It was once called the New Journalism. Now we call it literary journalism, without capital letters, signifying its acceptance. John Sack did not invent literary journalism, but he was certainly one of its founders, along with Truman Capote, Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe. He was one of the great writers to come along in the Sixties who delivered to readers not just the facts but the story behind the facts, and the story behind that story, weaving compelling narratives of wars and the men who fought them.
   Sack, who was suffering from bone-marrow cancer, died this past weekend in San Francisco following a transplant operation. News of Sack's death was released yesterday by Esquire, for which Sack had written for more than 40 years. He was 74. In announcing his death, Esquire editor David Granger described Sack as one of the rare giants of magazine journalism.
   In his long career, Sack wrote for many of the country's major magazines and also was a producer of television documentaries. He wrote 10 books, including "M," a day-to-day account of the lives of soldiers in a combat unit in Vietnam.
   A New York native and a graduate of Harvard College in 1951, Sack began his writing career for Stars and Stripes while a young enlisted man during the Korean War. He was soon submitting pieces to the New Yorker and Harper's.
   After his discharge, Sack joined CBS as a writer and producer. But in 1966 he quit to sign on with Esquire as a correspondent covering the war in Vietnam. 
   Out of that assignment came the longest piece ever published in Esquire, at 33,000 words, and among its most controversial. It was a time, early in that war, when America's thoughts were elsewhere. What reporting was done by the major newspapers and television networks was told from the perspective of the Johnson administration, faithfully relating inflated body counts of enemy soldiers killed and assurances of the victory that would soon come to the American forces.
  Sack's story, behind a cover of black with the words in white "Oh My God -- We Hit a Little Girl ...," presented a very different picture of Vietnam as told through the eyes and words of the soldiers fighting that war. It told not the official version of the conflict but how that war was actually being fought in the field, and in the most brutal of details. Praised for its accuracy and compassion, the story dispelled any belief that war had been sanitized of blood and random slaughter. Expanded, that story became the book "M."
   Sack went on to write “The Confessions of Lieutenant Calley," an Esquire cover story about a young Army officer who admitted to leading his men to committing atrocities against civilians in the village of My Lai. In long taped interviews with Sack, William L. Calley related how he had directed his troops to shoot and kill men, women and children who had been taken as prisoners. Calley's defense was that while the killings were regrettable, the burning of villages and slaughtering of civilians was the only way the U.S. military could achieve victory in Vietnam. 
  When Calley was subsequently prosecuted, Sack refused to turn over his notes or in any way cooperate with investigators, despite his arrest and indictment.
   Sack's reporting on Vietnam did much to change how America's major news organizations covered the war. And as that reporting changed, bringing a clearer picture of Vietnam into American homes, the nation that once supported the effort slowly turned against it.