April 26, 2007

AP PRESS RELEASE

Associated Press honors memory of David Halberstam

Releases new book foreword authored by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist

NEW YORK -- In honor of the late David Halberstam, The Associated Press has released the foreword to its forthcoming book, “Breaking News: How the Associated Press Has Covered War, Peace and Everything Else,” which was written by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.

“It is with deep sadness that we honor the passing of our friend, David Halberstam,” said Tom Curley, AP's president and chief executive officer. “David embodied all that we in journalism hope to be, covering news over a storied career with razor-sharp insight and great courage. The Associated Press had no greater supporter than David.”

In the foreword to the book Halberstam, who covered the Vietnam War for the New York Times, details his first-hand experiences with AP’s Saigon bureau during the Vietnam War.

Contact: Jack Stokes, AP Corporate Communications, 212.621.1720

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Foreword David Halberstam

Who knew at first glance back in the summer of 1962 that it would become a legendary place, one that would have a special niche in journalism’s modern history? It was the least imposing of offices. The Associated Press bureau at 153 Rue Pasteur in downtown Saigon was tiny and was in no way fancy. It felt more like a converted closet than anything else; if there were two people there at the same time it seemed overcrowded. The toilet doubled as the photo lab, where Horst Faas, the resident photographer, back from covering combat that morning and often still in his fatigues, developed his pictures of the fighting. It was said that the decision to move to larger quarters took place in 1964 after Wes Gallagher, AP’s general manager, visited the bureau, needed quite badly to go to the bathroom, but was told to wait because Faas was working in the loo (and might well be working there for another hour) developing his photos.

If the quarters were not particularly imposing, then the three journalists who worked there were also an unlikely lot. Mal Browne, the bureau chief, had started out life as a chemist, had become bored with the world of science, and found journalism to be a great deal more fun. Peter Arnett, the number two man, had kicked around a bit in Asia but had not worked for any big-time news operation. Arnett was from New Zealand and looked a bit like a rougher Kiwi version of the French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo. The phrase two-fisted might have easily been applied to him, and if he had not been a journalist, it sometimes seemed that his alternative career might have been that of a prizefighter.

The third man, Faas, was a German citizen, officially a photographer but every bit as good a reporter (in fact, he was a great observer) as the other two, and he missed nothing, either about the war taking place right in front of him or, for that matter, the idiosyncrasies of his colleagues. He was quite possibly the most cerebral man in the entire Saigon press corps. “A lot of photographers who did what Horst did saw themselves as photographers first and journalists second, but Horst was different—he saw himself as a journalist first and a photographer second—he always knew what the story was, and he was, whether with camera or with pencil, always reporting,” said Hal Buell, his boss, who assigned him to Vietnam.

The oldest of the three was Browne, thoughtful, almost, I thought, scholarly, and immensely talented, who had arrived in 1961, a year before the others; he was the old man of the bureau in 1962 at the grand age of thirty-one. Faas was twenty-eight, and Arnett was only twenty-seven, about to turn twenty-eight that year when by chance they both arrived in Saigon on the same day, June 26, 1962. “Mal was very different from any AP man I had met before,” Faas remembered. “Very serious. Very studious. Very tall. Always the red socks. No other color. And very good sources. Lots of spooks coming by the office to see him and to whisper secrets to him, and Peter and I would have to go outside the office so they could talk in private.”

Browne had grown up in New York in a home that was at least partially Quaker, had gone to Friends Seminary there and, in time, Swarthmore, had started out life as a chemist but then had worked for Stars and Stripes in Asia. That had taken him to the Middletown (N.Y.) Record, where he spent a year and a half before joining AP in Baltimore; he wanted, he made it abundantly clear to his bosses, to get back to Asia, and when the then Saigon bureau chief needed to leave for family reasons, Browne got the assignment. He arrived in November 1961, just as the first part of the Kennedy buildup was taking place.

Browne was a very good bureau chief; he operated in the way that Wes Gallagher, the new general manager, wanted. He began to write longer pieces—takeouts, they were then called—two thousand words long, trying to give a better perspective on what was happening in the war and why it was different from other wars. He also set an important tone in the bureau in two critical ways. First, he backed his people up when they were challenged by the Saigon officialdom, something that was very important and that greatly liberated those who worked for him to do their best work. Second, he never big-footed the story. That protected the bureau from pettiness and backbiting. Browne did not big-foot for two reasons: because he thought it was morally wrong and because his own philosophy, which soon became the philosophy of Arnett and Faas as well, was that there was going to be enough here for everyone—plenty of war, plenty of heartbreak, plenty of stories.

