Freelance Tips from John Bartlow Martin

With his ubiquitous horn-rimmed glasses, bow tie, and mild manner, John BartlowMartin looked more like a schoolteacher or a laboratory technician than a nationally known freelance writer. He believed more in hard work more than talent, once commenting, “Hell, I’m just a reporter.”

The Indiana-raised Martin had honed his observational skills as a gritty police, city hall, and re-write reporter on the Indianapolis Times in the late 1930s and as a regular freelance contributor to such true-crime periodicals as Official Detective Stories and Actual Detective Stories for Women in Crime.

In the 1940s and 1950s Martin progressed to having his work appear frequently in the “big slicks,” the mass-circulation magazines printed on glossy paper with such famous names as the Saturday Evening Post, Life, Look, Collier’s, Esquire, and Harper’s. Martin transcended the conventions of the fact-detective magazine genre in his true-crime articles for national magazines, attempting to place the subject in its social context. He avoided “the artifices, the false suspense and phony emotion,” of typical reporting about crime, and tried to preserve “the narrative value of the stories rather than transforming them into dry case histories.” What remained were powerful stories that eschewed any contrived suspense for “the suspense of fine inevitability,” the type of suspense felt by those attending prizefights.

Martin became one of but a select few freelancers in the country able to support his family. A 1955 Time magazine article on the “ruggedly individualistic breed” of freelance writer estimated that out of the thousands who attempted to make a career in freelancing for magazines, only seventy or eighty managed a yearly salary of $10,000. 

When Martin hit his stride in his early freelance days writing stories for true-crime detective magazines, he churned out a million words a year, selling a third of them at two cents a word. By 1957 Newsweek magazine cited Martin as one of the highest paid freelance magazine writers in the country, estimating his income at $32,000 in a good year. “I like everything about free-lancing,” said Martin, “with the exception of the lack of security. Sometimes it’s four to six months between checks, and that creates problems for my grocer and everybody else.”

In his writing for the big-slick magazines, Martin produced long, detailed drafts of his articles in a large downstairs bedroom he converted into his workroom at his Victorian home in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park, Illinois, and a cabin retreat he owned on Smith Lake in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. When asked where he was from, however, Martin always responded, “I’m from Chicago,” a city that often exasperated him, but for which he never lost his affection. Although invited several times to join the East Coast staffs of Life and the Post on a full-time basis, Martin preferred to remain in the place he knew best, the Midwest.

As a freelance writer (a profession he once described as “champagne today, crackers and milk tomorrow”), staying in the area he knew so well gave him a tremendous advantage. “The Midwest was where things happened, it was, almost, the locomotive of America,” Martin said. “And I as a writer almost had it all to myself, while in New York little happened and writers were scrambling all over each other.”

In March 1959 Martin received a letter from Jack Fisher, editor in chief at Harper’s, asking him for an article about the freelancing trade and his career as one. Martin declined Fisher’s offer, as he had other commitments to address, but the idea spurred him to jot down a few tips for those daring enough to embark on a career as a writer for hire. His guidelines include the following:

“Keep away—but not too far away—from liquor, women and politics.

Sit down in front of a typewriter and stay there.

Do not talk; listen.

Write only about things you love or detest; about nothing toward which you are indifferent.

Keep a schedule—any schedule.

Rewrite, and rewrite, and rewrite, and rewrite.

Give yourself enough time.

Be sure.

Remember that the subject is everything, the writer nothing. Avoid the I. The subject, not you, matters.

You must believe what you write. And write what you believe. And write nothing else.

Keep a couple of ideas ahead so when an editor proposes a bad one you can counter with a good one of your own.

Writing gets harder, and so does legwork? Why? Because you see more. When younger, you see more clearly because you see less. When older, you see more and things become less clear—the man who 20 years ago would have seem thoroughly evil is now seen to be human too after all, and this must be taken into account too.”
 
 

John Bartlow Martin: A Writing Life

During the 1940s and 1950s one name, John Bartlow Martin, dominated the pages of the “big slicks,” mass-circulation magazines, especially the Saturday Evening Post, where he produced multipart articles on such provocative topics as mental illness, divorce, abortion, and desegregation in the South.

A former reporter for the Indianapolis Times, Martin, was one of but a few freelance writers in the country able to support himself from his work. His peers lauded him as “the best living reporter,” the “ablest crime reporter in America,” and “one of America’s premier seekers of fact” in a career that spanned nearly fifty years. What set him apart, however, was his deep and abiding concern with the common man in twentieth-century America. “Most journalists,” he noted, “make a living by interviewing the great. I made mine by interviewing the humble—what the Spaniards call los de abajo, those from below.”

Martin treated his freelance career as though it was a regular job, working from nine in the morning until five in the evening, with a half-hour break for lunch, from Monday through Friday; he took Saturdays off and spent his time on Sundays dealing with correspondence and “other accumulated afflictions,” as well as planning his work schedule for the upcoming week.

Pitching ideas to editors, and also receiving suggestions from them, Martin did not cover breaking news, preferring instead to bide his time. “I won’t touch a story when it first breaks because all the reporters are there, all asking questions trying to outdo each other,” Martin explained. “After that’s all over, I feel that I can get closer to it.”

