"I Bomb": Malcolm Browne and the Air War in Vietnam

The creation of the North American Aviation company, the F-100 Super Sabre jet fighter earned a distinction as the first U.S. Air Force plane to be able to reach supersonic speed in level flight. With the American buildup to fight the Vietnam War, however, the F-100 often flew strike missions against enemy targets on the ground instead of air-to-air dogfights.

One such mission occurred on October 15, 1965, as a flight of five F-100s took off from Bien Hoa Air Base, located about fifteen miles from Saigon, to bomb a hamlet in the Mekong River Delta that intelligence reports indicated housed 200 Viet Cong guerrillas. For this sortie, however, one of the aircraft on the mission included a two-seat F-100F dubbed Lillian. Riding with the pilot that day was Malcolm W. Browne, the head of the Associated Press’s Saigon bureau, who had been reporting about the conflict in Southeast Asia since 1961.

While he thrilled to the memories of dramatic World War I dogfights and the high stakes of the Battle of Britain during World War II, Browne pointed out that while still dangerous, the air war in Vietnam more often consisted of “dull routine than high drama, and nothing decisive seems to come of it, despite the great hopes America has pinned to it.”

Browne, an aviation fan who constructed his own model airplanes as a hobby, donned a white helmet, a “G” suit, and a parachute before climbing into the F-100F. The tightly fitting “G” suit helped pilots from “blacking out” due to high centrifugal forces when making high-angle dive bombing runs and steep turns.

The pilots from the 481st Tactical Squadron carefully examined their planes before taking off. “With difficulty, each man climbed the ladder hooked into the side of his plane and swung his legs over into the cockpit,” Browne remembered. “The idea is to stand on the seat first and then slide in.”

Once inside his F-100F, piloted that day by First Lieutenant Rod Dorr, Browne had to spend time buckling himself in, including not only the usual seat belt, but dealing with a shoulder harness, straps around each calf (to secure his legs in case of an emergency ejection), and various fastenings to the ejection seat. “There also is a compressed air coupling for the G suit to hook up to, a communications cable to hook into the helmet for earphones and microphone, and the oxygen tube for the face mask,” he noted.

Once securely strapped into place, Browne said that he felt about “as free and comfortable as a condemned man in the electric chair. Besides the discomfort of confinement, the heat in the cockpit of a fighter waiting to take off from a Vietnamese airfield is nearly unbearable.” One of the pilots confided to the newsman that he regularly lost two pounds every mission due to excessive sweating.

With his helmet secured and earphones in place, Browne discovered that sounds from outside the aircraft were blotted out, especially after the canopy was lowered and locked into place. While the air outside the plane could be rent with “the shattering hypersonic blasts of an after-burning jet engine,” the pilot and his passenger heard none of that. “In the earphones there is almost constant technical chatter between planes, ground control and forward air observers,” Browne said. “Besides that, there is an eerie moaning sound in the earphones, produced by the complicated electronic gear in the plane.” He also reported:

“To hear only the moaning sound, like the sighing of wind around the corner of a house when bomb blasts are erupting and huts disintegrating just below, or when napalm splashes so close below as to scorch the plane’s paint, is a phenomenon pilots call ‘cockpit isolation.’ Outside there is the din and horror of jet-age war; inside there is the calm an quiet of a computer room. The pilots are glad to be spared the sounds they create. I have sometimes wondered whether it might not be better for some Air Force officers to be better acquainted with the ugly cacophony of warfare.”

Dorr and Browne had to wait about ten minutes to take off, as a long line of transport planes and aircraft were ahead of them. When their turn came, each man pulled a set of safety pins from their ejection seats, arming them. Browne learned from his talks with the American pilots that they regarded their ejection seats with “a mixture of gratitude and fear.” While being shot out of a disabled jet might save their lives, it could also “break one’s back, or at least result in permanent injury as the result of severe spinal compression,” he said.