Arnett was a natural for the Saigon assignment: fearless, physically indefatigable, with an almost pure instinct for reporting combat. I had always thought if you were going to invent the perfect reporter to cover the Vietnam War it would have been Peter Arnett. It was fascinating to watch him grow—the learning curve was so quick. In the beginning he had no idea how good he was, but the demands of the job, risking his life every day to watch other men risk theirs, was something that he was obviously born to do. He had a natural affinity for the men who did the fighting, as they had an affinity for him. One could watch him even back then in 1962 and 1963, studying the journalists around him, absorbing lessons from them every day about how they worked, his confidence constantly building. And he was always fearless—but it was a double kind of courage, not just the courage to go out into battle again and again, year after year, but the other, rarer kind of courage as well: the courage to report stories that the American mission and Washington hated because they went against the official optimism. His stories were the ones that always propelled the bureau into controversy. He kept getting better and better, and on some days before he was even thirty, he was well on his way to being, in the judgment of peers, the best combat reporter of that war.

The third man, both brilliant photographer and skilled observer, was Faas, who had just begun to distinguish himself as a talented and fearless journalist. He had arrived in Saigon after serving a two-year tour in the Congo and Algeria, which before Vietnam had been the most dangerous assignments in the world. Born in 1933, he had grown up in the bitter embers of World War ll, and as a photographer he would prove to have an almost magical touch; he was, thought Buell, able to get the action photo that AP badly needed every day. He never let you down on getting the basic photo. But Buell thought there was always more to what he did, something that a lot of combat photographers working for the wire services lacked—an artist’s eye. Faas had displayed that touch from the start, and his bosses were just beginning to understand that they had someone special when they assigned him to Vietnam. The work he did there was phenomenal. “I put together the portfolio of Horst’s photos for his first Pulitzer, and I remember being dazzled by it,” Buell recalled, “by what he had done and how often he had done it—again and again and again. It wasn’t like it is sometimes for the Pulitzer, when there’s one super photo that is obviously the winner. Rather, it was the sheer cumulative effect of his work, so many battles, so many photos that both told the story and had that special element that was artistic as well.”

Faas was one of the first Germans to work at a high level for an American journalistic organization so soon after World War ll, and he was very aware of an undertow of resentment that sometimes seemed to be there. He was exceptionally sensitive to careless phrases tossed off by colleagues, or by imitations of his accent, done without malice but painful to him nonetheless. Because he was different—German, stockily built, with a very heavy accent—and kept his more complicated thoughts private, it was very easy to get Faas wrong, and a great many people did. They believed he was a kind of combat machine, good because he felt nothing, always immune to the terrible suffering around him. The truth was very different; he had a finely tuned, almost delicate sensibility, which fortunately for AP was balanced by an enormous sense of duty and honor. That sense of honor was special. It was not by chance that long after the war was over, Faas was the coauthor of a book paying homage to those photographers who had not been as lucky as he: Requiem was a poignant collection of photos by all of the photographers who had been killed on both sides of the war.

But in the beginning it was easy to underestimate him and to wound him. Arnett later remembered being with him on one of the early occasions they had worked together, on an assignment near Pleiku, and Arnett had said something in a German accent, and Faas had been furious, and he had taken it for a while, and then he had called Arnett on it. “What the hell do you know about it anyway?” he had said, meaning the war, the old one that had ended in 1945, and Arnett had realized he was right, that when he himself had been ten years old, a carefree kid playing cricket in Riverton, New Zealand, Faas had been twelve, trying to survive in a brutal world that had been collapsing on top of him.

Because he had replaced a photographer named Fred Waters, who was extremely popular with his peers, Faas came slowly by the acceptance of some of the older reporters in the region. Something like that sounds small, but it was very important, given the overheated, incestuous little universe foreign correspondents work in. But soon, among reporters of his own generation, he was in turn accepted, then admired, and then loved. He was smart, talented, and incredibly generous—the rarest of colleagues. Not only could he do the work at the highest possible level himself but also he could teach, and he did a brilliant job assembling a small army of Vietnamese stringers to take photos, painstakingly teaching them how to work their cameras and gently telling them how to work the apertures and that if they shot at a certain opening, “we’ll save you in the darkroom.”