Whenever he began his research, or “legwork,” as he called it, Martin felt afraid because he believed the people he would be interviewing “knew so much,” while he still knew so little about his assignment. Also, when he worked for a newspaper, he reasoned that he had the right to ask questions, because a newspaper “had an inherent right to keep the public record,” but as a magazine writer, he did believe he had that same privilege. “The only way to cure my hesitancy was to master the facts—to study the public record until I knew more about the case than anybody directly involved,” Martin said (one of his close friends described Martin as “fact obsessed”).

Spending anywhere from a few weeks to more than six months pursuing a story, he kept digging until he had all the facts he could gather, especially the human details that “made the bald facts real.” Writing and editing were important to a story, he later said, but “in the end everything depends on reporting.” There were times when he returned from a trip on a Saturday, repacked his suitcase, and left the next day on another assignment. Such commitment to his craft was necessary because a lot of bad reporting, he noted, stemmed from a writer’s reliance on only a single source.

Digging for the facts necessary to construct his stories, Martin developed a few tricks of the trade for interviews. Whenever possible, he tried to talk to a subject at his or her home, because the person would be “at ease there and the objects that surround him will suggest questions to you and remind him of details.” Although he always used a notebook, and spurned tape recorders, he usually kept the notebook out of sight when beginning an interview.

To get the notebook out of his pocket and start taking notes, Martin asked his subject a question requiring a number for an answer—“when were you born?” for example. “You should always try to establish an understanding, a sympathy even, with everyone you interview, even the villains; they’re not totally evil, only human, and what you want to discover is why they behaved the way they did,” he said. If a subject proved to be reluctant to talk, Martin often began relating his own experiences. “Tell him your story,” he said, “pretty soon he’ll likely tell you his.”

Martin preferred doing interviews face to face, not over the telephone, and always aimed at doing so for at least two hours “because you’ll waste the first 45 minutes, you’ll get your best stuff between then and 1½ hours, and you’ll waste the last half hour.” Martin realized he could not possibly collect all the facts on a subject, and even if it was possible nobody would publish the resulting story, as it would be too long. “A writer has to be selective,” he said. “Complete objectivity is impossible. He’ll pick the facts as he sees them and write them in the light of his own experience. That’s really all he can do.”

On his travels Martin usually went to his assignment, in spite of often feeling apprehensive about flying, via airplane, renting an automobile upon his arrival. He depended, however, upon hitting the pavement to get the material he needed. “If I’m doing a story on slums,” he told one reporter, “the best thing to do is walk around. . . . Any story is made on the street.”

Early on in his freelance career, Martin organized his material on three-inch by five-inch notecards. During his investigation of the Centralia, Illinois, minedisaster in 1947, however, he had to come up with something new due to the wealth of information he collected. For the article, eventually published in Harper’s, he went through his notes and documents, gave each a code number, and then numbered the pages. When he came across an item he wanted to use in the article, he typed it out, triple spaced, and keyed it to code and page numbers. “I then cut up the typing line by line into slips of paper,” said Martin. “I moved the slips around, arranging and rearranging them.”

When he had all the slips arranged to his satisfaction, he pasted them together, resulting in a long scroll that he rolled up, placed on his typing table, and consulted as he began writing, letting the scroll fall to the floor as he worked. When he came to the end of the scroll, he had his rough draft finished. Martin dropped this system when, years later, one of his scrolls measured more than 150 feet long, “running out of my room and out the front door and across the lawn.” He went back to organizing his research on note cards, this time using some measuring five-inches by eight-inches in size.

Martin pounded out rough drafts of his stories on a typewriter in his office, or “workshop,” as he referred to it, at his home, never by longhand or by dictation. Usually starting his work at about 8:45 a.m., Martin took a cup of tea with him into his office, closed the door, and worked until lunch, which often consisted of a bowl of Consommé or Consommé Madrilène and a tuna fish sandwich. Martin wrote quickly, on the average of fifty pages a day, sometimes finishing a story in the morning and starting another one that same afternoon. The room was often littered with notebooks, reference books, and memorandums dealing with the subject he was writing about.

Usually, Martin worked until nearly 5:00 p.m. He never ended a day “written out, with nothing more to say.” Instead, he made sure to finish by typing out a quarter or half page of notes about exactly what was coming next so the next morning he could take up where he had left off. Martin discovered that getting started on a story or a day’s work was the hardest part of his job.

Writing in the days before computers, word processing, and the easy storage of information, Martin made sure to make a carbon copy of everything he wrote, especially his rough draft. He did not keep the copy in his house, but secured it elsewhere, always worried about what might happen if a fire—the ultimate “nightmare” for a writer—ever broke out. (Martin knew of a writer who had worked for two years on a novel in a cabin in the Minnesota woods; the cabin burned down and, with it, the only copy of the novel.)

Tackling a rough draft of a story, Martin did what he called “heavy rewrite,” moving sentences and paragraphs around until few if any sentences from his rough draft survived until the final draft. He tried to cut lines he was “especially pleased with, doing the real polished writing on rewrite, not rough—in spite of all this the basic organization remains the same.” It took him as long to rewrite as to write the rough draft. Martin’s system worked for him, but realized other writers might have preferred a different way. “There is no ‘right’ way to write; there is only your way,” he said.

