WHEN Saigon Bureau Chief Simmons Fentress tried to reach New York on our direct teletype line one morning last week, the operator was brusque: "Tell him to hold it for a minute. Doesn't he know there's a war on?"

Suddenly, "the war" no longer meant just Viet Nam. Jason McManus and Ron Kriss, who have written a great deal about Viet Nam, now found themselves writing the cover story and the lead Nation article about the Middle East conflict. In the field, reporting the war from the Arab side proved difficult. For days after Egypt expelled U.S. citizens, no transport was available, so Correspondent Roger Stone was interned with 21 other newsmen in a dingy Cairo hotel called the Nile, where life, as he put it, "was a game of Stalag 17." In Beirut, Lee Griggs, reinforced by James Wilde from our Paris bureau, was still able to work, but things were hardly pleasant. In the street, Griggs met an Arab acquaintance walking with a group of other Arabs. The man sidled up to him, mumbling, "I have to do this or my friends won't respect me," and spat in Griggs's face.

On the other side, where the Israelis freely permitted correspondents into the war zone, the hazards were far greater. One American who tragically proved this was LIFE Photographer Paul Schutzer, killed by an Egyptian antitank shell (see PRESS). Among the last pictures taken by Schutzer was the photo of General Moshe Dayan on which our cover portrait is based.

Correspondent Israel Shenker, who had interviewed Dayan the week before, was in the office of Israeli Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin when word came that Egypt had accepted the ceasefire. "Where's the champagne?" asked Shenker. Tea was served instead. Meanwhile, Peter Forbath managed to see some of the fighting on three fronts--Gaza, Jordan and Sinai. The trouble was keeping up with the speeding Israeli army. "I saw grotesque dead and wounded, equipment abandoned intact, stunned and frightened captured Arabs," he said. "But in a way, I truly felt the reality of the war in blacked-out Tel Aviv, being shelled by the Jordanians, as I huddled in a doorway with people who remembered World War II and Nazi Europe."

From his apartment overlooking the Valley of the Cross, Jerusalem Stringer Marlin Levin could watch a Jordan-Israeli artillery exchange, "left-right, left-right, almost like a tennis game." Levin's eight-year-old son Donnie whiled away the time by writing letters to relatives in the U.S.: "There is no school today. I am sitting in a shelter. I like school. It is more fun than war."

Other TIME staffers appeared. Marvin Zim, on his way to the U.S. from New Delhi, joined the Sixth Fleet. From New York came World Editor Ed Jamieson and Chief of Correspondents Richard Clurman. When Clurman stepped off the plane at Tel Aviv, one dusty correspondent fresh from the front cracked: "You can really tell the war is over when guys like you start arriving."

But that other war is not over. When one of our Saigon correspondents remarked to a U.S. Marine sergeant that there would not be much space in this issue for Viet Nam, he was told: "Don't worry, boy. This war's got staying power."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.