Newscasting: The Men Without Helmets

The Viet Nam footage he screened on his CBS newscast one night last week was particularly poignant for Walter Cronkite. It showed a mortar bar rage at the Khe Sanh airstrip that wounded both the co-producer of his show, Russ Bensley, and CBS Cameraman John Smith. Neither Smith nor Bensley, who was filling in for an injured CBS sound man at the time, was seriously hurt. But three days later, after evacuation to Danang, Producer Bensley was wounded again during a rocket attack. His colon was ruptured and his spleen had to be removed. "The irony of it," said CBS Correspondent Don Webster, reporting from the hospital, "is that for several weeks now we've been planning to do a report about the new war in Viet Nam and on the fact that Viet Nam is a much more dangerous place than ever before."

No group in Viet Nam is more disturbed or disgruntled by the dangers of the "new" war than the U.S. television journalists who are covering it. Since the Tet offensive began, 14 correspondents and crewmen from the U.S. networks have been injured. Last week two ABC men, Bill Brannigan and Jim Deckard, were injured in the bombardment of Khe Sanh.* As a result, many members of TV's standard three-man teams (correspondent, cameraman and sound man) have begged off from hazardous assignments, and the networks are having trouble reporting all the battles. CBS Tokyo Bureau Chief Igor Oganesoff, who was frequently shuttled into Viet Nam for fill-in duty, has refused further combat assignments, ABC's Don North, a veteran of 18 months there, asked to be transferred. ABC's Hong Kong Bureau Chief Sam Jaffe also decided after three recent weeks in Viet Nam that "I won't cover Khe Sanh, and I refuse to go back to Hué." Summed up Jaffe, 38, who saw action as a merchant seaman in World War II and with the Marines in Korea: "The longer you stay here, the more inevitable it is that you're going to be hurt, maimed or killed."

"Nowhere to Hide." The big trouble is that even a rotation system such as NBC's — a stint working out of Danang, then equal time in Saigon — no longer affords a man any rest. Says NBC's New York-based News Operations Head Bill Corrigan: "There's nowhere to hide any more. There are no soft assignments." A newsman is in action from the moment his plane touches down at Tan Son Nhut Airport.

TV journalists, to be sure, are not the only ones becoming vulnerable and restive. But the first war to be thoroughly covered by television is most perilous for the TV crews in the van. To the men in the field, network managing editors back in New York seem obsessed with "the wire-service syndrome" — they ask for coverage of every bit of action. Says one embittered TV staffer: "Editors are so afraid of missing one story that to protect their flanks they have been asking us to risk getting our tails shot off."