Once upon a Distant War.

William Prochnau has written a wonderful book about the early years of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. He tells the story by recounting the trials and triumphs of a half-dozen young reporters who fought U.S. and Vietnamese officials - and even their own editors - to get the truth to American readers.

They succeeded, at great personal and professional risk and under the most difficult conditions, in reporting the truth about the failure of the American effort to build a stable government in South Vietnam. Beyond that, they changed the way the U.S. press covers American wars. Never again would reporters assume that the military was telling the truth; never again would the military assume that the press was its ally. The bruises of those early years would still be felt three decades later in Grenada and Kuwait.

It was not a question of being anti-war. These reporters in those years did not question whether the U.S. should be in Vietnam. As one of them said, "I thought war was a glorious adventure. We all believed in the cause." They thought the war was right, that the problems were caused by flawed strategy and poor American and Vietnamese leadership.

The roll call of the correspondents is short: Malcolm Browne and Peter Arnett of the Associated Press, Neil Sheehan of the United Press International, David Halberstam of The New York Times, and Charles Mohr and Mert Perry of Time magazine. Other reporters came and went; big-foot foot columnists like Joseph Alsop "parachuted" in for brief, carefully-chaperoned visits that served only to confirm their entering bias. The six young reporters comprised the entire American resident press corps in 1962 and 1963, the years when the United States started down the slippery slope into its Vietnam quagmire.

They were indeed young. Sheehan, 25 in 1962, was the baby of the group; Mohr, at 34, was the oldest. They came from varied backgrounds and places: Sheehan from Massachusetts, Browne from New York, Mohr from Loup City, Nebraska. Halberstam's family had moved around the country, winding up in the New York suburbs. Arnett was a New Zealander who stood only five foot six with his boots on; Mohr, Sheehan, and Halberstam were well over six feet tall. Sheehan was a moody Irishman and recovering alcoholic. Browne was a loner who stood a little apart from the rest of this band of brothers; Halberstam was gregarious, always seeking companionship.

Tall or short, loud or quiet, all of them were excited by their new assignment. Halberstam was the only one who had covered a war; his last assignment had been the Congo. Mohr had worked in Washington, where he had covered the White House, and came to Saigon from New Delhi. The others made up for their inexperience with energy, aggressiveness, and long hours.

These young correspondents in Saigon were the first of a new breed. Prochnau explains why they were different:

"In this brief but crucial period they [established] the skeptical standards for a new generation of war correspondents ... provocative, new, adversarial standards that broke from the old and would be used to chronicle America's disaster in Vietnam and events long after."

But they paid a price: "In so doing, this small group of young men would bring down upon themselves the wrath of every power structure they confronted - the White House, the Pentagon, the South Vietnamese government, the old guard of the press itself, even their own bosses...."

All the key miscalculations that haunted American policy during the big war of 1965-1975 are foreshadowed here, from officials who would not or could not admit that they might be wrong, to fake accounts of enemy soldiers killed in battles that never took place. Whenever one of the Saigon reporters got past the lies to produce a story telling the truth, the top American diplomats and military men in Saigon would simply deny the story - and then order an investigation to discover who talked to the reporter.

In Washington, it was the same, only more so. President Kennedy, infuriated by Halberstam's reporting, told his top advisors: "Goddammit, I don't want you reading those stories in the Times. We're not going to let our policy be run by some 28-year-old kid." Finally, after more bad-news reports by Halberstam, Kennedy called in Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger and asked him to pull Halberstam out of Vietnam. Sulzberger, to his lasting credit, ignored the President.

Prochnau focuses on the six reporters, and he tells their story well. A former newspaperman with first-hand experience in Vietnam, Prochnau captures the special quality of the place and time. At the same time, he has produced a thoroughly researched, authoritative, and compelling account of the whole Vietnam struggle during the critical years of 1962 and 1963.

I made my only extended visit to Vietnam in the fall of 1967, when I was White House correspondent for the Minneapolis Tribune. Before departing for Saigon, I wrote to Ronald Ross, the Tribune's smart and skeptical resident correspondent in Vietnam, and asked him, among other things, what I ought to read to prepare for the trip. His answer was deadpan - and deadly serious: "All you need to read are Catch-22, The Quiet American, and Alice in Wonderland."

