Mich

Michele Is Missing

The Green Berets named a search-and-clear mission after her. Landing lights and television cameras were trained on her when she visited an aircraft carrier, and the sailors were later treated to an "Hour with Michele" over closed-circuit sets. After she spent a night in the field with the 4th Infantry Division near Pleiku, the soldiers nailed a sign to a tree: "Michele Slept Here." But last week Michele Ray, the red- haired, 29-year-old French beauty and ex-model, was nowhere to be found: she had been captured by the Viet Cong.

Considering the daredevil way she operated, it came as no surprise. She once drove a Renault all the way from Argentina to Alaska, and the same idea occurred to her while covering the war as a freelancer in Viet Nam. Why not drive from Ca Mau, at the nation's southern tip, to the Demilitarized Zone in the north along 600 miles of ragged road and Viet Cong? In December she started out, her car sandbagged as a defense against land mines.

During the first 400 miles of her trip, Michele encountered the Viet Cong only once--on Christmas Day. Cheerfully pointing to herself, she kept repeating "Phap," the Vietnamese word for French. The startled Viet Cong gave her a cup of tea and sent her on her way. The incident may have left her a mite overconfident. When military officers at De Due warned her not to proceed any farther along Highway 1 because North Vietnamese regiments were thought to be in the vicinity, she blithely disregarded them.

Plunging ahead, she was forced to stop two miles north of De Due when she reached a five-foot-wide ditch that had been hacked out of the highway by the Viet Cong. As soon as she climbed out of the car to take pictures, three Viet Cong took her captive. According to peasants who witnessed the proceedings, the V.C.s forced her to drive off the highway to the edge of a sugar-cane field. There they all got out; while Michele munched a piece of sugar cane, which she asked her captors to cut for her, the Viet Cong set up a booby trap in the Renault with a grenade and a 155-mm. howitzer shell. Then they marched their prisoner off.

In the next few days, U.S. troops operating in the area failed to locate Michele. Last week a captured Viet Cong reported that she was unharmed and being taken to the Viet Cong mountain headquarters.

NEWSPAPERS

Not Just Words--But Action

Seventeen-year-old Lisa had run off with a federal-parole violator. Her distraught mother phoned the police, then the FBI and finally "Action Line," the Detroit Free Press's column devoted to helping people solve their problems. It was "Action Line" that got action. The column's ten-man staff traced the couple through eleven states before locating them. When they returned to Detroit, "Action Line" helped them get married, then persuaded the probation officer to overlook the parole violation. The column even found a job for the new husband. Not all newspapers follow up readers' complaints quite so thoroughly. But more than two dozen U.S. papers are offering this service and finding that it makes good copy, too. Most of the credit is given to Bill Steven, who as the imaginative editor of the Houston Chronicle started a column called "Watchem" in 1961. The Action-Lining papers often receive hundreds of letters a week and thousands of telephone calls, try to answer as many as possible and print the most interesting requests. They locate missing persons and documents, investigate consumer frauds, unsnarl red tape, straighten out social security and medicare payments.

Community Rapport. Above all, the action columns strengthen local coverage, the first responsibility of today's newspaper. To their own surprise, some editors have found the column to be the most popular in the paper. "It establishes rapport with readers who have drifted away from newspapers over the past years," says Miami Herald Executive Editor John McMullan. To make sure its "Action Line" column got action, the Washington Evening Star put its Pulitzer prizewinning crime reporter, Miriam Ottenberg, on the job. Checking out a complaint about a mortgage foreclosure, Miss Ottenberg discovered that a deed to a house was a forgery. Her investigation put an end to the activities of a band of forging frauds. When an anguished woman called to say that her son-in-law was about to take his life, Miriam quickly checked out the story and had the man disarmed in the nick of time. Monster Problems. Not all the kinks have been worked out of the action columns. "It could become a Frankenstein," says Chicago American Managing Editor Luke Carroll, who worries about all the readers' complaints that necessarily go unanswered. As far as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the St. Louis Globe-Democrat are concerned, the column did become a monster, and both papers killed it. "It got to be a matter of the same trees being trimmed and the same holes in the streets being filled," says Globe-Democrat Managing Editor George Killenberg.

The column also encourages a lot of crank calls and crazy requests. But the Detroit Free Press, for one, has found a way to turn the tables on readers supplying bum information. When a woman asked for help to recover her children who had gone to "visit" some friends in New York and then disappeared, the paper spent a few days investigating. Then "Action Line" curtly replied in print: "That was no visit. You gave your children away outright. You found a lonely, childless couple, then kept dunning them for money by threatening to take the children back. That's why they moved. If you want 'em back, stop drinking, throw out that guy you are living with, get a job and hire an attorney."

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