At an advance air field in Korea last week one of TIME-LIFE International's men ran into a couple of TIME readers. He asked them what they thought of TIME'S coverage of the Korean war.

Said Corporal Darland W. Headsteath, of San Francisco: "A copy of TIME gets pretty dog-eared around here by the time we all get to see it. I have to hunt a quiet corner to read mine. If I don't, someone picks it up as soon as I lay it down.

"We're so close to the real thing that it's hard to get an idea of what's going on in the war. About all we can gather here is that our F-51s are flying day and night loaded with rockets, bombs and machine gun bullets. I've been working 15 to 18 hours a day maintaining these airplanes, and when I get a chance to read TIME I feel a little more like a general running this show than a mechanic with a socket wrench in my hand.

"The War in Asia section is an accurately written account of the part of the war I've seen, and it's certainly reassuring in the way it tells that this whole thing has a much greater effect than just a fight for this beaten up countryside."

Sergeant Robert G. Biesecker, of Bertrand, Nebr., who is in charge of plotting maps for tactical reconnaissance at this advanced fighter plane base, had this to say:

"From early reports we had, the people back home consider this just a police action. After reading the last issue of TIME I feel a lot better about the whole thing. It makes these long days make a lot more sense. These TIME stories give us an idea of what we're fighting for actually, and anyone who reads them will soon forget the idea that this is nothing more than a little skirmish."

At present, 2,525 copies of each issue of TIME are being flown to Korea by the Far East Air Forces for distribution to our armed forces there. Through the Eighth Army's Intelligence Section, an additional 1,000 copies are also being provided for Korean civilians (and distributed by the United States Information Service) in Pusan and the beachhead area.

These copies are from TIME'S Pacific edition, which has by far the most difficult transportation and communications problem of TIME'S four international editions. It is printed in Honolulu and Tokyo from Cellophane proofs and negatives flown from the U.S. Then it has to be distributed (while the news is still fresh) from Hawaii west to Afghanistan, from Japan south to New Zealand.

The week the Korean war began, TIME-LIFE International had finally succeeded in organizing Saturday delivery in New Zealand. Elsewhere throughout the Far East and Pacific areas--including Korea--most of the Pacific edition's 160,000 readers can read their copies at the same time U.S. citizens are reading theirs.

Since the Korean war began, we have been receiving requests for permission to reprint TIME stories--especially from War in Asia--from Stockholm to Bombay. The most widely requested story to date has been "The Cat in the Kremlin," our July 17 cover story on Stalin.

As this issue goes to press, TIME-LIFE International has learned that TIME is again circulating (clandestinely) inside Communist China--which should be news for TIME readers there who wrote us after China fell, asking if there wasn't some way that they could again get their weekly copies of TIME.

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