Once airborne, the five planes on the mission grouped themselves into a loose formation in the crystal-clear sky with the Mekong Delta spread out below them. Reaching 15,000 feet, Dorr and the other pilots were in communication with “Beaver 79,” a L19 light plane far below serving as a forward air controller spotting the target. “Beaver 79 had found our hamlet and told us he would indicate it with a smoke rocket,” Browne recalled, “one of several he had on racks under his wings. We broke into a wide circle and watched Beaver 79 sail along a canal firing a puff of smoke into a cluster of thatched huts. From where I was sitting I could see no sign of life. Pilots tell me they rarely see people on the ground.”

The first fighter broke out of the formation and started his bombing run, announcing to the group, “I bomb.” One after the other, the planes made their attacks. “The dive down seems vertical,” Browne noted, “and at one point the ground actually seems to rotate over one’s head.” The reporter could see flames coming from the tiny objects on the ground and Dorr prepared to make a strafing run. “While we still were what seemed to be a long distance above the ground, our cannon began to fire,” Browne reported. “Actually, I heard very little but the moaning in the earphones, but the whole plane vibrated from the firing, like an electric massager.” He could see streams of shells rip into the huts below, as well as flashes of light as the shells exploded.

Browne could not believe how much his body was strained to its limits by dive bombing. He noted that the speed was so great that everything happened within a few seconds. Timing had to be perfect. A dive from 15,000 feet to almost sea level produced "excruciating pain in the eardrums as the result of the terrific air pressure change. This pain persists through the rest of the mission." Also, the downward crush of a pull-out almost paralyzed the lungs, pulled the flesh on one's face downward, and made arms and legs weigh six or seven times what they normally would. "Hands on stick and throttles and feet on rudder pedals become monstrous weights," Browne added, "and it is all a pilot can do to hold them in place, much less keep them under control in the delicate movements required in a pull-out."

Dorr repeated his firing passes several times and Browne observed that the target “looked properly battered.” In his official report about the mission, Beaver 79 indicated that the F-100s had destroyed eight structures, damaged six others, and destroyed 30 percent of the target area.

On the return flight to Bien Hoa, Dorr let Browne take the controls for a bit. The journalist was surprised by the “lightness and responsiveness of the stick. Lighting the engine’s afterburner in level flight produced an exhilarating thrust forward, and I could imagine that the F100 must be very pleasant to fly, or, rather, ‘drive,’ as its pilots insist on saying.”

Upon hitting the runway, Dorr deployed his aircraft's tail parachutes to help slow it down. Taxiing to the flight line, Dorr and Browne climbed out of the cockpit, both drenched in sweat. As yellow tractors hooked up to the F100s to haul them off to a hangar for refueling, rearming, and servicing, the pilots unloaded their gear, reported to their superiors about the mission’s results, and showered at their billeting area. “In the evening after chow at the officers’ mess there would be time for a movie, a few beers and perhaps a letter home,” said Browne.

Miles to the south of Bien Hoa, Browne pointed out that the embers of a Vietnamese community were “still smoldering and the blood was still fresh from the death that had struck from the sky that afternoon.” Pilots, however, rarely thought or talked much about the results of their work, he noted, except in terms of the military targets hit. “Sometimes these raids kill enemy guerrillas. Sometimes they merely kill women and children cringing in improvised shelters,” reported Browne. “Pilots have no way of telling which, and they are at the mercy of forward observers and men sitting at desks who take coffee breaks and make human mistakes.”

Browne recalled that the worst mistakes happened because of map coordinates. On military maps, square sections of land were designated by two letters (for example, WR). “A mention of the two designator letters roughly locates an area,” he said. “Following these two letters are six numbers, three each for coordinates reading across a vertically. A complete coordinate, consisting of two letters and six numbers (i.e., WR825439) locates any spot in the world to within a few hundred feet.”

When a pilot is ordered to bomb a coordinate, he assumes that the coordinate is accurate and marks a military target. Unfortunately, said Browne, sometimes the same “slovenly work attitudes that prevail in the United States extend to the American military, even in war theaters.” If care was not taken, two or more numbers in a map coordinate could be accidentally transposed, which could lead to a pilot being off by a few miles.

