Interviews with American Writers
by Eric James Schroeder
© 1992 by Eric James Schroeder

John Sack (Concluded)

Sack:...In a sense I did hate the Vietnamese. Even in Saigon I really disliked them--I wouldn't say hated them--but in my own experiences with them I really disliked them. When I got to Vietnam I was planning to spend half my time writing the book and half my time doing good things for the Vietnamese. To my knowledge, I was the only member of the American Center of the International Pen Club in Vietnam. I called the Vietnamese Pen Center and said that I'd like to meet them and even offered to help them. And they said, "Ah, so, so, so," and never returned my call. Having also been a producer at CBS I called the Vietnamese television station and offered my services, free. They never did anything. It was impossible to meet any Vietnamese. The only Vietnamese you could meet were prostitutes. You were never invited into Vietnamese homes. Like the American soldiers, I really started disliking them. But of course the soldiers were going to dislike them even more because they were being killed by faceless people who they assumed were the Vietnamese whose faces they saw during the daytime. If I'd gone through that, I'm sure I would have hated them.

After their first operation I went down to Saigon to write, and M was left wandering around in the field for weeks and weeks, getting killed like Morton or wounded like Yoshioka. So when Demirgian came into Saigon one night and said, "I'd like to burn this whole country down and start again with Americans," I could vaguely understand it, but couldn't really appreciate the depths of it or why he would feel that way. But then when I came back at the end of the year and saw them really full of hatred--Demirgian wanting to kill a VC because he was a Vietnamese, Condron shooting those two laundry boys--then I was really puzzled by it, and in my second Esquire article I ascribed it to racism. When I came back home in 1967, I remember being on a radio program at CBS at which the host asked me, "How do the soldiers feel about the Vietnamese?" To which I replied, "They hate them." He was tongue-tied. "What? What? Are you saying that our soldiers hate the Vietnamese?" I answered, "Yes, they do." He continued sputtering, "What do you mean? I, I, I thought they, they were there to defend them!" The switchboard lights up. There are calls pouring in and I'm fielding angry questions: "How dare you say that? I was in World War 11 and we passed out candy to the children. We loved the children. How can you say that Americans hate the Vietnamese?"

Schroeder: Do you think that this feeling was unique to Vietnam?

Sack: To the Vietnam war? Well, it was much stronger in Vietnam. We didn't particularly like the Koreans in the Korean war. We called them the "indignant personnel" instead of the "indigenous personnel." Apparently there was some annoyance with our South Korean allies. But nothing to the point of purposely going out and trying to shoot them. These feelings were certainly much stronger in Vietnam. I started thinking about it, and finally I began reading books on racism. I finally decided that it was not because of racism. In fact, I make this point explicit in The Man-Eating Machine. This is an idea that I had a tremendously difficult time getting across. I finally realized that we hated the Vietnamese not because they were yellow people, but because they were people, period, and in an efficient society people stand in the way. We would kill the Vietnamese simply because they were people and prevented our war machine from going forward. But this is still so difficult for people to accept. Mother Jones bought a section of The Man-Eating Machine. Then they changed the sentence "It wasn't racism" to "It wasn't just racism." And I insisted, "No. It wasn't racism. This is exactly what I'm trying to say." They got very upset by this. Just before going to press they had a meeting and didn't invite me; the result was that they cancelled the whole article.

Schroeder: Your technique in M is at times self-consciously literary. For instance, in several places you foreshadow things to come. Yet we are kept guessing throughout the book who is a marked man and who isn't.

Sack: That was, of course, the plot of the book, in so far as there is a plot. The first sentence implies that some of them are going to die--at least one of them is going to die. And then every major character who is introduced is introduced with a little hint that it might be him. Prochaska is introduced and just when everybody thinks, "Oh boy, is he being set up to be killed," I say, "He's the sort of person who in a mediocre war novel would die in the next chapter to last," leaving the question open: Is he going to die or not?

Schroeder: Or perhaps your comment undercuts the initial foreshadowing and makes us certain that it's not going to be him.

Sack: I was hoping that it would be ambiguous, that everyone would wonder. And Morton, of course, telling his mother about the coffin. And Demirgian with the sergeant telling him, "You're the one that's going to die." The question is left open so as to give the book a plot.

Schroeder: Yet the tone is, as you characterize it, black humor. And because in many places the tone is so light, when people actually do get killed, the reader's sensibilities are offended; he thinks, "This person can't really be dead." There's an analogous situation in The Naked and the Dead. Hearns's death comes so unexpectedly and seems to pass almost unnoticed--except by the reader, of course, who says, "Wait a minute. This hasn't really happened--he couldn't be dead, he's the main character!" We simply don't want to accept the fact of his death. The same sort of thing, I think, happens in M.

Sack: Well, that's the way it is in war. And I suppose that that's the best way to write about it--not to suggest anything in advance. But of course I was never there when any of the people in the company died or were hit. Even if I had spent a year with M, it would still have been very unlikely that I would have witnessed anything of that sort. In Demirgian's company nobody was killed after the first operation. That would have been the company that I would have been with, most likely. And even if I were there, all of a sudden something explodes and somebody is dead--[slowly] I don't know how you could embroider on that.

Schroeder: In M, though, after someone is killed life seems to go on. There's not a great sense of tragedy about it. It's forgotten because it's something that does happen. But then--

Sack: [interrupting] That's my fault. There was a great sense of tragedy accompanying Morton's death. The book would have been better if I had really been able to elaborate on that.

Schroeder: I think the book's last section, the summing up of what has happened to all of the principal players in the last six months, is very effective: "So and so was killed, so and so was wounded, so and so never made it to Vietnam, and good old Demirgian, still in Vietnam, only now a sergeant." The ending conveys a strong sense of these young innocents who went into Vietnam thinking that it was going to be a turkey shoot or an extended vacation or various other illusions; they lost these illusions and some of them also lost their lives in the process. The compactness of the last page brings all of this home so quickly.

