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M
Lift your head and hold it high! Mighty Mike is passing by! So sang the 250 diverse soldiers of M Company ("Mighty Mike") as they went marching to Vietnam. Their right feet hitting the snow simultaneously, they sang, "Am I right or wrong?" They had their answer three weeks later."Great reportage," The New York Times. "Great literature," The Dallas Morning News."A superb book," The Nation."One must go back to Orwell for appropriate comparisons," The Washington Post."Sack achieves the quality of William March's Company K in World War I, of James Jones' From Here to Eternity in World War II," The Los Angeles Times."Absolutely the best book to come out of Vietnam," The Cleveland Press.M has been nominated by the NYU Department of Journalism as one of the top journalistic works of the twentieth century.
198 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1967
87 people want to read
About the author
John Sack
33 books5 followersJewish-American journalist, considered to be the founder of literary journalism.
He was a war correspondent in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Yugoslavia.
His book Eye for an eye about war crimes against the German population of the by Poland annexed part of East Germany has caused an uproar because Sack pointed out the crimes against humanity committed by jews.
Sack was accused of holocaust denial and anti-semitism by various fellow jews and jewish political organisations.
He was a war correspondent in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Yugoslavia.
His book Eye for an eye about war crimes against the German population of the by Poland annexed part of East Germany has caused an uproar because Sack pointed out the crimes against humanity committed by jews.
Sack was accused of holocaust denial and anti-semitism by various fellow jews and jewish political organisations.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
October 9, 2023
M is M Company of the First Infantry Training Brigade from Fort Dix, New Jersey.
Early fiction/documentary telling of an introductory Vietnam experience. Sack was a combat soldier in Korea, later a journalist covering Mike company training in the cold wilds of New Jersey, headed for the jungles of Vietnam.
Written about real people and real situations. New experiences for all, training for a war that had not been fought yet. The story is a collection of moments that contain odd vignettes with some being quite surreal. Charlie surrounding your fire base, flashing dozens of tiny pen type flashlights at your sentries on night watch. Stuff like that.
A look at a war that was not yet known. A Vietnam war story that is not among of a number of retold tales.
Early fiction/documentary telling of an introductory Vietnam experience. Sack was a combat soldier in Korea, later a journalist covering Mike company training in the cold wilds of New Jersey, headed for the jungles of Vietnam.
Written about real people and real situations. New experiences for all, training for a war that had not been fought yet. The story is a collection of moments that contain odd vignettes with some being quite surreal. Charlie surrounding your fire base, flashing dozens of tiny pen type flashlights at your sentries on night watch. Stuff like that.
A look at a war that was not yet known. A Vietnam war story that is not among of a number of retold tales.
October 31, 2023
Not a bad book. What I liked? How the author treats the battalion as a whole. Dont want to spoil things but you’ll see. I did not like the juvenile, I guess a way to put it, way of descriptions. Probly better for a younger reader. Teens and twenties. I’m 58 and appreciate alot of different styles. I can see this book having its place. Maybe in a school classroom setting. History or literature class with discussion.
October 26, 2023
I did my basic training in the British Army at roughly the same time as the men featured in this book were being sent to Vietnam. We were destined for Ireland and a brutal, squalid little war exposing the political ineptitude of a century and more of English politicians attempting to hold on to a colony which refused to be colonised.
What comes across is the difference in the wars, it wasn’t just that we were very different soldiers from the men portrayed in ‘M’.
The Irish spoke pretty much the same language as us, shared similar cultures. Northern Ireland was minutes away by air – it could have been shelled by an artillery battery on the Scottish coast. But it was a purely infantry war – raid and riot, ambush and bomb, rifle fire. The killing was up close and personal.
And Sack makes it clear that Vietnam was a wholly alien and racially different environment. American troops could go their whole tour without seeing an enemy soldier while artillery and airstrikes slaughtered the Vietnamese in their thousands. Young men managed to shoot themselves and others while being less than careful with guns. They burned down Vietnamese villages, shot dogs and livestock, and counted down the days till they could get home.
The Americans featured in this book seem very shouty soldiers - they’re encouraged to yell. British troops tend to be much quieter, but they grumble all the time. John Sack had covered Korea, he was an experienced war reporter. He followed a training cadre of infantry through their shouty training, noted the bureaucratic decisions (or chaos) which selected those who’d go to Nam and those who’d go to safer US bases elsewhere in the world.
Numbers of these US troops also seem to be contaminated by religion: there’s a padre interfering with training on a daily basis, there’s at least one soldier who is a religious fanatic, there’s even a place for a bible in the recruit’s footlocker. Once they get to Nam, however, their god seems to forsake them … life becomes brutally secular and prosaic.