Such inaccuracy could lead to tragedy. Browne noted that on one mission such a transposition happened, and U.S. planes swooped down on the village of Lang Vei on the evening of March 2, 1967. Located approximately 400 miles north of Saigon, Lang Vei was “a hard-working little community considered friendly to the Saigon government,” he noted. When relief workers arrived at the village after the bombing raid, they discovered eighty dead and 120 wounded civilians. “America promptly apologized to the South Vietnamese government, and sent blankets and rice for the survivors of Lang Vei,” Browne reported. Sometimes U.S. planes also mistakenly hit friendly troops in the field.

While government officials in Washington, DC, often touted the “surgical precision” of bombing and strafing attacks made by the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps in North and South Vietnam, from what Browne observed of the air war, such claims were “grossly exaggerated.”
 

Creating "The New Face of War": Malcolm Browne and the Bobbs-Merrill Company

During its heyday, the Bobbs-Merrill Company of Indianapolis stood as the largest publishing house located west of the Allegheny Mountains, releasing works from such varied authors as James Whitcomb Riley and Ayn Rand. In April 1964 Bobbs-Merrill’s editor in chief,William Raney, working out of the firm's New York office, sought to add another author to the firm’s list.

On a recommendation from a friend, Raney wrote a young Associated Press reporter, Malcolm W. Browne, AP’s bureau chief in Saigon, South Vietnam, to gauge his interest in producing a book about his experiences in that war-torn country. Browne had been in South Vietnam since November 1961 and had spent more time there than any other American correspondent, earning the title of the dean of the Saigon press corps.

Raney’s correspondence proved timely. In early May Browne learned that he and David Halberstam of the New York Times had shared the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for their articles about the war and the coup that had toppled the government of President Ngo Dinh Diem. Browne proved to be quite enthusiastic about tackling a book about the Vietnam conflict. “Viet Nam is, of course, a news hot spot in which America is fighting a war,” Browne wrote Raney. “As an advisor over there told me recently, ‘It ain’t much of a war, but it’s the only one we got.’ In fact, it is a very important war, the importance of which goes far beyond the trickle of casualties incurred by Americans so far.”

Browne had received international attention with his photographs of the self-immolation of a Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc, protesting the supposed anti-Buddhist policies of the Catholic-dominated Diem administration. The journalist’s time in the country had led him to believe that the conflict there threatened to “put our system to its toughest test since World War II. As Spain’s civil war of the 30s was the precursor to World War II, I think Viet Nam is the forerunner of a long, ugly campaign we shall have to wage in Africa, Latin America and the rest of Asia. Our enemies have said so, and there is no reason to doubt them.”

As Browne later explained to former U.S. ambassador to Vietnam Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., in a letter asking him to contribute a forward for his book, he did not intend the work to be “an ax-grinding opus,” nor a historical account. “It is built mostly on vignettes and my own body of personal experience in the field,” he told Lodge.

For the next six months, while still reporting about the war for the AP, Browne worked on his book, turning in a completed manuscript to Bobbs-Merrill in October 1964. In his stories for the news service, Browne noted that specific images—the smell of battle, the experience of a single soldier or guerrilla, and the sights and sounds of a hamlet at war—had more effect “on readers than generalities, however well reasoned.”

While traditional news writing depended upon a “pyramid” style, proceeding from the general to the specific, Browne said it was sometimes “more effective to reverse the order, leading the reader into a complicated situation almost through a succession of pointed anecdotes, all depending mainly on images.” As he had discovered with his images of Quang Duc’s fiery death, “photographs carry more of an initial impact than words.”

Browne told Raney that although he hoped to impart to readers the “feel” of Vietnam and its problems and did not intend to merely put together a collection of “impressions thrown together under one cover.” He wanted to cover such potential topics as “Women in Viet Nam and the Phenomenon of Madame Nhu,” “Making Foot Traps for Fun and Profit,” and “Opium as a Social and Political Force.” Browne suggested as a title “The New Face of War,” which Bobbs-Merrill settled on for the book. “Beyond informing,” Browne noted, “I want it to be a book that will be interesting to read, even when and if the Viet Nam crisis is resolved.”

