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

I'm almost to the point of calling BS on any of you guys who claims you read this thing through without stopping. There are parts of it that were just to gut-wrenching to do that. It was exceedingly well done, though. Unflinching, yet respectful. I cried. Multiple times.

 

It's weird. I thought the piece was fascinating, well-written, unbelievably reported, an emotional topic, but I never cried, never really came close. Not sure what, if anything, that means, just throwing it out there. Maybe I read it more as a journalist than a regular reader. Like as I was reading it I was thinking more about how the hell someone pulled this off than the subject (and in no way should that me taken as any sort of back-handed compliment, just the way I read it).

I think I have cried reading something before, though nothing comes to mind right now.

 

What a great read. I was totally blown away.

 

I've been telling people I work with about it, literally begging them to read it.
I need someone to talk to about it.
I plan on rereading it too.

 

I haven't made it through the entire piece, but I'll pick it back up when the empty feeling in my stomach goes away. These folks lost just crush me.

I told Jones this in a PM, but I highly recommend a book along the same vein by Rinker Buck called "Shane Comes Home" about the first casualty of the war, Shane Childers. Really outstanding work.

 

I bought this mag today at Joseph-Beth's while waiting for a doctor's appointment (I hate my cat but that's a story for another day). I'll read it tonight. I bought the hard copy so I could leave it for my father when I head back home Thursday. I don't know if he'll read it or not...but I want him to have the opportunity.

 

I have three thoughts to add ...

1) A THANKS: I believe I read the story two days ago, and I'm still thinking of more friends, family and colleagues I want to send it to. Thank you both for writing it and for coming on here to enlighten us as to your methods and the process behind the story. Also, thanks are in order to whoever first posted it. As has been echoed above, I may not have caught the story otherwise.

2) A LINK: I've tried to read this whole thread, and I don't recall running across this link yet. It's a Q&A from Esquire with the author: http://www.esquire.com/the-side/qa/things-that-carried-him-interview

3) A QUESTION: I'm wondering about a practical issue I don't think has been addressed so far: Jones, how did you collect and organize all this material as you were gathering it? You mentioned recording interviews. I assume there were also handwritten notes involved? All the time or only some? Did the story then require endless transcription? in general, how did you keep all the interviews and people and details straight? I was somewhat surprised to hear it was all reconstructed. How much harder did that make it than if you had been able to witness some of the journey first-hand?

Now, I'm off to the book store to buy a copy of the magazine. I figure it's the least I can do to support such work ...

 

Thanks again everybody. Really, I'm humbled by the response. It's being very heartening.

Waylon, I'm ashamed to admit (I mean, really ashamed) that I hadn't heard of Common Ground until you mentioned it. I've done some checking up on it, and clearly that's a hole in my education that needs filling. I'll be reading it as soon as I can.

To the spanish penguin in the audience, I think it was probably harder to do it months later only because the people involved had scattered. This is an argument for another thread probably, but I think the story would have been more vivid had I been there first-hand -- although it might have made for lazier interviews then. Because I wasn't there, and I wanted to get every detail right, I really prepared for each interview and asked a lot of questions I might not have had I been there. That's a waffle answer, but it really is hard to say.

Keeping things straight was actually easier than I thought it would be. I mean, I was very careful about keeping contact lists as I found people -- and to give to our factcheckers; you can imagine the job they had in front of them when this landed on their desk, bless them -- and I wrote sections as I got the information I needed, sometimes just a sentence or two that struck me, so that I didn't lose anything for time or distance.

But I'll tell you what: I took photographs of everyone I talked to and put them on my computer, because I thought over time I'd start getting people mixed up. As it turns out, I didn't need them. I could name and describe everybody I talked to off the top of my head. I could do that right now. Like I said earlier, some conversations are hard to forget.

The transcription was crazy, really. This was the first time in my career I made use of outside transcibers (in this case, mostly interns at Esquire, but also Buddy Kite, my editor's assistant and a peach of a guy). I've always been too ashamed of my stammering interview style -- Um, so, like, what happened next? -- to have somebody else listen in, but here, I just had to. There were hours and hours and hours of tapes. And it was important, again for factchecking, that they all be transcribed. Luckily I had help.

This will sound like a cliche, but really, you have to treat stories like these as though you're building a house. If you think of the whole thing, it's too big and overwhelming and you'd fold up your tent. But I just thought, Today, I have to piece together the flight from Dover to Scottsburg. Who do I need to talk to? Or, Today I need to figure out who carried Joey from the hearse into the funeral home. (As it happens, a local newspaper had a picture, with a caption naming names, and I had more interviews to do.) In some ways, it seemed endless, the web. Just about every person I found gave me someone else to talk to. The Barclay brothers came from Tim Chapman, the Patriot Guard Rider; I didn't know about Chaplain Tobin until my last day in Alaska, which gave me the scene where he identifies Joey's body. Someone just happend to mention him, and he just happened to be in his office, sitting at his desk.

There was a lot of luck like that involved, for sure, too. But I just approached it like a puzzle, and piece by piece, I found most of what I wanted.

If you were going to do a story like this, that would be my first recommendation. Break it down into pieces. Take it in steps, and do your best to stay organized. Think of it like chapters of a book, even paragraphs of chapters. Then all of a sudden you'll find yourself with a foundation to build on, and it seems much less daunting.

Hope that helps. Thanks again everybody.

 

That was a great story. Jones, what made you feel like you didn't hit it out of the park? I think that it started a bit slow, but I think that's because there are no pictures of Monty on the first couple pages -- I wanted an immediate connection to the man. That's not criticism, it was an incredible story. I cried while reading it on the train.

 

Jones doing his interviews:



Sorry, couldn't help myself.

Jones, on a serious note, I'm fascinated by your organizational approach. Do you think the fact that you've got a couple of books under your belt helped you with this article?

 

I think, like many writers, Jones always thinks he could have done better. I thought it was about as perfect as it could be.

Jones, you've covered the response from the people in the article. Have you gotten anything from any book publishers? I could see this article being the jumping off point for a book, like Krakauer's "Death of an Innocent" in Outside was expanded into "Into the Wild."