Faas was also very smart about the war. He had his own rules—one of them was to be the first man out of a chopper because in the noise and the confusion of a chopper assault enemy fire was often inaccurate in those first moments. But most of his rules were based on a kind of worst-outcome scenario. You were, he told others, always to take a three-day supply of food because things could go badly very quickly. You checked out the units you were going into battle with—this was particularly true in the days when reporters went out with South Vietnamese troops. Avoid troops with rusty weapons and avoid troops who seemed to care more about their ducks and chickens than their weapons. Later in the war, when the Americans were pulling out, he added a new one: always carry a money belt with extra money in order to encourage stretcher bearers to get you on a chopper. “I thought he was the smartest of us,” said Richard Pyle, who spent five years in the country, three as bureau chief. “We would be thinking of what was going to happen and after that happened, what would happen next, but Horst was always thinking what would happen after that. He was always one or two steps ahead of the rest of us.”

Faas remembered meeting Arnett for the first time even before they got to Saigon; the latter was running a small English-language paper in Laos, and he was obviously a young reporter anxious to make a connection to something bigger and get out of Vientiane. There had been an earlier story about a coup in Laos that Faas had heard about; with the communications temporarily down, and all the Western news agencies on the other side of the Mekong, Arnett had swum the river to get the news out, carrying his stories in a plastic bag so they would not be ruined. On another occasion there had been a second coup, and somehow Arnett had gotten the story to all the wire services, but he had given AP some fifteen minutes in lead time. Eventually, that helped connect him to a job.

Faas thought Arnett bright and brash, with a certain kind of cockiness that he had seen before in the Congo: the kind of young man—there had been a lot of them in Africa—from Australia or New Zealand or South Africa who eventually ended up on Fleet Street, quick and hardworking and instantly brave, eager to work, and just as eager to play. However full of himself Arnett might have been when he first arrived, Faas was never intimidated by him. “When we first met I had already been a real war correspondent dealing with real bullets in the Congo and Algeria, and the war in Laos, where he had worked, was mostly a war without bullets,” Faas said. “There was a lot of Fleet Street in Peter at first, and I could see him getting an offer from one of the British papers and ending up there.” But then, as Faas said, he kept getting better and growing and becoming different—he kept wanting to know why things were happening. From the start he had a great feel for the story. He had staked it out early, and he committed every ounce of his being to it: this was, after all, a job that a young New Zealand boy, wanting to make it in the larger world of international journalism, could only dream of. He never seemed to wear down. “He was,” as his colleague George Esper said, “physically indefatigable. He could work at a very high level when he was surely exhausted, but he managed never to give in to the fatigue.”

In the end, all three won the Pulitzer prize: Browne in 1964, Faas in 1965, and Arnett in 1966. Faas actually won it twice, once in Vietnam, and once for covering Bangladesh; and Arnett nearly won it twice. [He was nominated for a second Pulitzer two years after receiving his first, but the nomination was subsequently withdrawn on the thinking that a reporter should not win twice for essentially covering the same story.] In 1975, Arnett returned to the bureau to help out when Saigon was about to fall, and as ever he did brilliant work there. Later, when he heard that AP was going to put him up for the Pulitzer again, he talked his bosses out of it and demanded that instead they nominate George Esper, the wonderful reporter and, in time, bureau chief who had been there for more than ten years, had stayed to the end, and had filed the last dispatches from Saigon. AP did, and Esper came very close to winning. “I’ve already got mine,” Arnett told Esper; it was typical of the kind of generosity and selflessness that had endeared Arnett to his colleagues for more than a decade.

The fourth man, who was not a member of the bureau but who was critically important in its creation and perhaps even more important in standing up for the reporters who worked there as the government’s complaints about the bureau’s reporting mounted, was Wes Gallagher, the principal AP news executive. Great reporters can’t really show that they are great reporters unless they have exceptional editors to protect them, and Wes Gallagher would turn out to be a great—and prophetic and courageous—editor. He was not only one of the most important American editors of that era but almost surely the least appreciated. He became AP general manager in 1962, just as the war was beginning to heat up and just as Browne, Arnett, and Faas were coming together in Saigon; and he decided that not only was this going to be a very big story but also that he was going to hang the prestige of AP on how it covered the war. It was going to be a prestigious assignment, worthy of a great institution’s best people, and AP was not going to spare the cost on it.

