a crime reporter. In 1960, he enlisted as an Army reservist, and spent three months in basic training at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. After returning to Chicago, in 1961 Hersh launched the Evergreen Dispatch, a short-lived weekly newspaper for the suburb of Evergreen Park. He moved to Pierre, South Dakota, in 1962 to work as a correspondent for United Press International (UPI), reporting on the state legislature and writing a series of articles on the Oglala Sioux. In 1963, Hersh moved back to Chicago to work for the Associated Press (AP), and in 1965 he was transferred to its Washington, D.C., bureau to report on the Pentagon. While in Washington, he befriended famed investigative journalist I. F. Stone, whose muckraking newsletter I. F. Stone's Weekly served as an inspiration. Hersh began to develop his investigative methods, often walking out of regimented press briefings at the Pentagon to interview high-ranking officers in their lunch halls. In 1966, Hersh reported on the intensifying U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, writing series of articles on draft reform, the shortage of qualified pilots, and on the U.S. bombing of civilian targets in North Vietnam, revealed by New York Times correspondent Harrison Salisbury. In 1967, Hersh became part of the AP's first special investigative unit. After his editors diminished a piece he wrote on the U.S.'s secretive chemical and biological weapons programs, he quit and became a freelancer. Hersh wrote six articles in national magazines in 1967 (two for The New Republic, two for Ramparts, and two for The New York Times Magazine) in which he detailed the government's growing stockpiles of the weapons and its co-operation with universities and corporations, as well as the secret adoption of a first-use policy. The research formed the basis for his first book, Chemical and Biological Warfare: America's Hidden Arsenal (1968), and the topic was highlighted that year by the Dugway sheep incident, in which an aerial test of VX nerve agent at the U.S. Army's Dugway Proving Ground in Utah inadvertently killed more than 6,000 sheep owned by local ranchers. The event and Hersh's reporting led to public hearings and international pressure, contributing to the Nixon administration's decision to end the U.S. biological weapons program in 1969. In the first three months of 1968, Hersh served as the press secretary for anti–Vietnam War candidate Senator Eugene McCarthy in his campaign in the 1968 Democratic Party presidential primaries.