In constructing his stories, Martin concentrated on using what he called the “three C’s”—conflict, characters tightly related to conflict, and the controlling idea. “I sometimes made a conscious effort to get a fictional effect out of a fact story, inventing nothing, simply handling the material as a novelist might,” Martin said, adding he probably had always been “a frustrated novelist.”

Most of his stories went through as many as six rewrites. Writing, to Martin, was “more like carpentry than art.” He also considered writing to be a solitary profession, one reason it was “both so hard and so rewarding.” When he wrote his stories he imagined someone reading over his shoulder, an editor who, if he was tempted to “overwrite a sentence, or leave one loose, or collapse upon a cliché, or otherwise write something idiotic, the imaginary reader would frown; I would fix it.” 

Wallace Terry, the Vietnam War, and "Bloods"

Wallace H. Terry Jr., who served as deputy bureau chief for Time magazine in Saigon, had amassed an impressive record as a journalist. Hired by the Washington Post at just nineteen years old, he had been one of the few Black reporters assigned by a mainstream daily newspaper to chronicle the burgeoning civil rights movement in the South. He was there for the critical March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and heard Doctor Martin Luther King Jr.’s stirring “I have a dream” oration. It seemed as the impossible could happen—King’s dream of one day in Georgia having “the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners” being able to “sit down together at the table of brotherhood” could become a reality.

Those magnificent dreams of brotherhood, however, had been bathed time and time again in blood. Terry had to endure such tragic deaths as Medgar Evers, a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People official, gunned down in the driveway of his Jackson, Mississippi, home by Byron De La Beckwith, a member of Jackson’s White Citizens Council, on June 12, 1963. Shortly before Evers death, Terry had visited him at his home, where the civil rights leader had treated the threats on his life as a badge of honor. “This is what you must face to get free in Mississippi,” Evers explained to the reporter, who had watched as a car driven by two white men attempted to run Evers down in front of the city’s NAACP headquarters.

While covering demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama, Terry himself barely escaped with his life when the hotel he had been staying at had been bombed by segregationists. The worst was yet to come. On April 4, 1968, his friend and his eldest son’s godfather, Doctor King, had been shot and killed by an assassin in Memphis, Tennessee, where King had gone to support striking Black sanitation workers.

Terry heard the news about King’s death while on leave in Singapore, where he had made a home with his wife Janice and their children, Tai (King’s godson), Lisa, and David. Terry had gone to get a haircut only to discover his Chinese barber crying. When he asked him what was wrong, the barber said his tears were for King, whose life had ended too soon. “And I thought, ‘Even a Chinese barber in Singapore . . . and I began to cry, too,” Terry recalled. When, he wondered, might God decide to “lower the curtain” for good on his life?

Rockets and mortars fired by forces of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (commonly known as the Viet Cong) shattered Saigon’s quiet on May 5, leading Terry to believe that a new offensive against the South Vietnamese government and its American allies was at hand. This attack would later be known as the second phase of the Tet Offensive that had first been launched against targets throughout South Vietnam by the VC and the People’s Army of Vietnam on January 30. He huddled with his Time colleague John Cantwell, an Australian who spoke Chinese and loved Asia.

Terry remembered that Cantwell often played a whistle for the birds he kept at the villa the magazine used for its headquarters, hoping they would answer with their songs. The two men had grown close while working together. Terry recalled that one night at the Embassy Hotel where they lived, they went up to its roof with a bag of hamburgers and watched while rockets and flares lit up the city. “We decide this is one war we don’t want to lose our lives in,” Terry said. “For both of us, Vietnam is making less sense each day.”

To cover the renewed fighting, one of the Time newsmen had to attend a military briefing, while the other investigated the damage inflicted on Saigon by the enemy. When Terry told Cantwell to attend the briefing while he roamed the city, the Australian demurred, insisting that his friend should stay with Janice, who might be frightened. Terry agreed but warned his friend to avoid such particularly hazardous areas as Tan Son Nhut airport and Cholon, Saigon’s Chinese sector. Before Cantwell set out, other reporters—Frank Palmos, a fellow Australian; Bruce Piggot and Ronald Laramy from the Reuters news service; and Michael Birch of Australian Associated Press—asked him if they could ride along. Cantwell agreed and the reporters drove away in a Mini Moke, a small, open-top utility vehicle.

Unfortunately, Cantwell ignored Terry’s advice. Chasing after two U.S. helicopter gunships attacking an enemy force, he drove into Cholon, ignoring warnings from South Vietnamese civilians that enemy forces were in the area. Three armed men appeared from behind an oil drum as the journalists drove down a dirt road. Although the reporters had continually called out, “Bao chi. Bao chi [Press. Press],” the VC opened fire at point-blank range with rifles and an AK-47 automatic weapon. “He seemed to enjoy his work,” Palmos said of the insurgent who finished off the wounded reporters with his pistol. “Not only did he ignore all pleas of innocence, killing Westerners seemed to appeal to him. Some honour for him. No possible response for us. He had, in his mind, killed five Western enemies.”

