...So he had failed. What he had tried to do hadn't worked. He wasn't really despondent about it. He still had a job making more money than a book would earn. He just thought: I've tried, I've failed. It was a good try. The next day a cable came from Harold Hayes. Esquire liked the article. It would run in the next possible issue.

Now Hayes wanted pictures of Company M.

Sack borrowed a camera from a photographer who worked for Associated Press and joined the company for a helicopter assault. So deep was he into this story by now that the night before they went out he found himself thinking, tears in his eyes, that the most wonderful thing he could do would be die with these men the next morning. He did jump out of the helicopter first when it landed so he could get pictures of the guys coming out, but there was nobody around to shoot at him. He took hundreds of pictures and sent them in; Esquire didn't use any of them.

On June 21, another cable came from Hayes: "Stringent invasion of privacy legal problems must be corrected at source." Hayes asked Sack to call him. When he did, Hayes told him the plan: Esquire's lawyer wanted Sack to get releases from the ten major characters in the story. Then if any of the others took Esquire to court, the lawyer would use the ten releases to demonstrate the faith the more important figures had in Sack and undercut the credibility of complaints.

By this time, M Company had moved into War Zone C, on the Cambodian border--a really dangerous area. Not all of the men Sack had written about were in Zone C, but two important ones were. The only way to get there was by helicopter. To reserve the press helicopter, Sack had to come up with four other journalists who wanted to go where he wanted to go. The first was easy. He had a French girlfriend, a baroness, and she had shown up in Saigon one day, equipped herself with press credentials and a tailor-made tiger suit, and set about covering the war. She would make one of the five. He learned that a big cache of rice was about to be burned in War Zone C--obviously good television. He went to Dan Rather.

"They're going to burn the biggest cache of rice they've ever found. We hope it's VC rice."

Rather thought about it and said he would come along. With a soundman and a cameraman that made five. Sack reserved the press helicopter for early in the morning.

The five of them showed up and told the pilot they wanted to go to War Zone C.

No way, said he.

But it was his job to take them where they wanted to go, Sack argued.

The pilot reflected. Look, he said, it's too hot, it's too dangerous. I'll get you in, I'll just touch the ground and you jump out and I'll fly out immediately. You're going to have to find your own way out.

They flew in, right up on the Cambodian border, and as they landed, machine-gun fire sent a .50-caliber bullet through one of the blades. The helicopter touched down, they all jumped out, the helicopter lifted off.

As Rather and his crew and the Baroness went on down the road where the rice was supposed to be, the two men Sack came to see showed up. They signed the releases, and when a brigadier general landed in a small bubble helicopter to check out the scene, Sack hitched a ride back to Saigon with him. The Baroness, Rather, and his crew would have to find their own way home.

Sack was back in Saigon by lunchtime. Around five in the afternoon, he sat down at the Hotel Continental to have a beer with a friend, a radio correspondent. Sack told him about leaving the Baroness and Rather behind, and his friend said, "Aren't you worried about these people?"

Not at all, Sack assured him. He predicted that within the next hour the Baroness would come walking up in her tailor-made tiger suit saying, "How could you do this to me? How could you leave me there? How could you abandon me with all of the people shooting the machines at me? This is a terrible thing--you call yourself a friend."

"I'd be worried," said his friend.

"No," said Sack, "I promise you."

About half an hour later the Baroness walked across the square in her tiger suit, stomped up to Sack, and said, "How could you do this? I have dinner tonight with the French ambassador, it's a dress party, I have to get my hair done, it is six o'clock, I do not have time to put on my dress and my makeup. How could you do this?"

In spite of what he had already seen in Vietnam, Sack could still laugh. He still had not fully understood what it all meant. He understood there were no iron-jawed heroes--he did not yet understand the horror, the wrongness of the war. When he talked with Hayes about a cover for his story, Sack suggested getting a color photograph of helicopters landing and soldiers jumping out, and over the face of each soldier, painting or gluing the face of Beetle Bailey.

"No," Hayes said, "you don't understand your article at all."

The cover George Lois would create for "M" would be large white words on a black background:

     Oh my God—we hit a little girl.

