...He flew with the men to Saigon and rode with the company up country. For the first operation helicopters were going to take M Company into a Michelin rubber plantation. M expected the plantation to be wired just for them--staked with poisoned bamboo, mined with explosives. When the time came to board a helicopter, Sack changed his mind. Under ordinary circumstances he was a fit, cheerful, confident man. But the prospect seemed a lot more dangerous than anything he'd been through in Korea. He went out to the airstrip to see the guys off and ran into Dan Rather, who had worked with him at CBS. "Don't worry about it, you'll be okay," Rather told him. Sack climbed into a helicopter.

The operation began on Monday; it was Friday before, as Sack wrote later, "M's battalion killed somebody, at last." A soldier tossed a grenade into what looked like a bunker, and the grenade exploded inside. A dozen or so women and children came running out, screaming, but no one seemed hurt.

...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 black arms the first specialist carried 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 child's nose was bleeding--there was a hole in the back of her skull.

She died moments later.

Back at the brigade, Sack apologized to an officer, a lieutenant colonel. "You know," explained Sack, "I'm really sorry, the plan was to get with this company, hang out with it, go on this first operation, and the book would end there. But the first operation was a big mess. That's the story, and I'm stuck with it. I know it isn't typical."

The officer thought a second or two, then said, "It's typical."

Sack couldn't believe it. He couldn't believe that with this vast army in Vietnam--with thousands of flights landing and taking off every day from the airport at Tan Son Nhut--the result would be the death of seven-year-old girls. He just couldn't believe it.

As he wrote the article out by hand back in Saigon, at the Hotel Continental, he still supported the war. He thought it was a bad war, but he thought the United States had to fight it. He had grown up during World War II, and served in Korea, and he had never heard anybody suggest that America might fight a war that it shouldn't fight. He wrote in an ironic mode, the beginning light as a literate sitcom, the middle mock heroic as Company M embarked on the ancient ship of war, the ending a black comedy:

The captains told their lieutenants, don't burn those houses if there's no VC in them--the lieutenants told their sergeants, if you burn those houses there better be VC in them--the sergeants told their men, better go burn those houses because there's VC in them, and Morton kept striking his C-ration matches.

He sent the first half of the article to Candida Donadio, his agent, to see if she thought he could turn the article into a book, and then he ran across an article that Michael Herr had written on Fort Dix for Holiday magazine. Reading Herr's piece Sack realized he had left out something important--description. He had been so used to writing television documentaries that he had forgotten there would be no camera to show his readers the scenes. He had produced a narrative bare to the bone. He started going back through the manuscript putting in sentences to describe the people and places. He still hadn't heard from Donadio by the time he had finished the whole article, so he sent it all in to her and to Hayes. He heard back from her first. She had read the first half, she said, and she didn't think there was a book in it.

So he had failed...  More