The new kind of war Browne wrote about included fighting not merely by weapons but through politics, diplomatic blackmail, propaganda, and terror—methods that had unsavory connotations in the minds of Americans, who were not used to involvement in a conflict in which “nice guys finish last.” He pointed out that the “experiences of most of America’s military tradition” seemed to be inapplicable for what soldiers faced in Vietnam, including ambushes, sniping, and boobytraps. “The only glory anyone is likely to get out of it is the satisfaction of carrying a bundle of human enemy heads, suspended by wires stuck through their ears,” Browne concluded. “There will never be the handing over of a sword by a beaten general to his victor. If there is victory, the fighting will merely die down to a few isolated incidents.”

The contract Browne signed with Bobbs-Merrill on May 7 called for him to provide a manuscript of 80,000 to 90,000 words on or before October 1. The publishing firm paid Browne an advance of $1,000 upon signing its contract, followed by an additional $1,000 upon delivering his manuscript, and established a royalty rate of 10 percent for the first 5,000 copies sold; 12.5 percent on the next 5,000 copies sold; and 15 percent on all copies sold thereafter.

In addition to writing the book, Browne also selected several photographs for inclusion. Unfortunately, even though he had taken most of the photos while on assignment for the AP, the organization’s photo division, Wide World Photos, charged him for their use, totaling $312.50, a bill Browne grudgingly paid.

Because Browne had contributed so much to paying for the images, Bobbs-Merrill paid to produce the book’s index—cost, $140. “According to our standard contract,” Geoffrey C. Ryan, a Bobbs-Merrill editor, wrote to Browne, “this is an expense to be borne by the author, but we never anticipated your going for so much on the photographs.” Ryan also noted that the firm was also able to waive the indexing fee because True magazine had recently agreed to pay $5,000 for a 23,000-world excerpt for its May 1965 issue. “This sort of thing is not only good for the money involved in the deal itself, but it has tremendous promotion value and helps the sale of books,” Ryan wrote Browne.

Browne faced a few challenges trying to complete his manuscript. By late September, he had written approximately 45,000 words and could have “easily” finished the rest in “one week of solid writing,” but instead had to deal with “one damned crisis after another, including a coup, dangerous rioting that nearly demolished my office, a pickup in the Viet Cong war, etc., etc. ad nauseum.” 

Due to his busy schedule working for the AP, he had to request a month extension on his deadline—a request Bobbs-Merrill approved. In the process, Browne learned that his editor, Raney, had been found dead in a New York hotel room. Police listed his death as an apparent suicide, with a medical examiner ruling that Raney’s death had been the result of an overdose of “an unidentified toxic substance.”

After finishing his manuscript, Browne discovered that Bobbs-Merrill had made unfortunate choices on whom they sent galleys in the hope that they would “say all kinds of wonderful things about the book so that we can quote them in publicity releases and ads, etc.,” as Ryan explained to Browne. The firm had sent galleys to Halberstam, who had a book about Vietnam of his own to promote (The Making of a Quagmire); columnist Joe Alsop; U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam Maxwell Taylor; and U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.

“Halberstam . . . was and is a tough competitor of mine (in view of his reporting here and his competitive book) with whom I have never been on friendly terms,” Browne wrote Ryan. “If he says anything nice it will be only to show he is a good sport, but this is fairly unlikely.”

Browne described Alsop, a firm supporter of America’s involvement in Vietnam, as “a personal enemy of mine,” adding that in Alsop’s junkets to Saigon he had charged him, “among others, with ‘selling out the United States’ and bringing down the pillar of our defenses in Southeast Asia, Ng Dinh Diem.” The bitterness between the two newsmen would, Browne said, “eclipse even an instinct toward being a good sport, which I doubt Alsop would display in any case.”

While Browne knew Taylor well, they had also “crossed swords fairly often,” Browne noted. He did not believe that the new ambassador would enjoy his “implied praise” for his predecessor, Lodge. “As for McNamara,” Browne wrote, “who I also know, the entire book is, in a certain sense, a criticism of his handling of the war in Viet Nam from its inception.”

Browne offered some alternatives for Bobbs-Merrill to consider, including Homer Bigart of the Times, a veteran war correspondent who had also covered Vietnam, “and for whom I have the highest respect,” and Bernard Fall, a renowned expert on Indochina. Browne’s other suggestions included Secretary of State Dean Rusk and U.S. Senator Mike Mansfield, “who has repeatedly defended me and some of my colleagues on the Senate floor.”

