the editor talks with you

The toughest editor I ever worked for was a former US Marine gunnery sergeant named John Robert King. At times I thought his mama should have named him Genghis Khan. His Marine buddies called him Gunny. The rest of us called him simply Bob. As a battle-hardened Marine, he brooked no nonsense, especially from me. Once in a blizzard it took me – by train and bus – 8 hours to reach our newpaper office. When I arrived, Bob was sitting at my desk doing my job, designing the front page of the next morning’s edition. The page displayed blizzard photos our photographers had struggled through snow drifts up to their waists to make. “You’ve got the best job on the paper,” he said. “I had forgotten how much fun it is.” On my performance evaluation, he gigged me for being late for work that day. It was the only thing he said he could find to criticize me for. I asked permission to append my side of the story – to which he agreed.

Bob was so tough only a few reporters liked him. Many feared him. This was not the Marine Corps. This was a collegial newsroom where journalists spent most of their waking hours bringing their readers the unvarnished first draft of history and then telling each other the most preposterous lies over beer. Bob was a Marine to the bone. He acted as if he had a low opinion of my own military service, because I had been a US Army infantry grunt in Korea. I didn’t bother to remind him that when the Army got through mopping up the Master Race in Europe, they went to the Pacific to help the Marines with the Rising Sun. When the publisher brought in a new boss instead of promoting Bob, he asked for leave. He felt the Marines needed him in Vietnam. We needed a lot more than Bob but the problem wasn’t there. It was here.

Bob arrived in Vietnam just in time to lace up his boots for the Tet Offensive. If you remember the Vietam War, the Tet Offensive was one of the enemy’s largest military campaigns. It involved 85,000 North Vietnamese troops and Viet Cong guerrillas in surprise attacks throughout South Vietnam. It started Jan. 30, 1968 – on Tet, the Vietnamese New Year. Bob was in the fighting at Hue, by most assessments the war’s bloodiest battle. It was a pyrrhic victory for the enemy. They lost 50,000 men either killed, wounded or captured. But it turned many back home against the war as the death toll rose to more than 500 Americans a week. The media played a role in this, publicizing anti-war protest photos and stories more often than coverage of the war itself.

Bob was one of the lucky ones, He came home in one piece. Back at the newspaper, he was assigned to work for me. This reversal gave me a chance to treat him the way I felt he had treated me. Did I? Of course not. He was a hero. Bob put his life on the line for us. I respected him for his love of the Marine Corps and his skills as a journalist. My father advised me to forgive but not forget. I haven’t forgotten you, Gunny.

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