The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight by Marc Weingarten

Author:Marc Weingarten [Weingarten, Marc]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-52569-7
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2005-06-12T16:00:00+00:00

The book is a diary of everything Tregaskis saw or heard, written in a clipped, straightforward style. Any speculative attempts at taking the emotional temperature of the situation are limited to Tregaskis’s own observations. Sack, in contrast, removes all mediation between reporter and reader; the story is not his, and thus not for him to tell.

“I don’t put myself in the story,” Sack said. “I don’t want the reader to even be aware that I’m there…. I want [the reader] to feel they’re getting undiluted reality—that they’re getting absolutely objective reporting. Of course, this is a trick—because I have my own values, as to what’s important, what’s worth saying, and what isn’t worth saying. I’m choosing what I want to write, and I’m choosing the order it goes in, so though it pretends to objectivity it’s really subjective, and this is a trick on the reader.”

For Sack, reportorial objectivity was one of the great myths. “If one million people threw roses at Khrushchev when he came to the States, and one person threw an egg and hit him, the Russian press would say one million threw roses, and the American press would say one threw an egg … and both of them would think they were being objective.” It was all about sifting through the information and choosing your own version of the truth.

To merely describe the activities of M Company in the verdant thicket of Laikhe was insufficient, because inertia and boredom was the story. The enemy was a wraith, unseen but omnipresent. Campaigns became tense waiting games, followed by a flashpoint cataclysm. This, Sack discerned, was slowly driving the members of M Company to seek refuge inside their own heads, which were being cross-wired by the confusing nature of their mission.

When M did encounter the Vietcong, the army’s rules of engagement faded into insignificance. The intuitive, improvised tactics of guerilla warfare left M Company confused and frayed, with no other recourse but to “burn, burn, burn” everything within reach.

“Burn, burn, burn,” Demirgian’s captain said. “Yes, that’ll get old Charlie out.”

“Yes, sir,” the lieutenant said.

“Charlie’s got no place to hide now. Charlie don’t like open spaces,” the captain said.

“No sir, that Charlie don’t,” the lieutenant said.

“That’s the way to end this war. Burn villages—burn the farms,” the captain said. “Then the Charlies’ll have to come in planting and rebuilding instead of just stirring up trouble.”

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