Palmos pretended to be dead and waited until the gunmen had to reload their weapons to sprint away, using the other VC for cover. “I was absolutely bloody shaken,” he recalled. “I could hardly hold a notebook.” Commandeering a three-wheel pushcart, Palmos went about a mile until he came upon and Australian soldier, who “rode shotgun” with him until they made it to safety with U.S. military police. Terry remembered Palmos staggering into Time’s villa, “visibly shaken, his clothes torn,” and crying out that his companions had been killed. Terry knew that he had to risk his own life to learn what had happened to Cantwell. “I let him go there,” he remembered. “If he is alive, or dead or captured, I have to know. I owe him that.”

Zalin “Zip” Grant, a former U.S. Army intelligence officer in Vietnam who had worked with Terry in Time’s Washington, DC, bureau and had returned to the war zone as a correspondent for New Republic magazine, agreed to help. Grant had been skeptical about Palmos’s report, believing there was a chance some of the reporters had survived the attack. “Was he really sure the newsmen were all dead?” Grant wondered about Palmos. “How about if one or two were only wounded and lying in Cholon bleeding to death as we spoke?”

Terry and Grant decided to “go it alone,” embarking on a perilous and frustrating journey to discover their colleagues’ fate. Finally, with the assistance of American forces that had pushed into the area, they came upon the site where Cantwell had stopped his vehicle; they were all dead. “I am too overwhelmed to cry,” Terry said. “Laramy is sitting up in the Mini Moke, his arms still upraised. The others are on the ground. Their bodies are full of holes. Caked in blood. Covered in flies. Bloated from the heat. John has been shot twelve times.”

When an ambulance driver refused to help transport the bodies, Terry and Grant stacked the dead journalists in the back seat of their vehicle (another Mini Moke) as quickly as possible, realizing the VC might return at any moment. They did. A group of thirty Vietnamese wearing black pajamas ran by the duo, holding their fire but looking at the Americans with hatred on their faces. “Why don’t they kill us? Perhaps it is their rush to get out of the area,” reflected Terry. The only thing he could find on his friend’s body was the whistle Cantwell used to entice the villa’s birds to sing. Returning to his hotel, Terry gave the whistle to his wife and told her Cantwell had died. “We cry together,” Terry said.

Walking into a press briefing the next day, he was surprised to see newsmen start to clap. Terry looked around to see who might be behind him, but there was nobody there. “The applause is for me. And for Zip. And, I will always feel, for our comrades who died doing their job,” he recalled. The ghastly experience did have a positive outcome—it resulted in a lifelong friendship between Grant and Terry. The men found what many soldiers in Vietnam, Black and white, had shared while serving together in Vietnam: “A bonding took place, as much for us as it did for the soldiers who risked their lives to pull comrades out of the line of fire or out of burning helicopters.”  

 
The determination displayed by Terry in tracking down and recovering his comrades’ bodies had been a part of his character from the beginning of his journalism career, which included groundbreaking positions at his Indianapolis high school and college newspapers. His trailblazing in the profession continued at Time, where he became the first Black correspondent working for a U.S. news magazine. “It was an important event for black people to make this kind of breakthrough on the color line,” he noted. “I was becoming a national correspondent, the first among black people to represent the mainstream media.”

Upon his return from Vietnam, Terry needed all the resolve he could muster to bring to life his dream of writing a book that would draw people’s attention to the sacrifices made by Black soldiers during the war, which ended with the fall of Saigon to North Vietnamese forces on April 30, 1975. He wanted his book to topple the conviction that “white soldiers are invincible and black soldiers are invisible.” The book grew to become “an absolute crusade,” Terry remembered.

Beyond telling the stories of the often-forgotten Black Vietnam veterans and the racism they faced while overseas and at home, Terry wanted to write about the conflict because, to him, there existed “no greater subject to write about than war because it’s the worst thing that we do to each other. Almost all the human emotions are involved in war; it’s the most desperate time for man.” Terry believed that war often brought out the worst in men, but also sometimes their best, especially compassion and love for each other regardless of skin color—a camaraderie forged in battle. “That’s the lasting message, the only positive message, about Vietnam,” he said. “The rest of it is nonsense. Foolishness.” Terry found it ironic that the closest America came to the kind of society King had dreamed about came during “the middle of a war he hated.” The newsman knew, however, the damage war did to a person’s soul: “You’re taking a descent into hell when you enter war.”

Terry faced a host of challenges during the more than a decade it took for him to get his book published, including dealing with the appalling memories of his time in combat. He remembered the pools of blood sloshing around his Mini-Moke from the bodies of the reporters crammed onto its rear seat, accompanying troops on dangerous night ambushes, and having a soldier’s leg come off when he grabbed it while trying to drag the wounded man to safety during a firefight. “I’d sleep with the TV on and guns by my bed and under it,” Terry recalled about his return home. “I’d take sleeping pills, but I still couldn’t sleep more than four hours.” Publishers told him there was only a limited market for books about Blacks written by Blacks. “I didn’t want to give up hope,” he told a reporter, “but I couldn’t see the light of day.”

