouched by human teeth. Far from being peeved at a boy whose secret workaday toothbrush might be the shape of a poodle’s tail or the color of kelp, Mallory was pleased with the boy’s expensive initiative.

  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. Dest
roy everything. Kill the cows, the pigs, the chickens—everything.’”

  Then M Company finally notched its first casualty.

  A cavalry sergeant, seeing a sort of bunker place, a hut above, hole below, and hearing some voices inside it, told Demirgian to throw a grenade in. Demirgian hesitating, ___, a solider we have met before, though not by name, jumped from his APC and flipped in a hand grenade himself. It rolled through the door hitting a sort of earthen baffle before it exploded and ___ gasped as ten or a dozen women and children came shrieking out in their crinkled pajamas: no blood, no apparent injuries, though, and ___ got onto his carrier again, it continued on. Yoshioka aboard, drove up to this hovel, and a Negro specialist-four, his black rifle in his hands, warily extended his head in, peering through the darkness one or two seconds before he cried, “Oh my God!”

  “What’s the matter,” said a second specialist.

  “They hit a little girl,” and in his muscular arms the Negro specialist brought out a seven-year-old, long black hair and little earrings, staring eyes—eyes, her eyes are what froze themselves onto M’s memory, it seemed there was no white to those eyes, nothing but black ellipses like black goldfish.

  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.”