Whether the general public cared or not in the beginning did not matter that much to Gallagher; if he was right that it was going to be a big story, then in time, like it or not, the public would care. Besides, Gallagher wanted a story like this for reasons of his own: He wanted to change the culture of AP at that moment. He believed its reporting at the time was too bland and too passive. He wanted to change that, in part because he was by nature an aggressive reporter but also because, with the arrival of television, there was going to be less and less need for a bland, tasteless news product.

Gallagher was a very good reporter himself, having been one of the best-known war correspondents of World War ll, from the early days in North Africa to his coverage of the Nazi war crimes trials in Nuremberg. As such he had great faith in the honor and integrity of working reporters and a feeling that their age did not matter, especially in a combat zone, where the young were as good as the old (and sometimes better) and often the fighting was being done by men much younger than the reporters. He had simple beliefs: If you found good people and endowed them with your trust and set them out on a story, they would come through for you. It was your job to back them up, which he did. That he backed them up in those years when there was so much criticism of the bureau’s reporters (and when a great many of his member papers, unaccustomed to challenging the word of the government, were uncomfortable with the growing confrontation) was critical to the success of the bureau. It freed the reporters from one of the great dangers of journalism—too much self-censorship.

It is important to remember that in 1962, when that remarkable three-man bureau came together, Vietnam was not yet a big story, and the size of the press corps reflected it. Neither Time nor Newsweek had a staff correspondent there. Though it was the beginning of the era in which television news began to bloom and the networks themselves were very rich, they did not have resident correspondents there. UPI had the immensely talented Neil Sheehan, who often felt overwhelmed, like a local ma-and-pa grocer going up against a giant supermarket. The New York Times was the only daily newspaper with a full-time reporter there. What is important about what Gallagher did is his sense of obligation to his profession, and to his readers: It did not matter if the average editor in the average city in America did not yet think that Vietnam was a big story, or later wanted more optimistic coverage of it. Wes Gallagher thought it mattered, and he was willing to spend the money to get it right from the start. He was, in effect, tying his own career to the abilities of the Saigon bureau. It was nothing less than an act of faith.

Gallagher was not always subtle in his managerial style. There was a certain bluntness to him—a toughness that was almost physical and very palpable. He was a man of elemental beliefs and elemental loyalties, and in confrontation with critics he backed down from neither. It was as if he wore a sign around his neck that said, “Do not cross me on this unless you are completely right and I am completely wrong.” He was, in the end, the perfect person to head the news organization at that moment because he was filled with purpose, sure of AP’s mission in Saigon and, finally, absolutely fearless. The pressure on him from the representatives of the government who wanted a more acquiescent kind of journalism was a constant, and the longer the war went on, the greater it grew. In fact, there was a simple mathematical formula for those days: The better the bureau was, the more its reporting would almost inevitably contradict the official version of how well the war was going—that is, Saigon’s artificially created optimism. This increased the pressure against the reporters from the government.

Gallagher understood that formula perfectly and did not back down from it. When you put in play three exceptionally aggressive reporters like these, who were only going to get better and work the story more deftly, you were, in effect, guaranteeing yourself ever greater headaches and confrontations with senior American officials in Saigon and Washington. One of the things that President Lyndon Johnson liked to do in those days was attack the bureau from the blind side—that is, have publishers whom he knew well and whom he understood had rather conventional views of Vietnam criticize the Saigon bureau to Gallagher for its alleged lack of patriotism. Peter Arnett still tells the story of Gallagher getting a number of these White House-inspired attacks and eventually asking for a meeting with the president. At the meeting, as Arnett tells it, Gallagher walked in, looked straight at the president, and said, “I hear you’re unhappy with my boys in Saigon.” “No, no, Wes,” Johnson said, “I think they’re doing a fine job.”

As it turned out, Gallagher and the other people at AP who assigned them had picked just the right reporters, because they were extremely careful. Given that much freedom, they had systematically validated Gallagher’s faith. In addition, they had, without anyone realizing it, been given a huge head start over most of the other reporters, who began arriving later, when the American presence became a combat one, in 1965. For they were rooted in the story as very few others were. By being rooted I do not just mean that they had more sources from earlier on, though that was true and it turned out to be a considerable advantage. I mean something else. Because they had gotten there very early—long before it was an American war—they all had an exceptional feel for it, and they tended to see it more through the prism of Vietnamese history than of American history. Unlike so many reporters who arrived with the big American buildup, they did not see it as connected to how well we had done in World War ll; rather, they saw it more through the legacy of the French Indochina War. They understood that the flaws of the South (and, in time, of the Americans) were political and were rooted in Vietnam’s modern history, in the colonial war from which this current postcolonial war was so derivative.

