"I AM not a stranger to fear, but I have never endured fear as intense or as protracted as I experienced that night. I was so frightened I could hear myself sweat."

This is how our Saigon bureau's Robin Mannock summed up his feelings after the event. Reporting for this week's cover story on the Negro in Viet Nam, British-born Correspondent Mannock, 36, had gone out on a long-range patrol with Sergeant Glide Brown and, as described in the opening passages of our story, had landed in the midst of the Viet Cong.

Brown and his men were so close to the enemy that one member of the patrol who was trying to snatch some sleep had to be awakened lest his soft snoring give them away. "As I hid in the grass, two Shakespeare quotations buzzed through my head," recalled Mannock, faithful to his Oxford education. "The first was 'Cowards die many times before their deaths.' The other, as the night dragged interminably, was the Dauphin sighing, 'Will it never be day?' "

Mannock has flown more than a hundred helicopter missions in Viet Nam, was inside Plei Me when it was attacked by the North Vietnamese, and had several close scrapes 2 1/2 years ago during the Congo fighting. But this, he concluded, topped all his previous experiences: "Sergeant Brown's courage and professional skill kept us alive and me sane that night. After the rescue helicopter had finally lifted us to safety next morning, I found myself singing above the engine's roar like one of the Animals, 'We gotta get out of this place.' "

The entire Saigon staff worked on the cover story, which was written in New York by Robert Jones and edited by Michael Demarest. From our Washington bureau, Harlem-born Wallace Terry, 29, arrived on the scene to help round out the coverage. "This was my first experience reporting a war," recalls Terry, "but not my first experience reporting violence. For nearly seven years I have followed the development of the Negro revolution in all corners of America. Now a Negro airborne sergeant kidded me about being safer in Viet Nam than I was during the Harlem riots (when I was knocked out by a rioter's brick), the Birmingham and Jackson demonstrations, and in Watts.

"In the course of my interviews I came across a Negro Navy radio man who was in grade school with me in Indianapolis, a helicopter pilot who belonged to my college fraternity at Brown, and an infantry officer who lived in my old Harlem neighborhood." Correspondent Terry was heartened by what he saw and heard in Viet Nam. "The tank I rode on had a Negro commander and an all-white crew. I have observed here the most successfully integrated institution in America."

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