IT was 2:05 p.m. in New York ' City--3:05 the next morning in Viet Nam--when TIME'S direct Teletype from Saigon clacked out an ominous message: "Don't ring our receiver alarm bell. We must keep silent. Please do not call us. We will call you."

Not long afterward, Saigon Bureau Chief William Rademaekers put in the promised call. When the V.C. hit the city, he said, all hell broke loose within sight and sound of TIME'S villa. An M-16 rifle was in one hand, Rademaekers said, while he carried on a long-distance teletype "conversation" with Chief of Correspondents Dick Clurman. Somehow, he had to keep an eye cocked for Viet Cong, keep track of the fighting swirling through the city, and deploy his own reportorial forces.

Most of Rademaekers' men were on the job almost before they knew it. Correspondent John Cantwell was practically blown out of his Embassy Hotel bed by mortar fire. He raced to the roof and got a panoramic view of the battle for the Presidential Palace. Correspondent Wallace Terry who spent the night at a U.S. AID official's home, found himself in an ideal spot from which to view the fierce firefight for the U.S. embassy. Correspondents Don Sider and Glenn Troelstrup were already at Khe Sanh, where they were joined by David Greenway.

By week's end, just about everyone connected with TIME had moved into the villa--three Vietnamese employees, two of their wives, eight children and the three correspondents not in the field. Only one thing was certain, said Commanding Officer Rademaekers: "In a couple of days, the two ducks and one chicken now roaming the compound will have disappeared into cooking pots."

ON Dec. 7, 1967, a fire that gutted the top three floors of the Time & Life building on Avenue Matignon in Paris took the lives of Public Relations Director Jean de Wissocq and Personnel Officer Franc,oise Hirou. Last week, in a moving ceremony presided over by Ambassador Charles Bohlen, 31 French businessmen presented the Paris staff with a Germaine Richier sculpture, symbolizing both their sympathy and their friendship.

Banks, art galleries, hotels, couturiers, fur and perfume concerns all shared in the gift. "When TIME and LIFE moved to our famous quarter of Paris," said Gallery Owner Herve Odermatt in his presentation, "we here today were proud to become your neighbors. We come here tonight as friends to tell you that we share your mourning and your grief."

The statue, said Henry Luce III, who accepted it on behalf of his colleagues, was something he liked to think of as a token of French friendship for Americans. TIME'S gratitude, said Luce, was not that of "an individual visitor appreciating France, nor of a company doing business here. It is as neighbors on a particular street. It is as neighbors that we come to know each other best, and best share each other's problems."

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