(page 2 of 4) Halberstam's reporting was so influential that President Kennedy phoned his New York Times editor, and asked that the reporter be sent back to the United States. The editor refused to do so. Both Browne and Halberstam won Pulitzer Prizes for their reporting in 1963. I concentrated on covering the war from 1964 on after the government of President Ngo Dinh Diem was overthrown and the Buddhist crisis had ended. Vietnam was a helicopter war so we traveled by helicopter with the troops, jumping off with them in remote jungle clearings looking for a fight. Sometimes we'd spend a week or two waiting for action. Sometimes it would be waiting for us as we landed. Forget shaving. We'd bathe in the rivers when we had the chance. We were wet in the rainy season, and soaking with sweat in the dry season. There were leeches that crawled through your clothing to the soft places in your body and sucked your blood. A lighted cigarette tip would kill them. And there were malarial mosquitoes that stung mercilessly. I wrote and sent out more than 3,000 stories for the Associated Press from South Vietnam in the years I was there from1962 to 1975 -- when the war ended with the communist takeover. But we reporters had it good compared to the soldiers. We could leave the battlefield and go back to our homes in Saigon when we wanted to. They had to stay and fight the war. A new president took over in American, Lyndon B. Johnson, after President Kennedy was assassinated in November of 1963. He continued the same policy in Vietnam along with Robert McNamara who stayed on as defense secretary in the new government. Johnson was then elected to the presidency in 1964 after promising the American people that he would widen the war in Vietnam, that he would not send more troops. But on the ground the war was going even worse than before, and photographers like the AP's Horst Faas who stayed in Vietnam nearly as long as I did, were there to take pictures of the brutal nature of the conflict. Horst Faas, in particular, was fearless and talented, producing dramatic pictures. One showed a father holding his child whose skin has been shredded in a napalm, attack -- that is, an explosive made of jellied gasoline. Another picture sowed the father appealing to a passing South Vietnamese armored vehicle but the soldiers don't help. It was pictures like these that fueled – that encouraged -- the growing antiwar movement in the United States. Pictures like these also angered the American government, and laid the groundwork, laid the foundation, for a bitter anti-press campaign that lasted throughout the war. The press didn't need to look far for brutal actions; Vietnam was that kind of war. Morley Safer of CBS, later to become a star of the popular news show 60 minutes, dscovered that US marines were routinely burning down villages near Danang. Safer asked the question, just where would all the people live with their homes destroyed? Would this destruction help the announced American policy of winning the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people? His story made a strong emotional impact on the American public, but it made him very unpopular with the military.         PREVIOUS PAGE RETURN TO BIO NEXT PAGE