Bobbs-Merrill agreed with Browne’s suggestions. One of those suggestions, Mansfield, paid off, with the senator writing the reporter that he had read the book’s proofs with “great interest,” as Browne had successfully “drawn a graphic and illuminating picture of the war in Viet Name and your book cannot but be useful to those who seek to understand and aid that unhappy country.”

Released by Bobbs-Merrill on April 26, 1965, The New Face of War shared the stage with Halberstam’s The Making of a Quagmire. The two books were often reviewed together, and reviewers, particularly those who were journalists themselves, pointed out how the two newsmen became unpopular with U.S. officials by digging up material that contradicted the optimistic view they were trying to present to the public about the war’s progress.

Not surprisingly, opposing viewpoints appeared, especially regarding Halberstam’s effort. Veteran war correspondent Richard Tregaskis, who had spent time in Vietnam for his own book, Vietnam Diary (1963), in a review for the Chicago Tribune, complained that Halberstam’s fundamental attitude in covering the war seemed to be “that something must be wrong rather than right with it.” Tregaskis also included a much harsher quote from an unnamed embassy official calling Halberstam a “young punk who’d never seen a war before and thought it should always go well. He just didn’t know about wars. It didn’t seem to occur to him that in all our American wars in the past, we had to run a little short of absolute complete democracy for the sake of winning.”

Instead of Halberstam’s book, Tregaskis recommended Browne’s work as “a more temperate example of the new books on Viet Nam.” Although Pulitzer Prizes awarded in previous years had often been “inept,” Tregaskis noted that when the committee split the award, honoring Halberstam, “they gave the other half to Browne—a safe and sensible bet.”

Initially, The New Face of War did well for Bobbs-Merrill, selling approximately 7,500 copies by July 7, 1965, out of the 12,000 it had printed. The firm’s chairman, Howard Sams, had been so impressed by Browne’s book that he sent sixty copies to his friends in the business world at his own expense “in the belief that his book is of supreme importance at the moment.” (Sams mailed an additional ninety-three copies, again at his own expense, in September.)

As time passed, however, Browne came to believe that Bobbs-Merrill had been slow in paying him his owed royalties and had not done enough to promote the book, particularly when it came to selling it in Vietnam. In February 1966 Browne wrote Robert Amussen, Bobbs-Merrill editor in chief, that a Vietnamese book dealer he knew had offered a few copies of his book for sale and they always sold out in an hour or so.

“There will soon be one quarter million American servicemen here, all vitally interested in the war in Viet Nam,” Browne wrote Amussen. “I can’t help feeling this would be a very substantial and profitable market if only the books were brought into the country some how. I get dozens of requests a week personally, and all I can suggest is that families back in the States ship them. I really wish this could be looked into, especially since there are growing numbers of Vietnamese book stores in Saigon specializing in American books.”

Although Bobbs-Merrill produced a revised edition of Browne’s book in 1968, he never seemed satisfied with his relationship with the firm, believing that the first edition had “virtually no paid advertising, and its success resulted wholly from good reviews and general interest in the subject.” He probably would not have been surprised by a quote made by a former Bobbs-Merrill publisher, David Laurance Chambers, who had noted: “One of the trials of life is the necessity of constantly showing an accommodating spirit to authors.”
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Richard Tregaskis: With the Marines on Guadalcanal

One of the men peering over the side of the Higgins landing boat saw it first—a long, low black shape moving slowly about a mile away in the bay between the islands of Guadalcanal and Tulagi in the Solomons.

The American flotilla that included two landing craft and a bargelike lighter filled with gasoline drums had several miles yet to travel before it reached its destination, Carpenter’s Wharf on Tulagi. Once there, the boats were set to disgorge their passengers, which included U.S. Marine Corps officers seeking information about the fighting on Tulagi from the First Marine Raider Battalion, as well as Richard Tregaskis of the International News Service and Bob Miller of the United Press. They were the only two civilian reporters who had accompanied the men of the First Marine Division as they landed on Guadalcanal on August 7, 1942, and had stayed with them on the island to face the inevitable counterattacks from the Japanese.