After numerous rejections, Terry’s dream came true when Random House, in 1984, released his book Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans. It became a bestseller and today is considered a classic reflection on a war that divided U.S. society and cost approximately 58,000 Americans their lives. As Janice, who worked closely with her husband on the book, noted, its publication opened “the gates to knowledge about Black servicemen and their service and their bravery and their commitment to America.”

As for Terry, he hoped that Bloods would appeal to all races, believing that when a white man saw himself “in the experience of a black man, then I had done what I had always wanted to do as a journalist.” He especially wanted Americans to know there was nothing about the Black experience that “was not universal and human. If we understand that, we can live with each other in a much better way.” The book’s power has not diminished over time. For his 2020 film Da Five Bloods about five African American Vietnam War veterans, renowned director Spike Lee, who “read every book and watched every documentary” he could find about the war, had been especially impressed by Terry’s book that he assigned its reading to the film’s actors, which included Delro Lindo, Jonathan Majors, Clarke Peters, and Chadwick Boseman.

Born on April 21, 1938, in New York City, Terry was raised in Indianapolis by his mother, Nancy, and stepfather, Frederick G. Schatz, whose interracial marriage had shocked both the Black and white communities in the city (she was Black, he was white). The manager of the Personal Arts Screen Process Printing Company, Schatz encouraged the young Terry’s early interest in journalism. “As far back as grade school I was editor of something,” Terry recalled.

His stepfather also urged him to rise above the racism he faced in Indiana’s capital city, where African Americans could not sit down and eat with white customers in local restaurants, register as guests in downtown hotels, or swim in public pools. If he had the money to see a movie, Terry had to sit in a segregated seating area in the theater’s balcony. While attending a prestigious local private school for a short time, he remembered that he and other students, after reciting “The Pledge of Allegiance,” had to sing “Dixie.” A classmate asked him why Black people wanted to be slaves. “No one was teaching anyone anything about black history or the black experience,” he added. Schatz’s untimely death from a heart attack at age forty-three stunned his stepson. “He had become my mentor,” Terry told a reporter years later about Schatz. “He was helping me figure out what to do with my life. I never replaced him.”

Terry attended Shortridge, the state’s oldest free public high school and known for its dedicated staff and its students’ academic prowess, especially when it came to writing skills. Located at Thirty-Fourth and Meridian Streets, the school sponsored the country’s first daily high school newspaper, the Shortridge Daily Echo, whose former staff members included such notable writers as Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and Dan Wakefield. Although weighing only 105 pounds upon entering the ninth grade, Terry played on the school’s freshman football team, suffering a broken wrist during a game. An English teacher suggested that it might be safer for everyone if Terry “wrote about sports instead of trying to play them.” He became the first Black editor of the newspaper, working on its Tuesday edition.

During the summer months, Terry’s parents helped him sharpen his skills by encouraging him to attend high-school journalism institutes, including ones at Butler College (today Butler University), Franklin College, Northwestern University, and Indiana University, where, he pointed out, the journalism building was named in honor of famed Hoosier World War II columnist Ernie Pyle. “That was one of the influences on me in wanting to be a war correspondent one day,” said Terry. “I thought there was no one like Ernie Pyle, except maybe Ernest Hemingway and Stephen Crane. Those writers had the greatest influence on my own writing.”

Terry graduated from Shortridge in 1955, racking up an impressive list of achievements that a local Black newspaper, the Indianapolis Recorder, made sure to document for its readers. His many accomplishments included being the first Black to win the Indianapolis News’s Merle Sidener Award for journalism at Shortridge, the first to be named secretary-general of the Marion County Mock High School United Nations, the first to attend Northwestern’s high school journalism institute, and the first to win an award while attending the institute. Terry decided, however, to pass on an offer to attend Northwestern, wanting instead to “go to the best small college that I could get into and study the classics.”

Applying to several institutions, he picked Brown University, an Ivy League institution in Providence, Rhode Island, attending thanks to a U.S. Navy Reserve Officer Training Corps scholarship. “My family did not have the money to send me to college, which meant I had to go where I could get the best financial aid,” Terry said. “Brown too had a daily paper [the Brown Daily Herald], and full of myself as I was, I was going to show them a thing or two.”

     

Visiting the Daily Herald’s offices during its freshman recruitment period, Terry announced to the newspaper’s staff that he would one day be its editor. Reflecting on his boldness, he said it delayed his admission to the newspaper’s staff. “I had to heel longer than anyone in history just to cool me down,” said Terry, who eventually became a reporter. The summer after his freshman year, he freelanced articles for the Indianapolis News, producing a series of articles relating his experiences on a two-month training cruise as a U.S. Navy midshipman aboard the battleship USS New Jersey. For his second summer at the newspaper, he carried coffee to publisher Eugene C. Pulliam’s office and wrote obituaries. He recalled that for many years he kept a photocopy of the first check he received from the News. Terry’s belief in his abilities, however, paid off when he took advantage of a constitutional crisis about school desegregation to achieve a scoop that landed him on the front pages of newspapers across the country.

