Esquire's "most gripping story you will read this year."

Starting with the gravedigger was the natural choice, just because he was the last guy in the chain -- putting the dirt on the coffin and the marker on the grave-- but for sure, I was conscious of Breslin's story, which is one of my all-timers. There are quite a few nods in the story to some of my favorite works.

The title was my editor's, though. I called it "The 3,431st" when I submitted it.

 

http://www.esquire.com/features/things-that-carried-him

 

I wondered while reading it what some of your favorite works were. I was able to lock down the JFK story but I am torn between a few others.

 

CJ,

That was the best piece I have read in a long time.

Thank you for writing it.

 

I'm waiting for Jonesy's brain before I make a bid.

MWAH-mwah-mwah!

 

Jones - You said something about this on another thread, but working on a piece like this, can you compare it for us to, say, standing at Delmon Young's locker with 20 other people waiting for a morsel? I just got the issue yesterday, but I can tell it's going to be a great piece, and the more of these I read, the more I can barely stomach daily "availability" any longer.

And this isn't a sports thing, either. I've done sports stories that I've loved when I got to get away from the beaten path and they turned out great.

I guess I'm asking you to compare the satisfaction of daily journalism vs. what this was, because so many people seem to look at covering a college or pro sports beat as the end-all, be-all (I particularly noticed that on the old Chris Snow thread that got dug up in conjunction with a thread of mine).

 

Chris-

That was an impressive read. Very Heinz-worthy. as you've discussed here, a story like that will bury a writer.

Did you propose that, or was it assigned?

gm

 

I'm on page 4, but the end of page 3 gave me a little chill.

 

Don't often disagree with you, Mr. Jones, but this is one of those times. A stand-up double, even a triple, wouldn't have left me still fighting back tears an hour after I finished reading.

I'll plagiarize hockeybeat: Thank you for writing it.

And good luck tomorrow.

 

Thanks again everybody.

Goalmouth -- I pitched the story. I'd read a story on CNN.com that included an interview with one of the guys who carried Sgt. Montgomery back to the patrol base. (Meeks was the guy, although they got his name wrong.) I read it and wondered, What happened next? I was just curious.

As it happens, I had a meeting in NYC with my boss and my editor about some other stuff not long after. We finished talking, and just before we all got up from the table, I said, "By the way," and I gave about a one-minute pitch. They looked at each other, said yes, and that was it. Easiest pitch of my life. Off I went.

They were also great about being cool when I kind of got consumed by the thing. It came out much longer than I thought it would -- mostly because I really had no idea what such a journey entailed. I knew that Joey was carried back to base after being killed by an IED. I called his mom next, started getting that part of the story together, and just began linking together the pieces of the chain as I found them. It was totally out of order, the reporting. The first sentence I actually wrote was in the section about the Kalitta pilots. "The thumbtacks in their mental maps are in bunches," or whatever it is. That was the first line. And it just built out from there.

Waylon, that's kind of a roundabout answer to your question. I mean, they're very different, daily writing and this kind of writing. I wrote on another thread, I can't remember where, that they are a different kind of hard. I wasn't a very good daily writer. This kind of writing is better for me. But I couldn't write these sorts of stories every time out. You need breaks, fluffier stuff in between.

I mean, if I was writing these stories and these stories only, I could maybe do four each year. This one took me about seven or eight months, with breaks for other stories. It really did sap me. There's a satisfaction in it, too, and a pride, but I'm not sure you ever get out of these what you put in -- I'm not sure they ever become all that you hope they might become. I knew with the material I had, there was the potential there for a great story. Not to sound cocky, but I feel proud about the reporting I did. I'm just not sure the writing matched it.

It's like this: Even with all the nice things everybody's said, I still feel so-so about it. That's not false modesty. I can just see some of the things that are missing (there was an entire scene, the ceremony the boys had in Iraq with the helmet, gun, and boots, probably 1,000 words that got cut) and when you write that long, there are always grafs that didn't get the attention they deserved.

It's funny, up above when Joel said he got a chill at the end of page three, I didn't know what that was, so I went to look at it. And reading that graf now, I would write it differently, more cleanly. It didn't matter that his original ring was cut off and that it was replaced. All that mattered was that it wasn't there and Micah went to put his on him and the glove was empty. That could have been written better.

Anyway, there it is. At the time, I did my best. Longform is tough. You have so much time with it -- that's a luxury, but it's also a burden. You spend a lot of time inside your own head. That's not always the best place for me to hang out, but I'd rather hang out there than in a locker room, begging Delmon Young for two minutes, if that makes any sense.

Thanks for reading it, everybody. And thanks again for the kind words.