Where the Action Is

Like a swarm of angry locusts, the helicopters descended on the soccer field at Dongxoai. Out of them poured Vietnamese rangers, who were greeted by a hail of Viet Cong fire. Three fell within a minute; the rest bolted for a ditch by a road. But one hulking figure, a Leica camera bobbing about his neck, threw himself against a hut and started snapping pictures. In the bloody melee, he took some memorable ones: a ranger as he was hit, his hand clutched to his stomach; a Viet Cong, his head popped up over a bunker to stare with surprise at the camera lens; a fallen ranger and the Viet Cong who shot him, barely 30 feet apart.

Safely back in Saigon, Associated Press Photographer Horst Faas put his pictures on the Wirephoto transmitter, rubbed a shrapnel nick on the back of his pudgy hand, and mused: "If they had used more mortars, they would have killed us all." His venture into a jungle village two weeks ago was only one example of Faas's daring and reourcefulness in getting the most poignant war photos that have come out of Viet Nam. He likes to show his latest pictures to anyone who will look. "That," he says with fierce pride, "is a Horst Faas picture."

Coldly Clinical. Faas has seen more combat than any other foreigner in Viet Nam. He has an uncanny instinct for finding out where the action is and getting there fast. His intelligence network, say admirers, can be second only to that of the Viet Cong. He works so hard that he is miles ahead of the competition. He is coldly clinical about his grisly work, but then he has to be. "Otherwise," says a reporter, "with what he sees every day, he'd go right out of his mind."

Faas was born in Berlin in 1933, worked in a darkroom for a photo agency, joined the A.P. in 1955. He shot much of the fighting in the Congo.

Often he bribed Congolese soldiers with Polaroid snapshots--a practice that enabled him to be in the right place to take the last picture of Patrice Lumumba as he was bundled from a plane to the truck that would carry him to his execution. From the Congo, Faas went to Algeria, where he snapped a number of O.A.S. murders daily and risked inviting his own. When a picture he took of one O.A.S. murder made the papers, a man stopped him in the street, invited him into a cafe for an absinthe, then pulled a pistol on him. "I was not going to plead with him," Faas recalls. "I heard him cocking the pistol. I thought, 'Now I get it.' He fired twice, and zip, zip, a round went by each ear. Then he bought me another absinthe. 'Next time we kill you.' "

Checking the Troops. Faas was spared a next time because he was transferred to Viet Nam in 1962. His life is in no less danger now, but he has learned how to take care of himself. "Before I go out with a unit, I check the troops," he explains. "Troops are good or troops are sloppy. If they are more interested in the chickens and ducks than in their packs, I don't go out with them." As the war escalates, Faas knows that his own chances of escaping unscathed are worsening. "Maybe after another battle," he said last week, "I'll just quit. That's the great advantage of being a civilian."

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