UP on the edge of Viet Nam's DMZ last week, TIME Correspondent David Greenway, like the Marines whose activities he was reporting, found himself spending much of his time hunkered down in foxholes. The way to stay healthy was to steer clear of incoming artillery shells.

Once, while he and a sergeant major waited for a lull in the firing, Greenway experienced what he says was a moment of total recall. "There I was, covered with mud, sweaty, nose pressed into the dirt, and I suddenly remembered that almost exactly a year ago to the day I was sitting in our plush Boston bureau trying to get a call through to Harvard's President Pusey for a story about the divinity school. I thought: 'If I walked into President Pusey's office right now, he would call the police.' "

Greenway found the very thought of making a phone call particularly ironic. For communications in South Viet Nam are so bad that reporters often spend days in the field without any contact with their office in Saigon. Until he choppered back to Saigon, in fact, Greenway did not know that the files he was writing in the battered outpost were to become a key part in a cover story.

Greenway's colleagues in TIME'S Saigon and Washington bureaus filed a great deal about other aspects of the cover story, but his eyewitness reports, made under almost constant enemy fire, were the basis for the part on Con Thien. The conditions Greenway was forced to work under were a measure of Greenway the man. He is well known at TIME for his sartorial splendor and neat English accent, polished during two years of graduate study at Oxford and subsequent world travels. Tigers and elephants, which he sometimes sees on operations in Viet Nam, make Greenway think he would like to go hunting there some day "if the war ever ends." And he some times muses on the fact that his father, an ornithologist, made several field trips to Indo-China 30 years ago. "Here I am, covering the same ground he covered then."

Born in Boston 32 years ago, Greenway graduated from Yale and filed his first story for Time Inc. as a campus stringer at Oxford. The story, for SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, was about the price of wolf's urine at the London Zoo. "It seems," he recalls, "that the Oxford drag hunt used wolf's urine for the drag and they were upset about a sudden price hike."

Subsequent adventures have taken Greenway from hunts near 19,565-ft.-high Kilimanjaro to 520-ft.-high Con Thien, which, as our cover story notes means roughly "place of angels," but is "more akin to hell." How does he like his new assignment that calls for so much time on the muddy, bloody "roof" of South Viet Nam?

"Covering the war here is often agonizing," he says, "but I suppose the appeal of it is that it's such a complicated war, and such a difficult war for both the United States and Viet Nam to bear. I feel it important to understand it."

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