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.
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?”
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.
“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.”
“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.”
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