As he puts it "I found out I could be bought." In January 1981 he was arrested with a boatload of marijuana from Colombia in a creek in South Carolina. He decided to take a job sailing as a deckhand on a 30-foot boat to Colombia. While waiting to see whether Burger could sell the book, after several rejections (it is good but no one wants to read about Vietnam), Mason was running a paper route each night, 100 miles on back roads, and his car blew up. Knox agreed to shop the book to publishers. By February 1980, Mason had a 200-page partial manuscript (about one-third), and an outline of the rest of his memoir. The first chapter written was what became the fifth chapter in the finished book. He began writing Chickenhawk on while living in Florida. Mason was encouraged to write his Vietnam memoir by Knox Burger, the editor of an author-friend of Mason (Bill Smith, better known as Martin Cruz Smith).
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