“Oh my God—we hit a little girl.” This was the single, shocking cover line of the October 1966 issue of Esquire. Inside was John Sack’s 33,000-word New Journalism masterpiece, M, in which he followed a single company of American infantrymen from Fort Dix, New Jersey, to the war in South Vietnam. With that story—the longest to ever appear in Esquire—Sack single-handedly invented what it meant to be an embedded reporter and reset the bar for what journalism could be: trenchant, moving, and at time...
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