M by John Sack

Title: M
Author: John Sack
Publisher: Corgi Books, London 1986
ISBN 0 552 12782 5

Summary:
John Sack joins a rag-tag group of draftees for training at Fort Dix and watches as they are transformed into M Company, then follows them over to Vietnam and accompanies them into battle: their first operation is a sweep through the Michelin plantation. Sack is the proverbial fly on the wall during everything the unit goes through, recounting the good and the bad that occurs during their tour of duty, running from 1966-67.

Thoughts:
How did I miss this when it was first published in paperback in 1986? M is an absolute classic of Vietnam War writing, and is up there with the best of them. The dense, detailed writing style, similar to Michael Herr's, will not be to everyone's taste, but Sack definitely provides an insider's view of what it was like to be there. John Sack volunteered for the Korean War and ended up writing for Stars & Stripes as a combat reporter, beginning a journalism career that extended all the way to the publication of his final book "Company C: the real war in Iraq" in 1995, which he wrote in his 60s whilst embedded in an armour unit that took part in the largest tank battle in recent history. His other book on the Vietnam War was "Lieutenant Calley: his own story; [as told to] John Sack".

There is so much detail in this 212 page book that I took it slowly and savoured it. Here's one extract to give you an idea of the writing. The scene is the edge of the unit's firebase, looking out over "spiral ooooo's of barbed wire" and "wooded hills and valleys", while a sergeant gives instruction on the wily ways of the VC:
"A southerner, the sergeant had succumbed to a drawl of such virulence that his vowels had become like a wind in old plantation chimneys, his consonants like the rustling of silken curtains: essence with no substance, matrix without matter the sergeant's smooth flow of words was a warm dessert in which one could scarcely differentiate between the custard and the currants. Early in his Army career, the sergeant had become aware that his most exigent utterances had been falling on the ears of his auditors like an alphabetical list of Hawaiian deities, and to compensate for this involuntary obscurantism he had made it his second nature to say each phrase of his glossolalia over and over until the drift of his Delphic meaning started to come across to the troops. Accordingly, even at times when the sergeant addressed himself on the topics of wrack and ruin, blood and guts, as he was obliged to this evening, even at these bloodcurling times the warmth of his Florida drawl and the easy leisuredness of his repetitions conspired with his loss-of-signal to make him as comforting as a man chewing a wad of 'baccy and reminiscing about the summer when one of his jerseys took a blue ribbon on the Chattahoochee. In this lonely hour, no eloquent gift of gab could have reassured Demirgian as much as this orientation by his soothing new platoon sergeant, Sergeant Allen."
All this is just prior to a mortar round landing nearby: "BANG! And as Yoshioka ducked and Demirgian's curious eyes turned to the concertina wire to gaze at the black explosion, a few hundred fragments of steel whistled through the evening air, s-s-s-s-s-, ten to twenty feet on the sunset side of M's new arrivals."

Rating:

Wayne, that's a GREAT review. I'd add it to my list, but I barely read much these days and am STILL slogging through the Vietnam Ground Zero series.

Good review. Yet another I'll eventually need to find.

This sounds fantastic! Dang shame they don't have it on Kindle, but i'll look for a paperback.

Thanks guys I think I need to track down the Lieutenant Calley book too, although it will not be an easy read.