Thus, even as the war was Americanized, these reporters possessed a certain skepticism that many of their journalistic colleagues lacked. Some of the second wave of reporters might look at a given battle and judge the casualty rates, perhaps ten to one favoring the Americans, much like the American military command did, as an index of forthcoming victory. But reporters like Arnett, Faas, and Browne, and the newcomers in the bureau whom they had mentored, would see it more warily, believing that Hanoi was learning how to regulate its forces in battle and how to fight so technologically driven an army as the Americans. They understood intuitively that the other side could replenish its forces more readily and that Hanoi, for this was critically important, controlled the rate of the war. And so, the casualty numbers might not mean that much.

They were very good, the men, and in time the women, of the bureau, both at the beginning and at the end. They lived the life of the obsessed. No one had a personal life. No one ever took a day off. If you were not out in the field on an operation, you got up in the morning and you started working, calling people and seeing people, and then you went to lunch and worked, and then you spent the afternoon working, seeing people and perhaps writing, and when you went out to dinner at night you were still working. Seven days a week—there were no weekends. And gradually people realized how good they were, that they were as good as those legendary journalistic figures from the past who had covered previous wars and from whose shadow they had emerged, until they were casting their own shadows. There were two basic laws of journalism at play here: The story in some ways defines the reporter, and the reporter grows with the story. And this was a story you could grow with. Vietnam was a great crucible for a journalist to learn in, not just because it was always dangerous (although that meant you had to be shrewd and careful about where you went), but also because you were always under scrutiny. Since the war did not work, not from the beginning, any story that was important and that had any significant dimension of truth was bound to draw the anger of both Saigon and Washington. That meant from the very first, any reporter working in Vietnam knew that the place was a journalistic minefield—that, and that it was important to have your facts beyond dispute every time you filed. In that sense it was a great training ground.

Arnett, more than any other reporter during the long war, needed to navigate that minefield carefully, because he kept breaking so many big stories, and Washington would have loved to find him errant. The fact that he was not an American but a New Zealander somehow enraged the Johnson White House. “Peter, you’re a great reporter,” Gallagher once told him as they were driving back from the luncheon where Arnett had just accepted the Pulitzer, “but don’t be wrong on a story—there are too many people out there just itching to get you.” Years later, George Esper would ponder all the attacks: “I think back on all those years, all those attacks on us, and on the bureau and I don’t think there was a single important story that we were wrong about. They were not only good—they were incredibly careful.”

From the start, the bureau was not, as the phrase went, “on the team.” Shortly after he arrived there in November 1961, when the American buildup was just beginning, Browne later recalled, there was a rumor that American fighter planes were being used in battle in support of South Vietnamese troops. If so, this was not only a big story, a sign of one more important increment of involvement, but also evidence that the American government was already operating in partial secrecy (a demented kind, really, because it was not something you could keep secret: There were too many people who would know about it and who were inevitably going to talk—the American pilots, the American advisers, the CIA guys––who always talked––and, of course, the Vietnamese officers). It was not exactly a secret to the other side. If American fighters and fighter bombers were being used, the Viet Cong (and thus the Russians and the Chinese) would know. Browne had gone out to the airbase at Bien Hoa, had been kept away by police, but had managed from a distance to see American planes coming and going. He noticed as well, despite the distance, that some of the pilots were tall and blonde. He filed his story. It was, he remembered, a small historic moment—his first major collision over the truth.

The AP reporters were constantly watching senior military officials undermine their own credibility by being openly careless with the truth. As early as January 2, 1963, when South Vietnamese troops had failed to fight at a place called Ap Bac, where three Americans had been killed and where the American division adviser Lt. Col. John Paul Vann had been blisteringly honest with reporters, the overall American commander, Gen. Paul Harkins, visited the scene of the disaster and called it a major victory. He claimed that the Viet Cong, who had long since escaped, were still bottled up in a trap. Arnett had been there that day and was absolutely stunned to see an American four-star general give an explanation that was so obviously a complete lie and that every reporter on location knew was a lie. If the tension between government official and journalist was considerable in the Kennedy years, when the American investment was one of advice and support with only about eighteen thousand troops committed, then starting in 1965, when the number soared toward five hundred thousand, the pressure grew exponentially.

