The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 1

1.

Some people decide at an early age that all they want to be is a writer. A high school classmate of mine was like that, actively Gathering Material while the rest of us were basically being kids. His career never got off the ground—he sold a couple fillers to Reader's Digest—but Robert E. Howard and my late friend Karl Edward Wagner had the same attitude and were extremely successful in their time.

I wasn't like that: I was going to be a lawyer. I intended to write and sell at least one story, but writing was only a hobby so far as I was concerned. This distinction affects everything that comes after.

2.

I sold two horror stories to Arkham House before I was drafted in 1969, and sold two more in 1970–1. The fourth sale came after I got back to the World and reentered Duke Law School. Then August Derleth, the proprietor of Arkham House, died and left me without a market.

There were very few professional outlets for fantasy stories at the time, and the fan press didn't pay at all. The modern fantasy/horror small press really started when Stu Schiff began paying a penny a word for stories in Whispers in 1973 (at my instigation, I'm proud to say). I had no luck selling the professional markets my fantasies using backgrounds from ancient history, and I scorned the notion of giving stories away to fanzines.

My friends Manly Wade Wellman and Karl Edward Wagner suggested that I use Viet Nam settings. Nothing else was working, so I tried that, with some success, selling a fantasy to F&SF and an SF story to Analog. The fantasy involved letting loose a monster from an ancient tomb; the SF story dealt with a tank company finding a UFO.

3.

Then I decided that I'd write an SF story using my background with the 11^th Armored Cavalry Regiment in Viet Nam (and Cambodia, for a couple months) instead of interjecting a fantasy or SF element into a real-world setting. That is, I'd write about a future armored unit fighting a future war. What I'd done before was simply to use the 11^th Cav as background, the way New York City or the French Revolution could be backgrounds for stories.

I made the unit a mercenary company, as Kuttner and Moore had done in Clash by Night in 1943 and Gordy Dickson had done in 1958 with Dorsai! (in both cases in Astounding). I called the unit Hammer's Slammers, following as much as anything the practice of Robert Heinlein in Starship Troopers, where unit designators include the commanding officer's name.

4.

I couldn't sell the story—The Butcher's Bill—to save my life. This was remarkably frustrating, since the sales to F&SF and Analog demonstrated that I was capable of doing professional-quality work. I couldn't understand what the problem was.

One of the rejections, by Ben Bova of Analog, was particularly maddening. Ben was well disposed toward me: he'd bought one story of mine already and would later buy two more (none of them in the Hammer series). Ben commented that The Butcher's Bill was a good story, but he had Jerry Pournelle and Joe Haldeman already and he didn't think Analog needed a third series of the same sort.

From thirty years on, the notion Jerry's Falkenberg series and Joe's Forever War were the same is even more ludicrous than it appeared to me at the time, and what I was doing was a third thing yet. That wasn't obvious from the outside, not at the time.

5.

What I now think was going on in the early '70s is this. Jerry, Joe, and I were similar in one important fashion: we'd all been at the sharp end of war (Korea in Jerry's case, Viet Nam for Joe and me). Our work therefore shared a sort of realism which Kuttner, Dickson, and Heinlein lacked (for all their enormous strength as writers).

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.

The funny—and wholly unexpected—thing is that after the Hammer stories were published, they gained a following. Though the magazine editors were civilians, SF readers included a number of veterans and serving members of the military. My stories were the first ones they'd seen which showed war the way they knew it. The comments Jim got on The Butcher's Bill and later stories in the series were positive; so much so that when he was hired to take over the SF program at Ace Books, he asked me to do a Hammer collection.

The collection, my first book, was the eighth book down on a list of eleven books from Ace in April, 1979. Short story collections are notoriously difficult to sell, as are authors' first books; Hammer's Slammers had both strikes against it. It sold over ninety percent of the first printing and went through eight more printings at Ace before I transferred the rights to Baen Books, Jim's new publishing line. The stories have never been out of print since their first book publication.

Not coincidentally, I became a full-time freelance writer in 1981 and have remained one since. The Butcher's Bill very directly gave me a career that I hadn't been looking for.

10.

Don't read things into the above account that aren't there. I'm not telling you that you have to believe in yourself in order to succeed: I didn't believe in myself (as a writer or as much of anything else).

I'm also not telling you that if you keep at it long enough you'll find an editor who believes in you. Jim bought my stories because they saved him editing time, not because he believed in them or me at the time he took them.

I am specifically saying that if I'd put my writing career first, I wouldn't have a writing career. I know many writers, some of them very good writers, about whom that isn't true.

But I'm saying one thing more: I believed in the truth of the vision I portrayed in the Hammer series. I followed that vision of truth to the exclusion of all other considerations in writing the stories.

And I don't believe any writer can have real success unless he follows his own truth.