Pride of the Regiment

When the hard-fighting 27th (Wolf hound) Infantry Regiment stopped a Communist tank drive on Taegu a month ago, the New York Herald Tribune's pert, fearless Correspondent Marguerite Higgins cabled an eyewitness story of the four-hour battle. Last week, in a letter to the Trib, the regiment's hard-bitten Colo nel J. H. ("Mike") Michaelis complained that she had left out something important. He supplied it:

"Miss Higgins, completely disregarding her own personal safety, voluntarily assisted by administering blood plasma to the many wounded as they were carried into the temporary Aid Station [which] was subjected to small arms fire through, out the attack . . . The Regimental Combat Team considers Miss Higgins' actions on that day as heroic ... in saving the lives of many grievously wounded men."

Me-&-the-War. Slender, durable Newshen Higgins, who covers Korea in tennis shoes, baggy pants and shirt and a fatigue cap that usually conceals her bobbed blonde hair, has done more than win the admiration of soldiers in her front-line reporting. She has also forced her male competitors, who at first tended to regard her as an impudent upstart in the business of reporting battles, to admit grudgingly that she was their match when it came to bravery and beats. More than once, Maggie Higgins has jeeped or hiked to hot spots while other correspondents hung back, thus forced them to go along, too. Said one colleague ruefully: "She's either brave as hell or stupid. Her energy and recklessness make it tough on all the others." She likes to send back such me-&-the-war stories as: "A reinforced American patrol, accompanied by this correspondent, this afternoon barreled eight miles deep through enemy territory . . . The jeep flew faster than the bullets which knicked just in back of our right rear tire."

Correspondent Higgins travels light, usually carries only a typewriter and a musette bag of toilet gear, eats & sleeps where she can (often on the ground), insists on no billeting favors because of her sex. As an all-round journalist, Newshen Higgins may not be quite up to her Trib colleague, Homer Bigart (with whom her feud for beats is already a Korean legend), or with some of the other crack correspondents in Korea. But she tries to make up for it by getting up earlier, and if necessary, working 24 hours a day. Said one colleague: "There's nothing she won't do for a story."

Campus Cub. Daughter of a globetrotting businessman and a French mother, Marguerite Higgins was born in Hong Kong in 1920, got her schooling in France and the University of California ('41). During the summer after graduation, she cubbed for the Vallejo (Calif.) Times-Herald. While she worked for her master's degree at Columbia's School of Journalism, she landed her first Trib job as a campus correspondent, was taken on full time when she finished Columbia in 1942. She was sent to the London bureau in 1944, got to Germany in time to cover the closing battles of World War II. At the Dachau concentration camp, while some correspondents dodged SS bullets, she and another correspondent jeeped blithely past and were the first reporters inside the central enclosure (an SS officer tried to surrender to her).

After three years of able postwar reporting in Germany, she became the Trib's Tokyo bureau chief in late June, was one of the first reporters to get to Korea when the war started. She flew to Seoul's Kimpo airfield, joined the retreat to Suwon, later covered the heartbreaking retreats of green, outnumbered U.S. troops. ("This is how America lost her first infantryman," she began her story of seeing Private Kenneth Shadrick fall in action.) She fought off attempts by officers, worried about her safety, to ship her out of Korea (TIME, July 24, 31), now stays at the front most of the time. She ranges such a wide beat that her New York office seldom knows where she is. This week, after days of suspiciously un-Higgins-like silence, they learned from her first delayed dispatch that Maggie Higgins had landed with the fifth wave of marines at Inchon and stayed with them under mortar and rifle fire and grenades until the beachhead was secured. She was making good an earlier promise: "I walked out of Seoul, and I want to walk back in."

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