A JOURNALIST brings not only talent and effort to any story he handles, but also the store of experience that lies behind him. In some cases that pattern of the past has little import; in others it becomes quite important. The latter was true for Correspondent John Mulliken who did the reporting for this week's cover story. Mulliken and General Johnson have quite a lot in common.

Mulliken's exposure to army ways came early. A graduate of Culver Military Academy (and Dartmouth), he served as a combat mechanized-cavalry lieutenant in four of the five major European theater campaigns of World War II and won the Silver and Bronze Stars. He got his Silver Star in October 1944 when he was a 22-year-old second lieutenant with the U.S. 7th Armored Division then fighting in The Netherlands. He was leading a platoon in a unit that was locked in combat with German forces for control of a canal when the Germans broke through. Mulliken and two of his men fought a delaying action while the rest of his platoon withdrew. Dug in, the three helped hold off the Germans for nine hours.

The Bronze Star came later, for administrative work as commander of a prison camp. And then when he was mustered out of the service, Mulliken may have thought that his experience with war had ended. Not so. He went on to cover, as a LIFE reporter, the Hungarian revolution, the Lebanon and Suez crises, the Congo uprising and the Viet Nam War. He has been TIME's Pentagon correspondent since 1963.

The military memories of the rest of the cover-story team vary from distant to close involvement. Researcher Lu Anne Aulepp was five when World War II broke out, remembers tearful farewells to her two brothers when they went off to war. Writer Bruce Henderson was still in high school when World War II ended, but he was an Associated Press reporter in Buenos Aires in 1955 when Peron was overthrown. Later, as TIME's man in the Caribbean, he covered the fall of Batista and the emergence of Castro in Cuba.

Nation Editor Michael Demarest is practically surrounded by military tradition: his father was a U.S. cavalry officer; his father-in-law was a U.S. Air Force officer; his wife Peppina, a sergeant in the Air Force, operated a Link trainer in India during World War II. Mike preferred the sea. As a quartermaster in the U.S. merchant marine in World War II he served on tankers, Liberty ships and troop transports, survived a German submarine attack that blew up half his convoy.

Cover Artist Boris Chaliapin, who at a tender age survived the Russian Revolution, does not claim any military history--except what he records at the end of his brush. He found General Johnson a most engaging subject, but was dismayed by the fact that the general scheduled the sittings for 7:30 a.m. Mrs. Johnson had breakfast ready but, sighed Boris, who is essentially a night person, "I'm not hungry that early."

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