I never knew a British soldier with a bible in his kit – there was much more entertaining literature floating around the barracks. Of course, we were all volunteers, none of us has been drafted, and I never met anyone who had volunteered so he could go chastise Irish Catholics and restore English order, the Protestant religion and civilisation to a blighted province. The politics of our intervention in Ireland went unstated.
It’s clear that American soldiers were far more ideologically indoctrinated than we were. Sack emphasises the obsession with the domino theory – if the Commies took Nam, they would topple the next state, then the next … from the Philippines to Japan and across the Pacific to San Francisco.
It was ideological bullshit, but the USA is an ideological society – beating a drum about illusory democracy and freedoms when, in fact, the military industrial complex identified by Eisenhower is toppling regimes in defence of the dollar, capitalism and the wealth of the wealthy. It’s an ideology which shapes the country’s politics, perverts the individual’s mindset, and keeps a tight rein on any opposition.
So there’s very little politics in Sack’s book. It’s bland. Maybe ‘hip’ in its language, but bland. The writing? I don’t know – it seems overwritten, overly indulgent in appearing hip and getting down and dirty with the troops. And yet I don’t really get any sense of the war, any real sense of the troops. Yes it’s a dirty war, and vast amounts of expensive hardware are literally being blown away, and thousands of people are being terrorised and killed.
But you only really get a generalised picture of the troops. War is boring – routines, tedium, getting used to the shit and the privation … spiced up, as the saying goes, with occasional moments of sheer terror.
Sack focuses on one or two soldiers who get starring roles – and it’s grimy, and obscene, and you know these are not the children of the rich being sent to fight this war, they’re poor boys and a lot of them are black (time after time he identifies a soldier as ‘Negro’), and they’re hardly mature and sophisticated in their thinking. And the officers, of course, are just Army, their mindsets as closely cropped as their haircuts.
Trouble is, the characters tend to become ciphers – greater characterisation might have made it a more significant read. Create a generalised other or two … a hundred men’s stories compressed into a handful of experiences?
I gather the book was originally serialised in ‘Esquire’ – a magazine which hardly had a great appeal for working class America and the blue collar bastards who’d get entered in the lottery to be shipped out in uniform and shipped back in coffins.
It’s a piece of trendy journalism at a time when what was needed was visceral anger. But Western newspapers and magazines reserve visceral anger for complaints about opponents of the Right and capitalism, so I suppose long, literate but affected articles are as close as most of the thinking folk back home could be expected to cope with … or be allowed to see.
But it was interesting reading this given that I did so a couple of weeks after Hamas committed atrocities, the Israelis are bombing Gaza, murdering civilians, and preparing to overrun the place, while the US and UK governments are, meanwhile, virtually the only people in the world who are not calling for a ceasefire.
I’m waiting for someone to write a story explaining what makes a young man enlist in Hamas, I’m waiting for the uncensored stories of the war. Sack’s articles / book are, from my perspective, far from brilliant and incisive … but he deserves credit for at least making the effort.
Not an easy read. Dense. Overwritten. But worth making the effort to persevere even if it is, maybe, relevant now only as a piece of historical reportage. It was certainly worth the effort of writing a review this length to put the book into perspective in my own mind.
What comes across is the difference in the wars, it wasn’t just that we were very different soldiers from the men portrayed in ‘M’.
The Irish spoke pretty much the same language as us, shared similar cultures. Northern Ireland was minutes away by air – it could have been shelled by an artillery battery on the Scottish coast. But it was a purely infantry war – raid and riot, ambush and bomb, rifle fire. The killing was up close and personal.
And Sack makes it clear that Vietnam was a wholly alien and racially different environment. American troops could go their whole tour without seeing an enemy soldier while artillery and airstrikes slaughtered the Vietnamese in their thousands. Young men managed to shoot themselves and others while being less than careful with guns. They burned down Vietnamese villages, shot dogs and livestock, and counted down the days till they could get home.
The Americans featured in this book seem very shouty soldiers - they’re encouraged to yell. British troops tend to be much quieter, but they grumble all the time. John Sack had covered Korea, he was an experienced war reporter. He followed a training cadre of infantry through their shouty training, noted the bureaucratic decisions (or chaos) which selected those who’d go to Nam and those who’d go to safer US bases elsewhere in the world.