On September 2, 1957, Arkansas governor Orval E. Faubus had called out his state’s National Guard to block admission of nine Black students to Central High School in Little Rock, defying the U.S. Supreme Court’s historic ruling in 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education that segregated public schools were unconstitutional. To resolve the state-federal standoff, Faubus traveled to Rhode Island in mid-September to meet with President Dwight D. Eisenhower at a U.S. naval base in Newport. Seeing an opportunity for a scoop, Terry tracked down the governor at his hotel in Providence. Borrowing a white jacket to pose as a hotel waiter, the college journalist made it past guards to Faubus’s room and knocked. “Congressman Brooks Hays opened the door and asked why I had come to see Governor Faubus,” Terry remembered. “I told him that I felt the students of this nation should know about the situation in Little Rock in detail, since it was they who were directly affected.”

Although Faubus declined to be interviewed at the time, he did talk to Terry and other representatives from Brown the next day. An enterprising wire-service photographer captured a smiling Faubus shaking hands with Terry. The photograph appeared in the New York Daily News under a headline reading, “Negro Reporter Gets A Fair Shake From Faubus,” as well as on page one of the country’s leading newspaper, the New York Times. According to Terry, his stepfather joked with him: “‘You’ve landed on the front page of the New York Times; you’re going to spend the rest of your life trying to get there again.’ He was right.” The next year Terry won election as the Daily Herald’s editor in chief, becoming the first Black to serve in the post at Brown and in the Ivy League. Before his senior year, Terry worked at the Washington Post, where he “was treated like a regular reporter [and] paid union scale. That was phenomenal because I was only nineteen when they offered me the job.”

After graduating from Brown in 1959 with Phi Beta Kappa honors, Terry received a Rockefeller theological fellowship to the University of Chicago and became an ordained minister with the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). He missed journalism, however, and sought a part-time job in the field. “No one around Chicago would hire me because I was black,” Terry reported. “I didn’t want to work for the black press because I saw it as specialized. I believed I should work in the mainstream [media]. While I was interested in stories that related to blacks, I thought those stories also related to whites. They were American stories.”

Terry received pointed advice from Fletcher Martin, a Chicago Sun-Times reporter and the first Black to win a prestigious Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, an honor Terry later received. Learning that Terry had worked the previous summer for the Post, Martin told him: “Son, it took me twenty years to get where you got to before you even got out of college. You don’t need to talk to me. You need to go back to the Washington Post.”

Martin called Al Friendly, the Post’s managing editor, asking him to hire Terry; Friendly did. After about a year with the newspaper, Terry became deeply involved in covering the civil rights movement. “To me it was the biggest story in the country. It was a story that I passionately cared for because it was going to affect me, my family, my children, and generations of black people to come,” he noted. He did a series of articles about the Nation of Islam, interacting with a charismatic minister named Malcolm X, as well writing about protest marches in the South.

Terry continued to cover the struggle for civil rights after moving from the Post to Time magazine, at the time the country’s top news magazine. He had been drawn to joining its staff by the large number of overseas correspondents it employed. Although his editors told him he would not be “pigeonholed into black reporting,” Terry demurred. After all, he had latched onto the beat as the best way to get off night rewrite at the Post. “I was damned sure going to get out of being a catch-all junior member of the Washington bureau for Time,” he recalled.

Making the civil rights movement his focus gave him the opportunity to work on several cover stories for the magazine, including profiles of such leaders as King and reports from the scenes of major riots in Watts, Harlem, Detroit, and Newark. “He got injured in New York, a brick got thrown off a roof into his chest,” remembered Janice. “It wasn’t directed at him, he just happened to be in the way of the brick being thrown off the roof.” The couple had met at a Howard University party in 1960 and married a few years later. At the party, Terry had proposed to Janice just minutes after meeting her, captivated that she knew his name from his byline. She later acknowledged: “I’m the type of person who reads everything. I read the back of cereal boxes. He didn’t know that.”

Terry had an opportunity for an overseas assignment in early 1967 when he suggested that the magazine do a cover article about Black soldiers fighting in Vietnam. Richard Clurman, Time’s chief of correspondents, called Terry to ask him to fly to Vietnam to help with the story. Terry accepted the assignment, believing that the attention President Lyndon Johnson had given to civil rights and his Great Society programs had been overtaken by a fixation about Vietnam. “The war was destroying the bright promises for social and economic change in the black community,” he said. “I was losing a great story on the homefront to a greater story on the battlefront.”

The piece, which ran in the magazine’s May 26, 1967, issue, pointed out that for the first time in the country’s history, Black soldiers were “fully integrated in combat, fruitfully employed in positions of leadership, and fiercely proud of their performance.” It seemed as if the U.S. military stood as a shining example when it came to race relations. “It was our first fully integrated war,” Terry observed. “It was democracy in a foxhole—the same mud, the same blood.” While Black-white relations were “in a slit trench or a combat-bound Huey” were years ahead of many communities in the United States, the article noted, there were problems, with racist graffiti from both sides emblazoned on the walls of latrines in Saigon and fights while off duty. But as a Black infantry officer told Terry: “With all the inadequacies and imperfections, the U.S. still offers more individual rights than any other country; it’s still worth dying for.”

