It was almost exactly 25 years ago, in May 1950, that TIME ran its first cover story on the fighting in Viet Nam. The face on the magazine's cover then was that of the country's embattled Emperor Bao Dai; the issue was whether the U.S. should heed appeals for American assistance in the French struggle against Viet Minh insurgents. In the quarter-century since then, events have compelled cover treatment of the seemingly endless Indochina conflict no fewer than 64 times. Whether or not some sort of final resolution of war is at last at hand, the anonymous Vietnamese orphan on the cover of this week's issue seems an inescapably appropriate symbol of the military and political, but above all human drama that is the subject of the 14-page section on Indochina.

Reporting from Indochina has never been easy, but the upheavals in both Cambodia and South Viet Nam in the past few weeks have vastly complicated the tasks of newsmen and photographers there (see THE PRESS). TIME Correspondent William Stewart, a veteran of the Easter offensive of 1972, flew into one northern provincial capital only to find the city literally collapsing around him as banks and offices closed and policemen deserted their posts; he was taken out by a U.S. helicopter along with the American officials he had come to interview. William McWhirter, who provided much of the reporting on the refugee exodus for this week's cover narrative, has twice had to flee cities as they fell in confusion and panic: first Danang, last week Nha Trang.

These episodes have seemed hauntingly familiar to Hong Kong Bureau Chief Roy Rowan, who covered the fall of the Nationalist regime in China for LIFE in 1949. "There is no way anyone can cover a defeat of this size dispassionately," Rowan cabled from Saigon last week. "We have continually found ourselves not only reporting the story, but in the midst of it. There are no safe sidelines, and the expert opinion, it seems, is often retreating right alongside us, asking us what we know. It is one of those few times when a reporter can not only witness but feel history being made."

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