In mid-August 1965, at the very start of the American war, the Marines received intelligence of the presence of a Viet Cong regiment in the village of Van Tuong, just south of the Marine base at Chu Lai, all of this just south of DaNang. The Marines had decided to attack, even though their own forces were still in the process of building up. Lt. Gen. Lew Walt, the Marine commander in Vietnam, decided to send two battalions already in country after the enemy and asked for a third battalion to be released, one that would be amphibious and was still in the Philippines and would have to arrive by ship. The operation was kept secret—there was to be no coverage, even though it was the first major use of the Marines there. Walt himself went on a very public inspection tour of Marine outposts to the north. Most of the DaNang press corps went along with him; clearly the Marines wanted ex post facto coverage. The ground fighting in the Van Tuong operation, known as Operation Starlite, turned out to be very heavy. Probably, though there is no empirical proof of this, the Viet Cong had decided to test out the new American military machine, trying to discern both its strengths and weaknesses. Instead of breaking contact and slipping away as they often did in the face of superior Western firepower, they held their ground and fought hard. The Marines who had come in by land encountered fierce resistance, and there were heavy casualties on both sides.

Arnett himself had watched the arrival of major American units in mid-1965 with a certain sinking feeling. He understood the nature of the war and he was very wary of what American technology might do or, equally important, might not do. To win there, he thought, the Americans would not merely have to fight the Vietnamese, they would have to become Vietnamese, and that was not likely to happen. In mid-August he heard from a source that there was a major battle going on just south of DaNang near Chu Lai, where the Marines were building a major base. Arnett immediately got himself on a space-available flight up to DaNang, where he found an old friend, an Army helicopter guy who thereupon got him on an Army supply helicopter and took him to Chu Lai. At Chu Lai, he climbed aboard a Marine chopper about to bring supplies to the embattled Marines. At that moment, no one knew anything about Supply Column Twenty-one, which had been assigned to leave one of the ships just off shore and bring badly needed food and ammo to the embattled units.

Though Arnett and his chopper pilot did not know it, Supply Column Twenty-one was already a lost column that was in danger of being wiped out. It had been ambushed by the Viet Cong, who were by then closing in for the final kill. On the way over to the fighting, his Marine chopper spotted a group of armored vehicles under assault—the lost column. It had somehow strayed the night before and had been hit by the Viet Cong. When Arnett’s chopper pilot spotted it quite by accident, five of the seven vehicles had already been immobilized. The lost column included two M-48 tanks and five amtraks (heavy amphibious vehicles). The Viet Cong had immediately knocked out one of the tanks and destroyed one of the amtraks as well. Then, in the panic of darkness, three of the remaining amtraks, trying to escape, had ended up bogged down in the paddy—a perfect target for the enemy.

What Arnett’s chopper pilot spotted from the air was not what he had been looking for, because no one seemed to know that the supply column was even lost. But it was clearly the wreckage of an American armored column, and still under attack—the Viet Cong were trying to overrun the last tank, around which the surviving wounded had gathered. With that, the chopper moved in for the rescue. When they landed, they were quickly surrounded by wounded men screaming to get out of there; Arnett and a photographer named Tim Page, who had also hitched aboard, and some of the crew members helped load the wounded on the chopper. All seven armored vehicles were damaged to different degrees, and the Americans eventually destroyed them all on location. In those days you could not yet print casualties figures, but Arnett later estimated that there were probably about twenty-seven men in the column at the start, that at least five had been killed, that eight more were seriously wounded and medevaced out, and about ten others were more lightly wounded. Arnett immediately flew back to Saigon, where he filed his story, “The Death of Supply Column 21.”

