John Sack

John Sack, legendary war correspondent for Esquire Magazine, has died. Esquire has his most acclaimed work, the 33,000-word October, 1966 Vietnam dispatch M Company, from Fort Dix, New Jersey to South Vietnam, online and free for your reading. It is, especially now, a fascinating work of journalism.

MONDAY MORNING for thirty gay minutes, for the first time in its corporate history, M could experience pleasant weather. The temperature at M’s altitude was 70, and through the sides of its swift helicopters there came one of those summer-in-a-sports-car and hair-rumpling breezes. With its whole silent battalion and three battalions more, M was in combat clothes and being lifted out toward the Michelin rubber plantation, a forest where the communists, all busy little beavers, had been whittling bamboo stakes for several days, dipping them in buffalo dung, urinating on them, putting them in punji pits, in foot-traps, in mad little Batman traps in trees, whiz! out of bushes, pop! out of ferns—aargh! and burying mines, and hiding grenades, and step on the wires and “Look out!” grinning old Foley had told M back in its infantry training, two weeks earlier, “Look out! here it comes! five whole gallons of flaming gasoline!” Through some diabolical means, the communists at the Michelin plantation had learned of the Operation the week before, although it was classified SECRET.

Take the time and read the rest.