Then, across the bottom, in smaller type:

     The true story of M Company.
     From Fort Dix to Vietnam.

Esquire's Vietnam articles in the preceding months had treated the war with skeptical humor: "An Armchair Guide to Guerrilla Warfare" or, as a cover for a campus issue, Jerry Lewis putting on lipstick ("How our red blooded campus heroes are beating the draft"). In austere black and white, the "M" cover was like a formal announcement of a change of heart.

After Sack got back to New York, Esquire gave a party for him in the offices, and Candida Donadio came. She had read the second half of the article by then and could see there really was a book here. She sold it to the New American Library and Sack spent the rest of the summer writing the book on Fire Island, then finishing up back at his apartment on East 63rd Street. "M" appeared in the October issue, 1966; Sack's father died on October 7, three days before the book manuscript was due--he was making final changes at the funeral. Later, basking in the Indian summer, sitting with friends at the cafe at the Central Park Zoo, he began to feel like a deserter. The New York Times Book Review even wrote a little item about him in a roundup of publishing news: Company M was still in Vietnam but John Sack was in New York. Sack told Hayes he wanted to go back and write about M's last battle.

By the time he got to Vietnam late that fall, the men were so close to ending their tour of duty that they were being kept out of the fighting, but Sack interviewed Demirgian and others who were around and visited the scenes of the stories they described. Then he reconstructed a night when Demirgian slept through an attack on his own nearby camp, Demirgian, who had once wanted out so badly he had asked another soldier to break his foot, had become obsessed with the idea of--finally--killing a Communist, but he had slept on as a squad of Communists went by on the trail. He woke up to learn he had missed the whole battle, his last chance. As he walked past the Communist dead, one moved an arm.

A living breathing communist, a boy of about eighteen, a Vietnamese in black, Demirgian brought down his foot on his face and crunch, Demirgian felt his little nose go like a macaroon, he said to the communist, "Bastard--well, was it worth it," kicking him in his eyeballs. "Stupid bastard--what did it get you," kicking him on his Adam's apple. "Goddamn bastard…

Finally, the boy was dead.

"Well," Demirgian said to another soldier, "I finally killed me a gook," and Demirgian smiled satisfiedly, Demirgian's soul was at peace, Demirgian, a little later, had started back to the country in whose interests he had been posted to Asia, to his green gabled home in Newton, to the sign in the living room welcome home in red, white, and blue! Safe and sound, Demirgian came marching home again! Let's give him a hearty welcome then! Hurrah! Hurrah!

In "M," the American men were still innocents, stumbling into a black comedy. "When Demirgian Comes Marching Home Again. (Hurray? Hurrah?)" was an infinitely more bitter story. The comic-strip outlines of "M" had disappeared. Sack was no longer describing soldiers who inflicted death by chance, but soldiers who had learned to hate. The story builds to the revelation of "Demirgian's Secret":

Demirgian hates the Vietnamese people--well, so does every soldier, but Demirgian hates and hates! The goddam bastards! Goddam people! Come to help their miserable country and what? Anyone get a word of thanks? Dead or alive--crippled, I could be blind, a basket case and they wouldn't care, not if they'd had my damn piastres first! Money is all they'd care, the crooked bastards!…A really and truly detestable race of people. Demirgian's year of duty among the Vietnamese had taught him to loathe them, the earth and Demirgian would be better rid of them, Vietnamese go to your damnable ancestors, die! Demirgian wants to kill communists because they're the only native people the Army's regulations allow him to kill.

By the time John Sack's "M" appeared in Esquire in October 1966, American troops in Vietnam outnumbered South Vietnamese and opposition to the war was rising sharply. Other magazines not conceived as political had stepped into the fray. The New York Review of Books was raising questions about the war in a barrage of articles, bringing out I. F. Stone, America's leading iconoclast, to lead the charge. On the West Coast, Ramparts, once a small lay Catholic literary magazine, featured Special Forces Master Sergeant Donald W. Duncan on its February 1966 cover, bedecked with Bronze Star and other medals, announcing "I quit! The whole thing was a lie!"