Sack: It's good if that happens. If that actually happens, great! I'm afraid the real reason for that is that I just wasn't there when Yoshioka and Morton were hit. I was supposed to be there with Yoshioka; I'd gone up to talk to him about something, and when I got there, they said that he was a casualty. They'd assumed that I was coming up to see Yoshioka, that I'd known about what happened. I didn't. As soon as I did, I went rushing down to the hospital and then was there with him in the hospital. So the scene at the hospital is much more detailed than the one on the road where he got hit. The reason that the scene on the road transpires so quickly is because I wasn't there to get all the notes that I needed.

But Morton, I found out about Morton a week or two later. When I went up to his company the captain was unhappy and disturbed about it. I explained I'd been following Morton since basic training and I'd like to find out what had happened. The captain said, "Rather than going to see the men, I think it would be better if we bring a guy up here because the men are feeling pretty disturbed." And the sergeant from Morton's squad came up, and he was very angry. I mean, he was homicidal. He approached me holding an M-16--the guy wanted to kill me. They'd been on this operation and people had died, and he was scared with the rest, and, finally, here's this reporter coming in to ask them about how this guy died. I could only talk to him for a few minutes and then the humane as well as sensible thing to do was to let him go back to his bunker. I did talk to one or two others who were there. I got much more information later on when M was optioned by CBS as a mini-series (it was never made). I had to write some more material for them, and it was then that I found out more about Morton's death.

But as I think about it, I couldn't have used that in the book; at that point the book was clearly drawing to a close, and things had to be summed up.

Schroeder: Were there any specific influences which caused you to forsake traditional journalism in favor of M's new journalistic technique?

Sack: One thing comes to mind immediately. I read Michael Herr 's story on Fort Dix in Holiday magazine; I had no detailed description in M, and he had such wonderful description in his article that I realized my piece needed something similar, so I inserted sentences such as this one on page nine of the paperback [reading]: "The air was thick with the smell of floor wax and rifle oil." And I went through the whole book putting in such descriptions. You see, before I went to Vietnam I hadn't read any New Journalism--I had read very little Tom Wolfe and had just glanced at Truman Capote.

Schroeder: Were you familiar with the term "New Journalism" at that point?

Sack: No; the first time that I heard the term was in 1968. 1 read a review of Mailer's The Armies of the Night in Look magazine--the review was called "The New Journalism"--and I said, "If there's such a thing I should learn about it." I started reading the piece, and Look offered a list of the four great New Journalists. And I was one of them. That was the first time I heard the term. I wasn't that familiar with Tom Wolfe, so I read a little more of him.

People in 1966 had been talking about Truman Capote, and I was afraid he was doing something I wouldn't be able to do, so I read about thirty pages of In Cold Blood just to make sure that he wasn't doing anything I couldn't even imagine how to do. Of course I'm incapable of writing descriptions as beautiful as his. But at least it wasn't something unimaginable. So the reason that M is New Journalism is because having been a producer at CBS News the scene-by-scene construction came naturally to me. You see, I originally wanted to do M as a documentary for CBS, and when I couldn't do that, I left CBS to do it for Esquire. I saw everything as movie scenes; that's why there's a sort of soundtrack running through it; that's why M has no flashbacks; that's why everything is set up scene-by-scene--it's a camera setup. I really had M in mind as a movie. Fortunately, that turned out to be the way things were done in New Journalism. And that's also why I had very little description. I hate writing description. Every time I have to think of some metaphor to describe what things look like I just rebel against it. For Christ's sake, give me a camera. On film I can show it in two seconds, instead of having to agonize over finding the right words for it.

Schroeder: One of the most controversial of the New Journalistic techniques is point of view. Tom Wolfe talks about the need for the author to keep out of the narrative and, in fact, does this in most of his work. Others like Mailer and Thompson, though, are often at the center of their narratives.

Sack: That was a specific, conscious choice in the case of M. As I mentioned earlier, I wanted readers to think they were getting undigested, raw material.

At one point I violated that in the Esquire article in the scene where the operation begins. When I first went out that morning I wasn't really planning to go, and Dan Rather said, "Come on, you'll like it; it's no problem." They were planning on going into the Michelin plantation. At that time as far as we all knew we were going into a terrible firefight. And at the last moment I decided to go along. The VC all knew we were coming. And I knew that the VC would know. There were all these horror stories circulating about what it would be like and what it was like the last time. And when we got onto the helicopters, both the soldiers and I thought that we were going into this incredibly hot landing zone. When this passage was first written for Esquire it said: "M wasn't anywhere near the Michelin funland; in keeping with the truly secret order--this is overwritten--"it was twelve merciful miles to the South. Hooray for the American Army!" And then I had "Author's Note" in parentheses, signifying how I was relieved. I meant thank God that the Army had some brains. Since everybody knew that we were going to the Michelin plantation, they sent us someplace else. Hooray. But then looking at the Esquire piece I realized that no one's aware that I'm there on the helicopter. No one's aware where I am. And to say "Author's Note" doesn't really make sense to the reader. So I just took that out; it was the only place where the author appeared. Eliminating myself was a literary choice. In a way it's the opposite of egocentric, but in another way it's even more egocentric: the art becomes so important that I'm willing to do anything--including keeping my picture off the book--for the sake of the art. 

Read the first scene-and-a-half

Buy an autographed paperback
from the Authors Guild

Buy an autographed paperback
from amazon.com

Read about M 
in It Wasn't Pretty, Folks, 
But Didn't We Have Fun? 
Esquire in the Sixties  
by Carol Polsgrove

Other books by John Sack