To Arnett it was not just a one-day story—serious combat, with higher casualties than anyone expected, the tragedy caused by bad communications in a brand-new war. To him it confirmed a feeling he already had that Vietnam was something of a quagmire, that a great deal of the technology that America was going to depend on would be inapplicable. In his story there are several references to the sheer might of the armored column, at 287 tons of steel, and of how incredibly vulnerable it had proven—“a reminder too that armored vehicles have a limited use in Vietnam.” The next day the Marines denied the story. To them, Supply Column Twenty-one did not exist. They were pushing the main operation, Operation Starlite, as a success, the first big engagement of the war, for the Viet Cong had finally fled, the Americans had taken the objective, and the casualty rate was presumed to be roughly ten to one. They wanted no mention of Supply Column Twenty-one, for it would have tainted the larger story—that American military power was going to work.

But there was a problem for anyone denying Arnett’s story—he had taken a bunch of photos, and the photos confirmed his story. The story seemed to rankle with the Marines, and they kept telling AP executives back in New York and Washington that they considered it a black mark against the wire service. Among those pushing the idea that the story was wrong was Gen. Wally Greene, the Marine commandant. Finally, Gallagher invited Greene to a publisher’s meeting. There he did a slide show with Arnett’s photos from the battle. “General,” Gallagher said, “you said this didn’t happen.” “I was misinformed,” Greene said.

Faas and Arnett worked so long and so well together that they often operated as a kind of team, known as Peter-and-Horst or, on occasion, Horst-and-Peter, as if they were one person instead of two. The problem with covering combat in Vietnam, Charley Mohr—probably the best all-around war correspondent that the New York Times ever sent to Vietnam—once said, was that you would hear about a big battle in the Central Highlands and fight your way to get on first a plane and then a chopper to get there and when you finally arrived “you’d find that Peter and Horst had already been there and were back in Saigon filing.”

Arnett was always in the field: That was where the story was. Like Faas he ended up seeing more action than most American grunts, and there was a certain irony to the attempt of American officers, newly arrived in country and warned back in America about the evils of the press corps and how unpatriotic it was, delivering lectures to men like Arnett who had been there for so long. In the early years, 1962 to 1964, it was one thing, but later it became a joke, an American officer telling Arnett what was wrong with the press and why we were winning and Arnett asking how long he had been in country and the officer saying three months or five months and Peter answering that he had been in country for five years, or six years, or seven years. More than almost anyone else—far more than any military man or political officer in the embassy—Arnett, I believe, gradually became the possessor of the institutional memory of the American war. He had been there at the start, when the Americans first arrived, and he was there at the end. It was Arnett who, on that final day in April, 1975, wrote one of the last dispatches as Saigon fell.

Neither Arnett, nor Browne, nor Faas was a star, at least not at the start. No one knew their names in the beginning, except maybe their colleagues, who knew from the start how good they all were. They were not particularly well paid; print journalism has never paid well, and the wire services in particular are not known for huge paychecks. The rewards were in the doing. There is for those who do it a certain kind of honor—one rarely expressed, for it would be soppy to express it—in the willingness to go back day after day and take such enormous risks for what are, in the traditional sense of material benefits, negligible rewards. It is in some way about winning and holding the respect of your colleagues, and of your own respect for the men and women who are fighting the war. There is a camaraderie that comes from shared values and shared obligations on a story like Vietnam; being a reporter is at the very core of a democracy, of being a free person in a free society.

To me that is what journalism is all about, sending good reporters to difficult and dangerous places that are about to become important but are not yet household words, covering stories when coverage means something, not, as all too often happens these days, too late in the story when it doesn’t really matter any more. We live in a time now when the values of that era seem ever more distant. Print is in decline for a variety of technological and economic reasons. Television dominates the play, and more and more coverage is about celebrities and scandals; when it comes to big stories, more often than not the networks do it in a preening way—look, not only are we here, but we’ve sent our anchorman just to prove how important the story is—covering it very big in the beginning, a beginning that is rarely a beginning. They come to a story a little late and then leave a little too early. Thus, what that extraordinary AP bureau did in those early days in Saigon is a reflection of journalism at its best.

That is why the AP bureau in the 1960s, and well into the 1970s, was so important. Even as I write, there are in some parts of the world where events are not yet of front-page merit, some young men and women going out every day and doing something difficult and complicated, something that takes a surprisingly varied array of talents, an ability to write quickly, a rare, almost intuitive sense of politics, and, of course, a certain kind of courage, the courage to stand up to powerful people who are always trying to bend you and intimidate you. The men and the women of the Associated Press have been doing it for a very long time, and when I was a young man in Saigon I was privileged enough to witness a great institution at its very best, at the moment in a democracy when it really mattered.

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