ALTHOUGH they have had their share of close calls, the TIME correspondents covering the war in Viet Nam had, until last week, come through unscathed. On Washington's Birthday, Pentagon Correspondent John Mulliken, on a two-month tour of duty in South Viet Nam, became our first casualty. He was wounded --fortunately only slightly--by a sniper's bullet while on a search-and-destroy mission with the U.S. 25th Infantry Division's 2nd Brigade in a patch of woods 20 miles northwest of Saigon. The bullet drilled a clean hole through the heel, missed the bones. Mulliken, a combat veteran of World War II, took the matter lightly, cabled his wife from the hospital about the precise area of his injury: IF YOU WANTED TO

SHOOT YOURSELF, THIS IS THE SPOT YOU WOULD CHOOSE TO DO THE LEAST DAMAGE. To the Silver and Bronze stars he already holds, his colleagues in the Washington bureau plan to add a third citation: the Order of Achilles.

IN the nine years since Ghana became independent, TIME has been banned, burned, scissored, or otherwise censored in that country so many times that we've lost count. This was thin-skinned Kwame Nkrumah's way of registering his displeasure with stories that were frank and detailed about the "Redeemer's" oppressive regime and his economic mismanagement of a promising young nation. Another form of damaging official harassment has been the on-and-off exclusion --and in one case the arrest--of our reporters.

When Nkrumah's leftist police state was toppled by a military coup last week, TIME'S editors were eager for coverage. First off the mark was Correspondent Friedel Ungeheuer, based in neighboring Nigeria, who flew into Accra a few hours after the coup and was able to get his file to the editors just under the Saturday-night deadline.

Significant as the immediate news was, both Writer John Blashill, who toured South and West Africa in January 1965, and Senior Editor Edward Hughes, who reported to TIME from Africa for 21 years in the '50s, envisaged a story that would place the coup in the framework of recent African history. To this end, correspondents tapped their sources in London, Paris, Washington and several posts in Africa itself. Writer Blashill found especially useful the perceptive chapter on Ghana in a new book, African Powder Keg, by Ronald Matthews, our correspondent in Tunisia. A source closer to home, a Ghanaian student working as a file clerk in Manhattan's Time & Life Building, proved knowledgeable about the new leaders in Ghana. His cousin is one of the top men in the new regime.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.