Numbers of these US troops also seem to be contaminated by religion: there’s a padre interfering with training on a daily basis, there’s at least one soldier who is a religious fanatic, there’s even a place for a bible in the recruit’s footlocker. Once they get to Nam, however, their god seems to forsake them … life becomes brutally secular and prosaic.
I never knew a British soldier with a bible in his kit – there was much more entertaining literature floating around the barracks. Of course, we were all volunteers, none of us has been drafted, and I never met anyone who had volunteered so he could go chastise Irish Catholics and restore English order, the Protestant religion and civilisation to a blighted province. The politics of our intervention in Ireland went unstated.
It’s clear that American soldiers were far more ideologically indoctrinated than we were. Sack emphasises the obsession with the domino theory – if the Commies took Nam, they would topple the next state, then the next … from the Philippines to Japan and across the Pacific to San Francisco.
It was ideological bullshit, but the USA is an ideological society – beating a drum about illusory democracy and freedoms when, in fact, the military industrial complex identified by Eisenhower is toppling regimes in defence of the dollar, capitalism and the wealth of the wealthy. It’s an ideology which shapes the country’s politics, perverts the individual’s mindset, and keeps a tight rein on any opposition.
So there’s very little politics in Sack’s book. It’s bland. Maybe ‘hip’ in its language, but bland. The writing? I don’t know – it seems overwritten, overly indulgent in appearing hip and getting down and dirty with the troops. And yet I don’t really get any sense of the war, any real sense of the troops. Yes it’s a dirty war, and vast amounts of expensive hardware are literally being blown away, and thousands of people are being terrorised and killed.
But you only really get a generalised picture of the troops. War is boring – routines, tedium, getting used to the shit and the privation … spiced up, as the saying goes, with occasional moments of sheer terror.
Sack focuses on one or two soldiers who get starring roles – and it’s grimy, and obscene, and you know these are not the children of the rich being sent to fight this war, they’re poor boys and a lot of them are black (time after time he identifies a soldier as ‘Negro’), and they’re hardly mature and sophisticated in their thinking. And the officers, of course, are just Army, their mindsets as closely cropped as their haircuts.
Trouble is, the characters tend to become ciphers – greater characterisation might have made it a more significant read. Create a generalised other or two … a hundred men’s stories compressed into a handful of experiences?
I gather the book was originally serialised in ‘Esquire’ – a magazine which hardly had a great appeal for working class America and the blue collar bastards who’d get entered in the lottery to be shipped out in uniform and shipped back in coffins.
It’s a piece of trendy journalism at a time when what was needed was visceral anger. But Western newspapers and magazines reserve visceral anger for complaints about opponents of the Right and capitalism, so I suppose long, literate but affected articles are as close as most of the thinking folk back home could be expected to cope with … or be allowed to see.
But it was interesting reading this given that I did so a couple of weeks after Hamas committed atrocities, the Israelis are bombing Gaza, murdering civilians, and preparing to overrun the place, while the US and UK governments are, meanwhile, virtually the only people in the world who are not calling for a ceasefire.
I’m waiting for someone to write a story explaining what makes a young man enlist in Hamas, I’m waiting for the uncensored stories of the war. Sack’s articles / book are, from my perspective, far from brilliant and incisive … but he deserves credit for at least making the effort.
Not an easy read. Dense. Overwritten. But worth making the effort to persevere even if it is, maybe, relevant now only as a piece of historical reportage. It was certainly worth the effort of writing a review this length to put the book into perspective in my own mind.
July 16, 2023
I read this for Booktube at War. Nonfiction isn’t my thing. War isn’t my thing. But M was an interesting read. Sack’s writing style is different but I liked its quirks. I imagine that Demirgian was pretty mentally unstable when he made it back home.
March 16, 2024
My favorite of the new journalism set.
August 17, 2010
Found this book in the Library, it was an interesting look at the induction process, basic training, and placement prevalent during the Vietnam War; purportedly based entirely upon the many aspects of real soldiers J.Sack was "embedded" with before embedding was SOP.
After having read the more encompassing Matterhorn earlier this year, I would suggest this novel to others as a passable prequel to the narrative one reads in Matterhorn, which also rings authentic in many ways.
I would consider this a lucky find on my part...
After having read the more encompassing Matterhorn earlier this year, I would suggest this novel to others as a passable prequel to the narrative one reads in Matterhorn, which also rings authentic in many ways.
I would consider this a lucky find on my part...
May 26, 2011
Vying for the title of the best Vietnam War book ever - he followed one company through their tour of duty and wrote a book that nails down the absurdity and awfulness of the war and all wars.
October 19, 2016
Bad sentence structure. Verbose in describing things.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews