Salami

One of my first real newspaper jobs was with the now defunct, but once important, Newark Evening News. True, in the Navy I had been a journalist and had my work appear almost daily in the Jacksonville Journal and the Florida Times Union, but getting a paycheck from a newspaper, being an honest-to-God reporter, was a relatively new experience. Newark was not San Francisco where I had put in a riotous summer as a replacement producer at KPIX. They asked me if I had editing experience when I applied for the TV job and I said, “Sure.” I meant audio tape, they meant film. In two days I learned how to cut film.

Of course, being new, I was assigned to one of the bureaus the paper had throughout the state. Newark coverage was assigned to the pros and I didn’t begrudge them their higher rank. Anyway, I was night police reporter for the area around East Orange. It was a traditional road for cub reporters but working nights, and getting used to its rules and denizens, made you a little bit different from your peers.

One stifling night I got a call reporting the finding of a body in a man-made lake on the outskirts of Newark. When I arrived a desultory search was under way. A lone cop in waders was scouring the bottom of the shallow lake. Eventually he found the body, an old derelict, slid it onto a rubber sheet and brought it ashore. As I spoke to a detective, the young patrolman straightened out the corpse, then proceed to sit on a rock and remove something from a lunch pail.

He wiped his hands on his shirt and unwrapped a salami and cheese sandwich wrapped in wax paper. As I said, I was relatively new to the gore, crime, and slime scene, and only half listened to the bored detective. I was fascinated, and yet utterly repelled, at the seeming callousness of the young cop as he munched his sandwich, wiping away an errant smear of mustard from his upper lip. The body lay six feet from him but his mind was on the sandwich.

I had better learn a few quick lessons if I were to make it as a tough, seasoned reporter, I thought. I couldn’t take my eyes from the young officer until the detective stopped talking, looked at me, at him, then looked puzzled. I got the facts, left, wrote up the story and teletyped it to Newark from the East Orange Bureau office. As I drove home through some really grubby urban streets I hoped that while I could develop a tough veneer, I would never become that indifferent to the cessation of a human life. All this in the basically uneventfully year of 1958.

Ten years later, while covering the Tet Offensive in Viet Nam, I rested against the trunk of a tree in the midst of one of the worst killing grounds I had thus far experienced. There were literally dozens of young Viet Cong dead within twenty yards. The adrenaline flow had long since abated, the heat was killing.. Every fly in Asia, and other bugs too strange to describe, provided a buzzing accompaniment. I remember looking at one corpse for several moments. It looked like he had taken a heavy caliber round, perhaps a fifty, in the forehead and it had lifted his entire skull while the face was left totally intact. The reason I studied him was the fact that his handsome young face was totally tranquil. To say he never knew what had hit him was probably right on the money and that he hadn’t suffered in his last seconds on this planet, was also probably true.

I had been in the same fatigues for three days, my helmet weighed a ton and I took it off and looked around me with the grafted-on indifference which is sanity-preserving in the midst of great combat or carnage.

Huong Nghia, my super, and usually jovial, cameraman, also rested his back and gear against the tree. The heat enervated and decayed as we sat, saying nothing. Finally Nghia rummaged in his musette bag and brought out something. He said, “Mr. Tom, you hungry, you want something to eat.?” After all, this was all in a day’s work for him and he hated the Viet Cong. Without thinking I said “Yeah, Nghia,” and he took the wax paper off a salami and cheese sandwich with mustard, handed it to me and I took my first bite. I was suddenly ravenous, devoured it in two minutes and I was about to throw the wax paper away when I remembered a stifling night in Newark.