Richard Tregaskis and the Parachute Battalion

In early April 1943, after recovering from reporting firsthand from the Pacific battlefields, war correspondent Richard Tregaskis of the International News Service, joined by his colleague Gordon Walker from the Christian Science Monitor, traveled to Nouméa, New Caledonia, the “Paris of the South Pacific,” for some rest and recreation.

Even after their break in civilization, Tregaskis remembered that the two men still felt “punchy” and described both as “exhausted, dirty and miserable.” Unfortunately, the mosquitos in Nouméa proved to be ferocious adversaries, preventing them from getting any sleep at night, and the hot days, combined with plumbing problems that interfered with proper bathing, caused the correspondents to become so disgusted that they came to welcome any kind of change, no matter how violent it might be. They soon had their opportunity, as they received permission from Colonel Robert H. Williams, commander of the First Marine Parachute Battalion, to participate in one of its practice jumps.

After hard and deadly action on Guadalcanal, the battalion had been sent to New Caledonia for rest and reorganization at a site near the Tontouta River that came to be known as Camp Kaiser, named for Second Lieutenant Walter W. Kaiser, killed in action at Gavutu. “Gordon and I thought a jump would be a novelty, and besides, I was tired of covering the war and I thought if anything went wrong, like, for instance, landing incorrectly and breaking a leg,” Tregaskis recalled, “I would have a good excuse for going back to the U.S.”

The night before the jump, Tregaskis and Walker joined Williams in his quarters, a square, prefabricated house known as a Dallas hut, equipped with a wooden floor, board roof, and foldable screens to keep out the dreaded mosquitoes. Williams invited a few of his staff officers to meet the correspondents at a small party. “There were powerful refreshments, and after a few hours of drinking, most of the assembly were feeling no pain whatever,” Tregaskis remembered.

One of the officers, a gruff lieutenant colonel, was formally polite to the reporters, but stressed to them that jumping out of a plane with a parachute was “a really dangerous affair unless you knew how to do it,” relating to them a “few gory incidents” in which paratroopers had their parachutes fail to open—a calamity that had proved fatal. The officer belligerently pronounced: “Tregaskis, I’ll bet you two dollars you break your ass.”

Because the occasion was supposed to be jovial, Tregaskis laughed and accepted the challenge. Attempting to lessen the tension, Williams took Tregaskis to the hut’s door. At the top were four front steps and Williams, standing at the top and leaping off, demonstrated the proper method for landing. “Twice I jumped down the four steps, somersaulted at the bottom, and the second time the performance was said to be satisfactory,” Tregaskis remembered.

With Williams content with his pupil’s progress, they went back to “the serious business of drinking,” said Tregaskis. He noted when whiskey was available in New Caledonia in those days, “one made the most of it. I had seen servicemen pay as much as $125 for a quart of American rye.”

The next morning, Tregaskis and Walker lined up with the paratroopers at the airfield. Showing no signs of having a hangover, the lieutenant colonel who had made the bet with Tregaskis reminded him that he had not forgotten about it, and he was determined to collect his money when the correspondent “broke my posterior this morning.”

Conditions were ideal for the jump, with gentle winds and sunny skies. On his plane, Tregaskis was second in line, jumping after his rival. As the aircraft took off and slowly gained altitude, Tregaskis recalled that his nerves were on edge. “The roar of the slipstream, the sounds of the big propellers and engines, and the rush of wind over the metal wings, were huge and frightening,” he said.

When ordered to stand up and snap his static line to a cable that ran the length of the plane’s cabin, Tregaskis experienced a sinking feeling. He saw his nemesis jump through the open door and disappear to the aircraft’s rear “like a sack of cement evaporating.” Then it was the correspondent’s turn. One of the paratroopers later kidded Tregaskis that he had to be kicked out of the plane, but the correspondent did not feel any blows, as he remembered being incapable of feeling anything but shock at that point.

Once he was through the door and out of the plane and into the roaring wind, it only took a few seconds for Tregaskis to feel the “good hard jerk on the webbing straps around my shoulders. I didn’t know exactly what had happened, but I knew my chute was opening, and I had held onto my emergency pack so that it didn’t hit me in the nose.”

Grabbing his risers and looking up, Tregaskis could see that his parachute had opened without any snags—a sight he described as “a gracious and benign bloom that seemed to be suspending me dead-still in mid-air. I looked down and saw that the ground was miraculously keeping its distance.” He could also see “puffs of white down” where other parachutists had landed safely.

Tregaskis’s problems came when he tried to land. The ground rushed up at him at a terrifying speed and he felt as if he was “falling with no chute at all.” He kept his feet apart and bent his knees but still hit the ground with great force, conking himself on the back of the head so hard that he saw stars. Completing a backward somersault, he found himself lying somewhat beaten up, but at least on the ground. “I had come in backwards and rolled over my least vulnerable part,” he noted.

