The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 1

At that point we diverged. Jerry was writing something not greatly different in theme from the Military SF of past decades. His soldiers were saving civilization from the barbarians, despite the scorn and disgust with which they were regarded by many of the civilians whom they preserved. At the time (remember, the Vietnam War was still going on), the conservative Analog was probably the only place Jerry's stories could've appeared.

Joe's stories focused on confusion, hopelessness, and mutual distrust at every level of society, particularly within the military itself. They were a reflection of what he saw in Viet Nam and during the '60s more generally. In the context of this essay it's important to note that Joe is one of the finest prose writers of his (our) generation. His choice to write for Analog rather than The New Yorker was just that, a choice.

In my case, The Butcher's Bill showed a group of pretty ordinary people who were members of an elite armored unit which'd been given the job of defeating an enemy unit. They did so, and in the course of doing their job they completely destroyed the architectural marvel that the two sides were fighting over.

That's exactly what the 11^th ACR had done to Snuol, Cambodia, in April of 1970. The only fiction in the background is that Snuol was a pretty ordinary market town rather than a unique ancient site; but if the NVA'd had their headquarters in Angkor Wat, our tanks would've gone through the same way they did at Snuol.

Clearly Hammer's Slammers weren't saving civilization. Neither were they hopeless, alienated people: they were individually good at their jobs, and they trusted the other members of their unit implicitly. It's also important that I do not and certainly did not deserve the critical respect that's rightly accorded to Joe. I fell between two stools, and I wasn't a polished enough craftsman to build a place for myself.

6.

If I'd been trying to build a writing career, at this point I'd have gone back to writing the sort of standard stories which I'd sold in the past. Instead I wrote another Hammer story, Under the Hammer. Fred Pohl had commented while rejecting The Butcher's Bill that military matters were too much in the fabric of the story for a general reader to understand it. I addressed the criticism by making the viewpoint character a new recruit to whom everything had to be explained, thus explaining it for the reader as well.

After the fact, I don't think that was a real problem: both the Viet Nam-setting stories I'd sold previously assumed equally extensive knowledge of the military. In any case, everybody rejected Under the Hammer also.

7.

Then the editor of Galaxy, one of the many who'd rejected the Hammer stories, was fired and replaced by his assistant, Jim Baen. Jim had recommended purchase of the stories and been overruled. Now that he was in charge, he called my agent and bought the stories after all (for Galaxy). He published them and asked for more in the series.

But—and this is very important—Jim neither understood nor liked the Hammer stories at the time he bought them (as he admitted to me later). He bought them simply because they were written with a higher degree of literacy than most of what was submitted to Galaxy, a magazine which paid poorly and late. Under the Hammer and The Butcher's Bill filled pages which would otherwise have contained stories which would've required heavy editing to bring up to minimum standards of English usage.

The Hammer stories were written with a flat affect, describing cruelty and horror with the detachment of a soldier who's shut down his emotional responses completely in a war zone . . . as soldiers always do, because otherwise they wouldn't be able to survive. Showing soldiers behaving and thinking as they really do in war was unique at the time and extremely disquieting to the civilians who were editing magazines.

8.

I mentioned that Jim asked for additional Hammer stories. I wrote three more, and Jim rejected two of them. No reasonable person thinking of a career in writing would've deliberately written stories which were not only hard to sell but which when they did sell were purchased by an editor who turned his eyes away when he bought them.

The reason I continued with the series is that the Hammer stories provided me with a form of therapy, a socially acceptable way of dealing with Viet Nam. (I didn't know that at the time. I came to the conclusion much later, when I was cool enough and sane enough to really analyze what'd been going on.)

9.