Now, five days later, exposed on the open water, the U.S. vessels had already endured one close call when an unidentified airplane appeared overhead. “I suppose in that moment we all realized how helpless is a small boat under the attack of a well-armed aircraft,” Tregaskis recalled. “One felt suddenly very much alone, out there in the middle of the bay, with at least ten miles of water on every side.”

Fortunately, it was an American plane—a Consolidated PBY Catalina headed to make the first landing on the recently completed airfield on Guadalcanal. “It’s ours,” one of the gunners on Tregaskis’s boat announced, and the correspondent and his companions began to “breathe freely again.”

Unfortunately, the second sighting turned out to be a deadly menace to their safe passage—an enemy submarine. At the moment the Americans spotted the submarine, it saw them, swinging around on an interception course. “I thought things couldn’t happen like that except in the movies,” said Tregaskis. “But there we were . . . racing with a Japanese submarine, trying to reach land before he cut us off—and he was winning.”

Desperate to survive, the boats attempted to outrun the enemy, going so fast the occupants were “practically drowned in spray,” according to Tregaskis. He could also see geysers of water rising up near them, each one closer than the last, representing shells fired at them from the submarine’s deck gun. “The first water spouts, the first sharp sounds of explosions, were far short,” he remembered. “But each successive shot crept closer.”

Confusion reigned onboard at what course to take until the coxswain on Tregaskis’s boat swung around sharply to the right. “There was a chance, we thought, that we could make the eastern tip of Florida Island, or at least come somewhere near it, before the submarine caught us,” Tregaskis remembered. Seeing their comrades’ plight, the marines on Tulagi did all they could to drive off the submarine, firing on it with their 75mm pack-howitzer artillery. Undeterred, the submarine continued its relentless pursuit, with its shells falling closer and closer to its prey.

The Americans’ chances at survival seemed dim when one of their vessels suffered engine trouble. Tregaskis could see the men in the other boat waving wildly at them and a haze of smoke issuing from its motor. His boat pulled alongside the stricken one, and they bumped and banged into each other as they tried to run at top speed. “The crew of the other craft fell, slid and vaulted into our boat,” Tregaskis said. A marine public relations officer, Lieutenant Herbert Merillat, ordinarily “quite a dignified young man,” tumbled in with great haste, leaving behind his shoes in the excitement.

Tregaskis found it a comical sight even at such a dangerous moment. But his relief turned to apprehension when he realized that they had lost precious time in picking up the other crew and the submarine had kept up its relentless pursuit.  “I told myself that this was my last day of existence, as it seemed certain to be,” Tregaskis recalled.

Fortunately, the artillery fire from Tulagi had come closer to the Japanese, with several shots hitting only yards from the submarine’s conning tower. Fearing for its safety, the submarine turned away, heading west for the open sea. The Americans had survived their ordeal, chugging without further incident into Tulagi’s harbor. “It was distinctly a pleasure to set foot on land again,” said Tregaskis.

After talking to the marines who wrested the islands of Tulagi, Gavutu, and Tanambogo from Japanese control, Tregaskis and his companions stayed the night on Tulagi. The near-fatal encounter with the submarine, however, had shaken Tregaskis. Although scheduled to make his return with his companions to Guadalcanal the next morning at 4:30, well before sunrise, he was convinced that the Japanese submarine that had pursued them before “would be lying off the harbor entrance, waiting.”

Tregaskis and the others in his party took shelter for the night on the floor of a shack near the Tulagi dock so they would not have to pass a line of vigilant marine sentries in the dark. But the correspondent could not fall asleep. He lay awake for hours, fretting that instead of risking a sea voyage, they should make their return by air. “‘How about the PBY which had flown into Guadalcanal this morning?’ Was the thought that suddenly occurred to me,” he noted.