Impressed by Terry’s work, Clurman asked him to return to Vietnam for a two-year stint in Time’s Saigon bureau, working as its deputy chief. Terry quickly accepted the assignment, as Vietnam represented “the biggest story in the world. And also in the back of my mind, I thought that I would write a book.” The correspondent’s two years overseas became “the most exhilarating and exciting years” of his life. “Maybe I got a rush from the danger and from the excitement,” Terry said years after his overseas assignment ended. “I went to where the action was because I felt that’s the only way I could fully tell the story.”

Terry knew he could be killed accompanying troops on dangerous search-and-destroy missions in the jungle or flying with pilots as they bombed enemy targets. Even reportedly safe rides on U.S. helicopters could be dangerous, as they could fall from the sky due to mechanical failures or by a single bullet from a VC soldier. Simple meals or drinks in Saigon could be deadly if the restaurant had been targeted by bombers. “Once I got into an area, even in the rear, if you’re there overnight you’re subject to enemy rocket and mortar fire,” he pointed out, “not to mention snipers, not to mention booby traps, land mines.”

During his time in Vietnam, Terry said he encountered a couple of “touchy situations where there was a prospect that we would be overrun, and I was handed a weapon by my escorts, and even told that if I didn’t want to be taken [by the enemy] I should use a grenade on myself. I don’t know if I’d ever do something like that. But there were indications that we were really in deep water.” He never fired a weapon, believing that his job involved watching what the soldiers were doing and trying “to keep a balanced head and be alert, keep myself alive, and pick up the flavor of what is happening.”

Janice often shared the dangers with her husband on her eighteen trips to Vietnam, staying for three or four days at a time and visiting major U.S. installations at Da Nang and Chu Lai. She remembered that her husband thought it was important for soldiers to see a female civilian. “I felt extremely honored to be there, to give them a moment of peace, to take their minds off of the war,” said Janice. Both Black and white soldiers treated her with great respect, almost “as if royalty was there.” Terry described her as “Soul Sister No. 1.” She remembered an occasion when a white soldier asked her if she would like some potato chips. When Janice assented, he returned, bringing with him enough potato chips to feed an entire outfit. 

Terry learned that racial relations among American troops in Vietnam had deteriorated from the hopeful story Time had published just a year before. After traveling all over the country, from the demilitarized zone to the Mekong Delta, interviewing American forces, Terry saw that the gung-ho professional soldiers who had volunteered for service early in the war had been superseded by draftees who were much more cynical. “Replacing the careerists were black draftees, many just steps removed from marching in the Civil Rights Movement or rioting in the rebellions that swept the urban ghettos from Harlem to Watts,” Terry observed. “All were filled with a new sense of black pride and purpose.”

These soldiers, who called themselves “Bloods” and lionized Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and Huey Newton, were more willing to question the American presence in the war. As his Time article, “Black Power in Viet Nam,” pointed out, there were more incitements from white soldiers, including Confederate flags displayed on trucks and barracks, cross burnings, and Ku Klux Klan costumes. In response, said Terry, African American troops “raised their fists in black power salutes, had their handshakes, flew red, black and green liberation colors in battle and protected each other against racism.” He realized that the “spirit of foxhole brotherhood” he had seen in 1967 had vanished.

Terry set out to use the information he had gleaned in notebooks and tape cassettes to produce a book about the war, leaving his job at Time to do so. During his last few months in Vietnam, the magazine had agreed to let him go into the field to conduct research he could potentially use for his book. “I ended up surveying hundreds of soldiers,” Terry noted. “I asked them social and political questions: how they felt the war was progressing; were we doing it the right way; should we invade the north; what they thought of draft-card burners and the antiwar movement; what they thought of each other and the Vietnamese; were blacks being discriminated against.”

As he sorted through the material and wrote, Terry supported his family by serving as a consultant to the U.S. Air Force, teaching journalism at Howard, and working for an advertising agency. “When the book came out,” Terry recalled, “I thought I would have an enormous degree of leverage as a journalist. I thought I would be able to call my own shots.”

Terry wrote his more than 600-page manuscript as both a narrative and oral history, almost a “series of one-act plays or like a film script,” doing so because he wanted to protect GIs still in the service whose fiery comments might get them in trouble with military authorities. Terry could not find a publisher. Many of them rejected his manuscript because, he recalled them telling him, Americans did not “want to hear any more about Vietnam. They most certainly do not want to hear anything connected to blacks who were in Vietnam.” It became so bad that his children would “go to bed at night praying, ‘Dear God, please let my Daddy find a publisher because he’s driving us crazy,’” Terry remembered. “My wife suggested I publish the rejection notices as a book. She figured I had enough.”

David Terry recalled that some of his earliest memories where the sights and sounds of the war. The family’s home in Washington, DC, became like a safe house for Black veterans who wanted, and needed, to share their stories, as they were, as David remembered, people whose lives had been damaged and destroyed by their time in Vietnam. One of the men interviewed, army veteran Richard J. Ford III, confessed to Terry: “I really feel used. I feel manipulated. I feel violated.” Unburdening themselves to his father, David pointed out, became part of the Black soldiers’ healing process. Janice, who taught first grade and worked at other jobs as well, sought relief from the accumulated stress through reading, which had always been her “resource for peace and learning,” and neighborhood walks. She also sought peace by visiting the gardens at the nearby Washington National Cathedral. “Somehow the spirits guided me there,” she remembered.

