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“The story of Company A” by Associated Press team Peter Arnett and Horst Faas had impact far beyond its page one presentations.
The piece, which told of exhausted soldiers rejecting an order to go into battle in Vietnam, caused repercussions in the U.S. military and directed the world’s attention to another unhappy facet of the Asian war.
Winners Arnett and Faas are among the most experienced in the Vietnam press corps, and frequently have been recognized by the profession’s highest honors. Both are Pulitzer Prize winners—Arnett won the international reporting prize in 1966 and Faas the news photography award in 1965. The previous year Faas had won OPC’s Robert Capa gold medal, for his Vietnam exploits.
The pair frequently worked together on stories in the field. However, working alone, either can double in brass: reporter Arnett sometimes illustrates his stories with his own photographs; photographer Faas often writes stories to go with his pictures.
Arnett is said to have spent more time in the field with the troops than any other correspondent in Vietnam. He was the first to reveal use of riot-control gas by South Vietnamese forces. “The scattered actions and frontless nature of this war make it absolutely necessary for a reporter to get out whit the units that are doing the actual fighting.”
The 35-year old New Zealander started as a desk man on the Southland Times in Invergill, New Zealand, while attending college at night. He later worked on the Wellington, New Zealand, Standard, the Sydney Sun in Australia, and the Bangkok World in Thailand. The latter paper sent him to Laos to set up an edition in Veintiane. Arnett began working as part-time correspondent fr the AP after a new regime shut the paper down in 1960. Eventually he became a full-time staff member based in Jakarta, Indonesia. Fourteen months after his arrival, he was expelled for writing a famine story which pleased the government, then, in 1962, he went to Vietnam.
That was the year Faas arrived. Since joining AP’s Bonn Bureau in 1956 Faas had been photographing in Algeria, in the Congo (where rebel troops had forced him to eat his United Nations pass), and Berlin, Faas, now 35, had begun his photographic career at 19 with the Keystone agency in his native Germany.
In Vietnam, he has gone out regularly with helicopter missions and dug in with ground forces to photograph the war. his pictures have shown what the war does to the Vietnamese people living in the hamlets and villages of combat areas.