As a writer of magazine features, Mike Sager never ceases to amaze. He finds access into the private lives of individuals good and bad, rich and poor, famous and nearly anonymous.
Having gained access, Sager hangs out with them, with the goal of understanding them at least as well as they understand themselves. Then he publishes their failures and successes for strangers to read, in magazines such as Esquire, GQ and Rolling Stone.
Because Sager is such a charismatic observer, skilled interviewer and pyrotechnic stylist, his magazine stories are haunting, memorable. Book publishers, fortunately, have recognized the universality of Sager’s stories, placing them conveniently between book covers.
“Wounded Warriors” is the third collection of Sager’s journalism, in the wake of “Scary Monsters and Super Freaks: Stories of Sex, Drugs, Rock ‘n Roll and Murder” plus “Revenge of the Donut Boys: True Stories of Lust, Fame, Survival and Multiple Personality.”
In the new collection, the “war” of the book’s title does refer to U.S. military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan. For the most part, though, Sager is using the word “war” generically. Each person is fighting a personal war, or two — or more — and not always on a foreign battlefield where the deaths can be tallied in the thousands.
The 11 stories in “Wounded Warriors” immerse readers inside the worlds of drug addicts (those from good stations in life, and lower stations); the high-functioning obese (Charlie Van Dyke, a 650-pound fat man in a low- fat world); teenagers in a Puerto Rican neighborhood of Philadelphia who stage pit bull fights to the death; those with high IQs who sometimes find their braininess a curse instead of a blessing.
There are also stories of Los Angeles street gang members whose thuggish dominance is threatened by the infiltration of crack cocaine; American Vietnam War veterans who tried to establish new lives in Thailand rather than return to the United States; and celebrities — specifically in this collection professional basketball player Kobe Bryant, political activist Al Sharpton and actor Marlon Brando.
Sager has reread and revised the stories, making them unique to the book, and thus making the book something more than a warmed-over personal anthology.
No egotistical master of his craft, Sager realizes that not everybody can be explained fully. In his affecting foreword, he shares his attempt to understand his father, a successful professional as a medical doctor, but somebody who rarely spoke about his feelings. While in college, his curiosity developing nicely, budding writer Sager sent a letter to his father: “Who are you? Are you ever afraid? How did you become a man?”
His father replied, “Do not try to dissect me, it cannot be done.”
Thought Sager, “dissect” was an interesting word choice for a man who had majored in biology.” Sager never made another attempt to enter the depths of his father’s soul.
Fortunately, Sager rarely gives up with other sources and subjects. He has come to comprehend that “in one way or another, every one of us is a wounded warrior. All of us are engaged in wars, large and small, that may never end.”
For Sharpton, it is a war against racism. For Bryant and Brando, it is a war against known personal limits as they dominate their professional realms. For addicts, it is the less noble war “against the overwhelmingly potent call of the next hit of your drug of choice.”
Maybe not noble, but real. That’s the strength of Sager the journalist: allowing readers to experience reality without leaving an armchair.
Steve Weinberg is a magazine feature writer and book author based in Columbia, Mo.
Nonfiction
Wounded Warriors: Those For Whom the War Never Ends, by Mike Sager, $16.95
