The Press: Twitting the Brass

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The least popular publication at the Pentagon is the Overseas Weekly, a racy tabloid that caters to the G.I. and competes with the official military paper, Stars and Stripes. It is not so much the competition that bothers the Pentagon as the fact that the Overseas Weekly never tires of twitting the military establishment. In between gobs of cheesecake and lurid crime stories, it exposes such eccentrics as the colonel who was able to commit an enlisted man to a psychiatric ward because the man had defended his friends at courtsmartial. Or the officers who punished two G.I.s by tying them together and leading them around like dogs on a leash. Not to mention former Major General Edwin Walker, who was discovered by the Weekly back in 1961 to be indoctrinating his troops with John Birch Society propaganda.

In 1953, the Pentagon tried to ban the Weekly from military newsstands in Europe, but Congressmen objected. Two years ago, when the Weekly applied for permission to be sold at PX newsstands in the Far East, it got a firm no. Last year, the paper asked for an injunction against the ban in a federal District Court, but the court ruled that the Pentagon could distribute what "merchandise" it pleased. This month, however, a U.S. Court of Appeals reversed the lower court and ruled that the Weekly was entitled to a court trial to prove that the ban amounted to censorship. The Pentagon has 90 days in which it can appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, go to trial—or drop the matter and start distributing the Weekly in the Far East.

Beards Are Out. The ban has hurt circulation (30,000 in Europe, 15,000 in Asia), but the Weekly has grown no less bumptious. ''We like to hire a man in his 20s who has been discharged in Europe and feels strongly about correcting military injustices," says Editor Curtis Daniell, 32. There seem to be plenty of candidates for the job, even though the Weekly pays reporters only $70 a week to start—and beards are banned.

"If the Army sees a beard, they think you're a Communist," says Publisher Marion Rospach, 42, who got fed up with her job on Stars and Stripes and founded the Weekly in 1950.

Along with a heavy dose of antimilitarism, staffers get a good grounding in investigative reporting on the Weekly; many move on to jobs with more illustrious publications. Pacific Editor Ann Bryan, 35, formerly managing editor of the Weekly's sister publication, The Family, is praised even by officers in Viet Nam. Without sacrificing femininity, the comely redhead has repeatedly gone out into the field under fire and written knowledgeably about combat troops.