One of the paratroopers helped him out of his harness and Tregaskis stood up and saw Walker across the field—lighter in weight, Walker had come down at a slower speed and managed to keep his footing when he hit the ground.

As for the lieutenant colonel that had badgered Tregaskis, the correspondent could see him limping as he walked toward him, and “as he came closer, I could see that his nose was red and swollen, a real honker, as we used to say when we were kids. As he had climbed out of the plane, his emergency chute had biffed him in the nose; landing, he had smashed into a naoli tree.”

Even in his miserable condition, the officer laughed at his situation, proving, said Tregaskis, that he was “a good guy; so I didn’t have the heart to ask him to pay the two dollars.”

Wallace Terry and Vietnam

Outgoing

Washington, DC, May 1967

It had been two years since the US Marines stormed ashore at Da Nang, South Vietnam, marking the first major deployment of American combat forces in the conflict in Southeast Asia. The war was “consuming the White House the way civil rights once did,” noted Wallace H. Terry, the first Black correspondent working for Time, the nation’s leading newsweekly.

Terry had an idea. Why not, he asked Richard M. Clurman, the magazine’s chief of correspondents, send a reporter to survey the contributions made by Black soldiers putting their lives on the line fighting the Communists? “I do not have in my mind going myself,” Terry recalled. “This could be dangerous.” Who would take care of his wife, Janice, and their three children if he never returned?

Clurman did the unexpected and asked Terry to tackle the assignment. Because it would be for only a brief time, Terry agreed to go. After all, he reasoned, one month did not appear to be “enough time to get killed.”

Despite his initial bravado, Wally Terry could not help but think about the worst that could happen to him in Vietnam. He sat down at a typewriter and produced a heartfelt goodbye letter for Janice. It read:

"If anything happens to me, and I do not come back to you, know always that I love you more than life. Take good care of our babies, Little Wally, Lisa Victoria and David Christopher (I love to hear the ring of their names), for they are me and they are you. Give them what money cannot buy, and that is the love which we have shared and always will together. Let their lives grow straight just as our love did. And let them remember that their father is but one small part of the world which their mother gave them. For more of what life has given to me has been their mother. . . . My much better self. I love you to distraction. I always have, my darling, and I always will. Life and death are thus as one. A kiss for wife and babies from papa san."

Terry returned home safe and sound. During his time in Vietnam, he proved to his superiors at the magazine that he would not flinch at witnessing the horrors of war. When Clurman needed a correspondent he could count on when an opening occurred in Time’s Saigon bureau, he again turned to Terry, who accepted the assignment. News about the Vietnam War, Terry noted, had become “the only story to drive civil rights from the front pages.”

This time, however, he did not travel alone. Janice and their three children lived in Singapore while he worked in Saigon and saw them when he could. Janice also visited her husband from time to time. At the hotel in Singapore, its manager had handed Terry a letter he had been holding for him. Reading it, Terry learned that the Black officer who had served as his guide on his last trip to Vietnam had been killed in action; he had only forty-eight days left on his tour of duty.

Terry had discovered a valuable lesson about the deadly reality of war: Anything could happen to anybody at any time. “In Vietnam, you could walk around the corner in the street and get killed. The war was, really, in effect, everywhere,” he said.

Incoming

Embassy Hotel, Saigon, South Vietnam, 1968

It had been an exhausting and traumatic day for Time correspondent Wallace Terry. Trying to get some rest in his hotel room, he was startled upright in his bed, gasping for air. He finally managed to get to sleep but bolted awake, his body wracked with chest pains. Too frightened to let himself fall back to sleep, his first thought was to seek help from John Cantwell, his Time colleague, whose room was on the floor above. Terry, however, realized that Cantwell was not there. He was in Hong Kong visiting his wife and children.

Another name popped up in Terry’s mind: Smitty, who was also staying at the hotel. If anyone could help, he could. The three-hundred-pound wheeler-dealer former army medic had left military service but stayed in Vietnam to provide his expertise to the US Agency for International Development.

“He’d know if I were having a heart attack, I thought, with some confidence,” Terry remembered.

After banging on Smitty’s door, a voice thundered at him: “Goddam Wally. What the hell you want at this hour?”

Terry tried to explain.

“What you eat today?” Smitty asked.

“Not much of anything,” Terry responded.

“Hmm. Well, what were you doin’? Where’d they send ya’?”

Terry told Smitty about flying four missions with the Vietnamese air force, including streaking at treetop level to strike enemy positions, narrowly avoiding midair collisions because the pilots insisted on flying at the same altitude, and getting lost over the Mekong Delta with no view of the ground below.

Smitty laughed. He informed the reporter there was nothing to worry about. The explanation was simple.

“Oh, man, you just scared.”