Ross's counsel was sound, and it is validated again and again as one reads Prochnau's book. It is all there: the refusal of top U.S. officials in Saigon and Washington to see, much less admit, that things were going badly; the efforts of the Kennedy administration to play down the extent of American involvement; the surreal atmosphere of Saigon; President Ngo Dinh Diem and his power-hungry family; the Buddhist monks who burned themselves alive at high noon in the marketplace to protest against the government.

Often the attempts to control news were flat-out ludicrous. On December 11, 1961, a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier came steaming up the Saigon River. Forty U.S. Army helicopters were lashed to its deck. Ship and cargo were plainly visible to thousands of spectators. But when reporters asked the U.S. military mission about it, officials would not even confirm that the carrier was there - let alone admit the obvious fact that Americans were about to start flying combat missions in support of South Vietnamese troops. It was an inauspicious beginning for the press-military relationship in Vietnam.

Part of the problem was that this new breed of correspondent was covering a new kind of war. Unlike their older brothers who chronicled World War II and Korea, the young reporters were not writing about a conflict in which "our" side clearly wore the white hats. There were no "front lines" in Vietnam, no territory won or lost. The enemy fought from ambush in the jungles or across rice paddies, fading away into the bush when he was done killing, leaving behind mines, booby traps, and sharpened bamboo stakes to mangle the unwary. Highways safe to travel in daylight became death traps at sunset; the night belonged to the men in black pajamas.

If the young reporters are deservedly the good guys in Prochnau's story, they are no plaster saints. They drink, they shout, they make love, they curse, they exchange insults with their editors. And they take sides: They regard U.S. Ambassador Frederick Nothing and General Paul Harkins, head of the U.S. military mission, as enemies. Their best friends are junior officers living dangerously in the countryside as advisors to Vietnamese military units. These men in the boondocks know what is going on and that their bosses in Saigon are lying about it, so they use the reporters and the reporters use them in the oldest transaction in journalism.

In the short term, the young reporters seemed to have won. Kennedy, as always hyper-sensitive to press criticism, denounced their reports - but took action that conformed to some of their goals: Diem was ousted by a military coup authorized by Kennedy; Nothing and Harkins were sent home. And Halberstam and Browne won Pulitzer Prizes for their Vietnam reportage.

But of course nagging questions remain, as they do about every aspect of our Vietnam disaster. Did all the reporters' hard work really accomplish anything? Nothing and Harkins and the Diems disappeared, but they were replaced by Ellsworth Bunker and General William Westmoreland and Nguyen Van Thieu, and U.S. policy did not change. The early failures of strategy and tactics recorded by Sheehan, Halberstam, and the others were repeated - at much greater human and material cost - for 10 long, bloody years under Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.

Why did the American press ignore Vietnam for so long? The New York Times was the only American newspaper to assign a correspondent full-time to Saigon in those critical early years. Where were The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and other great regional newspapers? Was it a matter of money - or failure to recognize an important story?

In a broader sense, why did the U.S. public pay so little attention to the deepening American involvement in Vietnam? Was it because most of the media ignored the developing situation? Or was it because the Kennedy administration succeeded in keeping the growing U.S. investment of men and money out of the public eye? Or were Americans simply preoccupied with Berlin, Cuba and the glitter of the New Frontier?

And finally, the eternal Vietnam question: How could so many supposedly bright men - John Kennedy, Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, and Dean Rusk for openers - have been so wrong? Why could they not see, as the reporters did, that the war wasn't working?

Prochnau's fine book raises these questions again. It offers no definitive answers but provides plenty of clues. Indeed, this volume ought to be required reading for anyone involved in making U.S. foreign policy: It reminds us to watch our step when we march down that road paved with good intentions.

Charles W. Bailey, a former Washington correspondent for the Minneapolis Tribune, is a member of the editorial advisory board of The Washington Monthly.