Famed War Correspondent Says Goodbye

After half a century literally in the trenches, my friend, the legendary war reporter Joseph L. Galloway, has penned what he calls his final regular newspaper piece this week. Joe covered at least seven foreign conflicts with distinction but is perhaps best known for the book he co-authored on a tragic Vietnam battle and its aftermath, We Were Soldiers Once..and Young, later made into a Mel Gibson movie. He wrote for me at E&P and penned the intro to my book on Iraq and the media, So Wrong for So Long. Since the Iraq invasion, he has been one of the most frequent and eloquent critics of the handling of that war, often in his regular columns for Knight Ridder and then McClatchy. In his final column he hails current McClatchy D.C. chief John Walcott as his best editor ever, going back to previous jobs. More later, but for now an excerpt from the final column. -- Greg Mitchell

I was a state bureau chief for United Press International before I could legally take a drink or vote. My friends and mentors were former President Harry Truman and former governor and presidential candidate Alf M. Landon. I stood in courthouse corridors on smoke breaks and talked to Richard Hickock and Perry Edward Smith, the "In Cold Blood" killers. On a freezing cold midnight I watched as the state of Kansas hanged Lowell Lee Andrews by the neck until death for shooting his mom and dad for the insurance money.

In 1964, at age 24, I headed off to Asia to cover a war I was certain was coming in a little-known country called South Vietnam. Within four months the first American troops, Marines, were landing on the beaches of Danang, and I was right behind them.

It would be 16 years before I returned to work in the United States - years of wars, coups d'etat, disasters natural and otherwise in places like Vietnam, Laos, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, East Timor, Afghanistan, the U.S.S.R.

You grew up fast covering the infantry at war in the jungles and mountain highlands and broad rice paddies of Vietnam. Seventy reporters, photographers and cameramen, many of them friends, were killed covering the war.