Under the Gun

For most of its 30 minutes, Time for Defense (Tues. 10 p.m., ABC) moves in a familiar groove: detailed battle reports by Department of Defense officials, interviews with top brass, music by the U.S. Air Force band. But for several tense minutes each show, listeners are carried from their armchairs across 6,000 miles of the Pacific. Last week they were pressed hard against a low stone wall rimming a Korean rice field and hearing the clatter of U.S. .50-cal. machine guns as they sprayed an enemy-infested hillside.

The vicarious, on-the-spot experience comes over the air from tape-recorded documentaries made under fire by combat correspondents of the U.S. armed forces. Most of them have been made by young (39) Lieut. Colonel Wes McPheron. With McPheron, armchair listeners have crouched in a forward observation post watching a tank-artillery duel and stood helpless in an aid station listening to the moans of a soldier crippled by a mortar burst. Last month they leaped with him out of a Flying Boxcar over Munsan, plunged down to earth with paratroopers of the Army's 187th Regimental Combat Team. (As McPheron plunged into the prop blast, listeners heard him count, "1,000 . . . 2,000 . . . 3,000" then, as the chute cracked open: "Phew! It takes the wind out of you.")

Like CBS's Hear It Now and NBC's Voices and Events, ABC's Time for Defense is building the tape-recording process into radio's most versatile, dramatic new device. The program has already achieved the goal set for it by Defense Secretary George Marshall: "To permit history to explain itself while it is still happening."

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