So unreal. World exploding around us. Sit on ground taking notes. Soldiers pop up around us, fire short bursts and then sink back into brittle bamboo. Purple smoke spirals upward on north, pink on south. Rockets crash and thud. 50-cal., thud. M-16 pops. Suddenly, all fire stops and movement shifts to north. Land smoldering, wall of burning tree stumps.

SO reads the final entry last week in Saigon Correspondent David DeVoss's notebook. A metal fragment pierced the pages, and a few words are illegible because of blood streaks. Moments after he wrote his impressions, DeVoss was hit by North Vietnamese mortar fire. He was seriously wounded in his chest, arms and legs. He received immediate first aid on the scene, and was quickly flown by helicopter to the Third Field Hospital outside Tan Son Nhut Airbase, where he underwent emergency surgery. At week's end his condition was declared satisfactory.

At 24, DeVoss is TIME'S youngest reporter in Viet Nam. He arrived there in January, when combat was relatively light. After the North Vietnamese began their Easter offensive, he covered major action all over South Viet Nam and became a virtual commuter on Route 13, which runs between Saigon and An Loc. He would set out from the capital in the morning by car to cover the progress of the South Vietnamese 21 st Division as it fought its way with agonizing slowness toward An Loc and the relief of the garrison encircled there.

Reports Bureau Chief Stanley Cloud: "After many journalists had lost interest in that front, David continued to make frequent trips. Much of what he wrote was of the horrors and frustration of that battle. He was convinced that the story of An Loc's plight, told by the people who lived it, would be one of the great stories of the war. He was determined to get it."

When DeVoss left Saigon last week with two veteran combat photographers, Le Minh and Dirck Halstead, he was hoping to enter An Loc with the rescue force's first wave. But the advancing column was still ten miles south of its objective when the enemy mortar rounds started to fall.

Despite his wounds and frustration, DeVoss is more fortunate than many casualties among the press corps. LIFE Photographer Robert Capa was killed back in 1954, when the war belonged to France and seemed far away. Since 1965 alone, 34 journalists have died in Indochina, including TIME Correspondent John Cantwell and LIFE Photographer Larry Burrows. Another 19 are still missing, all but two of them lost in Cambodia.

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