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

by Marc Weingarten

  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:

  Conventional journalism could no more reveal this war than conventional firepower could win it; all it could do was view the most profound event of the American decade and turn it into a communications pudding, taking its most obvious, undeniable history and making it into a secret history. And the very best correspondents knew even more than that.

  “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.

  We know that for years now, there has been no country here but the war. The landscape has been converted to terrain, the geography broken down into its more useful co
mponents; corps and zones, tactical areas of responsibility, vicinities of operation, outposts, positions, objectives, fields of fire.

  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.

  It stayed cold for the next ten days, cold and dark, and that damp gloom was the background for the footage that we all took out of the Citadel. The little sunlight there was caught in the heavy motes of dust that blew up from the wreckage of the East Wall, held it until everything you saw was filtered through it. And most of what you saw was taken in from unaccustomed angles, prone positions or quick looks from a crouch; lying flat out, hearing the hard dry rattle of shrapnel scudding against the debris around you, listening to the Marine next to you who didn’t moan, “Oh my God, Oh Sweet Jesus, Oh Holy Mother save me,” but who sobbed instead, “Are you ready for this? I mean, are you ready for this?”

  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.

  The eyes are ice-blue but not cold, and they suggest his most interesting trait, an originality of mind that one never associates with the Military, and which constantly catches you off balance.

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

  “If you hate this all so much, why do you stay?”

  He has me there. I wait a moment before answering. “Because, General, it’s the only war we’ve got.”

  And he really smiles now. After all that talk, we’re speaking the same language again.

  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.”

  If all the barbed wire and all of the sandbags were taken away, Khesanh would have looked like one of those Columbian valley slums whose meanness is the abiding factor, whose despair is so palpable that for days after you leave you are filled with a vicarious shame for the misery you have just tripped through. At Khesanh, most bunkers were nothing more than hovels with inadequate overhead cover, and you could not believe that Americans were living this way, even in the middle of a war.

  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 r
eplied, “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.”