THE FIRST DRAFT OF HISTORY
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HALF A CENTURY AGO, THE LEGION OF FOREIGN CORRESPONDENTS who would inspire a generation of successors arrived in Saigon to report on a complicated and dangerous war in Vietnam.
Unlike most journalists today, those arriving in the South Vietnamese capital didn’t stay chained to their desks. Field reporters such as Gloria Emerson of the New York Times and Peter Arnett of The Associated Press, as well as photojournalists such as Don McCullin of the Sunday Times, put on uniforms, packed some field rations, and hitched rides on U.S. military aircraft to link up with front-line units. It was that easy to cover a war. “As a correspondent, you could go out and wave down a chopper or a plane and get on and go anywhere you wanted,” said Jim Shaw, a former reporter for Stars and Stripes in Vietnam.
Their words and pictures became the stuff of legends. But first, they had to get their stories and photos back to their outlets at home—a rudimentary, low-tech process hard to imagine today. Photographers hand-carried rolls of film they shot in the field, developed them in darkrooms in Saigon, and hurried them to a plane. Reporters had to find a telex machine to transmit their copy. Not being tethered to technology—and their editors—wherever they went, they had the ability to
