Viet Nam a Letter From the Publisher

By John A. Meyers

During the turbulent years of the Viet Nam War, scores of TIME correspondents and photographers braved the dangers of battle to help shape the magazine's coverage. Two of them, Correspondent John Cantwell and Photographer Sean Flynn, died in the conflict, and five others were wounded. The list of present staffers who served in Viet Nam, either as journalists or in the service of their country, is long and distinguished.

For Dean Brelis, currently TIME's New Delhi bureau chief, memories of Viet Nam go back to 1950-51, when it was an embattled French colony. Ho Chi Minh, leader of Viet Nam's fight for independence, once told Brelis, "We will defeat the French, and if you make the mistake of staying here, we will defeat you." Recalls Brelis: "It was a warning I never forgot."

James Wilde, now TIME's Nairobi bureau chief, is haunted most by an experience in March 1965. "I spent 48 hours in a pouring monsoon helping to load the dead of the South Vietnamese 5th Airborne Battalion onto helicopters," Wilde remembers. "There were 453 of them, including six U.S. advisers. All of the corpses were rotten with rain. We were scared; we could feel the Viet Cong watching from a nearby tree line. The stench of death massaged my skin; it took years to wash away."

Chicago Bureau Chief Christopher Ogden was a college student in 1965 when he decided to hitchhike around Southeast Asia. Among his stops: Saigon. Ogden returned to Viet Nam in 1968 as a U.S. Army lieutenant with an intelligence unit. Diplomatic Correspondent William Stewart served in South Viet Nam as a Foreign Service officer from 1966 to 1970, first as a civilian district adviser in the pacification effort in Long An province, south of Saigon, then in the capital. "I don't think I ever worked so hard or played so hard as in those years," says Stewart. "By the time I finally departed, in January 1970, I was so consumed that I was unable to leave my Manila hotel room for several days." He returned to Saigon as a TIME correspondent in 1972-73 and again in 1975. Johannesburg Bureau Chief Marsh Clark recalls the special problems of covering the war from 1968 to '70, when U.S. involvement was at its peak. "We tried to report on the myriad social difficulties the war was creating, especially the huge migration of people into the cities," he says. "Just covering the battles did not actually tell much about how the war was really going."

Photographer David Burnett has especially vivid memories of the Easter offensive of 1972. "Most unnerving," he recalls, "was the sight, through the borrowed binoculars of an American adviser, of a wave of North Vietnamese tanks coming toward us." Rio de Janeiro Bureau Chief Gavin Scott chronicled the dwindling American presence in Viet Nam in 1973-74. "It was possible, in those fading days of the war," he says, "to eat breakfast with my family, drive out of Saigon for a morning's action, then return for a gossipy lunch." William McWhirter, now bureau chief in Bonn, reported from Viet Nam for TIME and LIFE during several tours from 1965 on. He had his final assignment there in 1975, covering the South Vietnamese retreat from Hue down the coast to the outskirts of Saigon. Photographer Dirck Halstead, who was based in Saigon three times between 1965 and 1975 for United Press International and TIME, took prize-winning pictures of the frenzied crowds trying to escape Saigon in 1975 before leaving himself by helicopter from Tan Son Nhut airfield just before the city fell. His contemporary photographs of Viet Nam are part of this week's coverage.

Bahrain Bureau Chief Barry Hillenbrand has a special reason to remember his tour in Viet Nam. In September 1974 he married Nguyen Thi Phuong Nga, a Saigon university student. The next year he tried, and failed, to get his Vietnamese in-laws out of the country. Six years passed before they were allowed to immigrate to the U.S. TIME was able to get many of its Vietnamese employees and their families out of the collapsing country. Dang Nguyen, bureau manager from 1964 to 1975 and now the chief of Time Inc.'s wire room in New York City, flew out with his wife and six children on a U.S. Air Force plane a week before Saigon's fall. So did Staff Photographer Le-Minh Thai, now employed in the Los Angeles bureau. Bookkeeper Nga Thi Tran was able to get seats aboard a military helicopter three days later; she now works on TIME's news desk in New York. San Francisco Wire Room Operator Luong Long left by plane just two days before the end.

James Willwerth, in Viet Nam in 1970-71 and now bureau chief in Bangkok, returned last year for the first time since the end of the war. Says he: "The visit was a sobering look at the ways in which hard-line ideologues have imposed their will on a nation." Eddie Adams, a TIME photographer who, while on assignment for the Associated Press in 1968, took the indelible picture of a Vietnamese general shooting a Viet Cong point-blank, also went back in 1983, though reluctantly. "I didn't think I had left anything there," he says. "I was wrong. Everything came back, but it was all off-key: Russians walking down the streets, the bars all turned into sedate coffee shops. I was a stranger in a familiar place."

International Editor Karsten Prager was in Saigon frequently from 1965 to 1968. He looks back on his Viet Nam years with both pain and gratification. "We all left something there, and we all gained something," says Prager. "As journalists, we suspected that we would never get a more dramatic story than Viet Nam. We frequently asked ourselves what could ever top it. Nothing ever did."