The correspondent stepped over the sleeping officers in the shack, woke one of them—Captain James C. Murray—and asked if the PBY could be called upon to ferry them back? The answer was no. The PBY had left Guadalcanal long ago, taking with it a few wounded men. “I felt better then, knowing that we had no alternative except to run for it,” Tregaskis remembered. “But it seemed to me inevitable that we would be caught and sunk, for the sub had obviously decided, this morning, that we were some sort of official boat, worth chasing—and worth waiting for.”

For the rest of the evening, Tregaskis sat on the shack’s front steps, looking up at the soft white stars overhead and thinking it would be his last night on earth. “I thought that, all in all, it had been a good life, although it seemed to be ending a little early,” he recalled.

Tregaskis’s fears did not come to pass; he and the others had a tense, but uneventful, return to Guadalcanal the next morning. The submarine did not reappear. It was not the last time, however, that he came close to injury and death in the Solomons. Until he left the island on September 26 to work on a book about his experiences, he withstood almost daily attacks by enemy bombers and nightly visits by another Japanese submarine, dubbed Oscar by the Americans, which let loose with an occasional potshot with its deck gun into the marines’ bivouacs.

The correspondent and others also had their sleep interrupted by harassing flares and bombs from aircraft nicknamed Louie the Louse and Washing-machine Charlie, named so by the marines for the distinctive sound made by the plane’s engine. These attacks caused only minor damage, except, that is, to “the nerves of exhausted men who yearned to sleep,” recalled Merillat.

Maneuvering through the jungle during the day, Tregaskis and others had to be on the lookout for cleverly concealed snipers. He admitted years after the war that while on the island both he and Miller—contrary to U.S. War Department regulations that forbade them to carry and use weapons—armed themselves with M1911 .45-caliber pistols. He knew that an enemy sniper could not possibly distinguish between a combatant marine and a noncombatant correspondent. He was right.

While covering the aftermath of what became known as the Battle of Bloody Ridge, Tregaskis looked across a ravine into the thick jungle foliage and saw a sudden movement—a Japanese sniper swinging his gun toward him. He could see that the sniper wore a camouflage suit, shaggy and brown, that looked like coconut husks. “He was sitting in the crotch of a tall tree and his movement had been to bring his gun to bear on me,” Tregaskis recounted. “I hit the bushes underfoot and he fired three or four times, missing me every time, and I moved away from there fast to a more sheltered spot where three or four Marines were lying.”

Tregaskis and Miller, through sheer repetition, honed their survival instincts, particularly when it came to Japanese air raids. They learned how long they could observe the bombers overhead before seeking shelter in a convenient foxhole or dugout, as well as how to adjust their bodies—supporting themselves slightly on the elbows—to avoid concussion in case a bomb struck nearby. “The worst time in a bombing is the short moment when you can hear the bombs coming,” Tregaskis said. “Then you feel helpless, and you think very intensely of the fact that it is purely a matter of chance whether or not you will be hit.”

Such chances varied by location, with the airfield—Henderson Field—a favorite target. “But even in other parts of the island, where odds may be greater, say, nine out of ten that you won’t be hit, you wonder if you will be the unlucky tenth case,” Tregaskis noted. While under attack, his thoughts sometimes drifted to those who had been badly wounded or killed in previous bombings, and in his imagination he suffered “the shock of similar wounds.”

Tregaskis also castigated himself for not immediately running for cover to a dugout with a sandbagged roof. Instead, the approaching bombers had transfixed him, leaving only enough time for a quick dash to leap inside an open foxhole, crouch behind a handy limestone boulder, or fling himself to lie flat on the bare ground. “When you have nothing but the earth and your lack of altitude to protect you,” Tregaskis recalled, “you feel singularly naked and at the mercy of the bombs.” He could feel the ground jerk with the bombs’ impact, followed by dirt clods showering down on his supine body.

Often shaken by the experience, Tregaskis would arise to see before him rows of “clean-cut, black bomb craters,” and the ground everywhere around him strewn with “small, cube-shaped clods of earth.” Measuring the distance once between his position and the nearest bomb crater, he discovered it “was not much more than 200 yards.” As for Miller, Tregaskis noted that the UP reporter’s “courage and cheerfulness never seemed to leave him, not even when the bombs were rattling down on Henderson Field, or snipers were trying running shots at us."