Terry persisted. Finally, in 1982, Random House expressed interest in his work. Erroll McDonald, an editor at the publisher, however, suggested that instead of a narrative the book should be done as an oral history. Author and broadcaster Studs Terkel had experienced great success with his oral-history collections, including Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (1970) and Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (1974). Although he respected Terkel’s work, Terry wanted to do something “distinctly different and innovative.”

Remembering a short-story class he took at Brown, Terry decided to use some of those techniques for his book, which he called an oral novella. “I decided I didn’t want to use a question-and-answer format; I did not want to get in the way of the narratives,” he recalled. “Essentially, the book would be a series of short stories placed in a progression that would give the impact and effect of reading a novel.” 
Each of the pieces included in Bloods had a beginning, middle, and end, plus flash-forwards and flashbacks. “I wanted each story to have a hook; when you started reading, I wanted you to feel like you couldn’t put it down once you were inside the first three or four paragraphs,” he said. Terry also thought that on every page the reader should be “moved to laugh or to cry or to feel that you’d gotten some information you never had before. There had to be something memorable on each page. If that wasn’t there, I felt I’d failed.”

McDonald had some helpful advice for Terry, telling him to make sure that each of the voices sounded grammatically different, or else they would read like New York Times articles. Incorporating this technique Terry believed, “gave an originality to each voice, since I didn’t physically describe these people or describe them in any other way either—they’re telling their own stories through me.”

From a list of fifty possible subjects, he featured twenty in Bloods, with the common thread among them being they were Black veterans talking about what they had faced during the war and after. “I sought a representative cross-section of the black combat force. Enlisted men, non-commissioned officers, and commissioned officers,” noted Terry. “Soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines. Those with urban backgrounds, and those from rural areas. Those for whom the war had a devastating impact, and those for whom the war basically was an opportunity to advance in a career dedicated to protecting American interests.”

Janice believed that the experience had been cathartic for all those involved in the book. “It was sort of like talking to your therapist,” she told a reporter for The Ringer. “They knew Wally and they trusted him, and that’s how they opened up so easily for him.” The secret in being a good oral historian, Terry pointed out, involved gaining the confidence of his subjects and asking the right questions. “Remember, you’re talking to people about their innermost lives,” he said. “Often you’re asking them to describe things that they have been trying to forget, or actions they’ve committed they’re not especially proud of.”

Bloods achieved for Terry what he had set out to accomplish, eventually serving as the basis for a program by the PBS television series Frontline and adapted for the National Public Radio program “All Things Considered.” What touched Terry the most, however, was the reaction to his book from Vietnam veterans. “One black soldier I talked to called me a ‘Blood,” he reported. “He said I’d become one of them.” For several years after the book’s release, he kept the story alive by traveling around the country, talking to high school and college students, in a program that evolved from a lecture or reading into more of “a one-man show or a one-man play.”

The depiction of Blacks in such well-known films as Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986), which won the Best Picture Oscar at the fifty-ninth Academy Awards; Full Metal Jacket (1987); and Born on the Fourth of July (1989) angered Terry. “Hollywood had the chance to right the big lie about black soldiers, but it only succeeded in perpetuating it. Platoon shows black as lazy, implying that they have to be pushed to fight or that they lack leadership ability,” he explained in an interview with People magazine. “That is contrary to the war I covered for two years and have studied and written about for 20 years. It’s a slap in the face.”

Terry died on May 29, 2003, from a rare, undiagnosed vascular disease. Janice noted that he had been plagued with a persistent cough that resisted treatment. “One day at noon when I arrived to take him to a scheduled appointment with his doctor, he suddenly collapsed as he was putting on his coat,” she remembered. “An ambulance quickly took him to the nearest hospital where he was immediately put on a respirator and sedated into a medically-induced coma.” He never came out of the coma.

Before his death, Terry had been deep into a planned two-volume work about African American journalists, eventually published in 2007 as Missing Pages: Black Journalists of Modern America: An Oral History. The book featured Black correspondents from World War II, the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War. One of the reasons he decided to do the book was because an acclaimed tome about the role of foreign correspondents he considered for use in his journalism class at Howard included the mention of a British journalist who claimed that he had rescued the bodies of four reporters killed by the VC. “I knew the story was a lie because I was there, and he wasn’t,” said Terry. He wondered why he had not been cited for what had been “a major and very dangerous event” in his life: “Was it because I was black?” 

Terry hoped his book might fill a hole in the history of journalism for college courses, but also be of interest to general readers who “would like to hear about major events in American history as seen through the eyes of a special breed of professional observers,” including such notables as Carl Rowan, Ethel Payne, William Raspberry, Barbara Reynolds, Bernard Shaw, and Ed Bradley. Despite her grief, Janice, a year after her husband’s death, went through his files and saw his manuscript through to publication.

The shadow of the Vietnam War continued to loom large in Terry’s life. He compared the conflict to the U.S. Civil War, seeing it as a subject Americans would “go back to and back to and back to. We’ll never get away from it.” It was a war he believed could not be romanticized, seeing it as “too ambiguous. But we’ll be writing about it forever. And the best books, the best films, are probably yet to come.”