AS the Viet Nam war grows bloodier, covering it becomes a more dangerous occupation for newsmen representing all media. Many correspondents are working under enemy fire--as ours were last week in the process of reporting for this issue's stories on the war. Bureau Chief William Rademaekers was based in combustible Saigon, as were Correspondents Don Sider, Peter Vanderwicken and John Cantwell. After covering the bitter fighting in Hue, Karsten Prager flew out to Danang to send his report.

Also in Hue early in the week was Correspondent David Greenway. Moving with a Marine company at the Citadel, Greenway decided to go forward with a squad that was assigned to knock out a North Vietnamese army machine-gun post. As the squad reached a wall still standing amid the rubble, a Marine stood up to look through what had been a window, and an enemy soldier shot him through the neck. Greenway and a medical corpsman dragged the victim to the company command post, and once out of the line of fire, laid him down on a road behind a burned-out bus.

There, three other newsmen joined to help carry the man back to the rear. Just as the newsmen picked up the dying Marine, an enemy mortar round landed a few yards from them, blowing them into a ditch. Shrapnel hit Greenway in the left leg. He was taken out of Hue in a helicopter and treated at the U.S. military hospital at Phu Bai.

At week's end, walking with a crutch, Greenway was back at work, but from his home in Hong Kong.

IT'S not necessarily who won or lost a particular contest, but how and why they came to be winners or losers and what it all means to the players and to the game. That, in sum, is our philosophy of how we should cover sports. And so our Sport team, headed by Senior Editor George G. Daniels, pushes aside the routine and instead seeks out insights that will fit stories into the larger context of what sports have to do with life.

In that search, Reporter Mark Goodman spent eleven days with this week's cover subject, Hockey Superstar Bobby Hull, observing the man at home, in his car, on the rink, at work on radio commercials, in his lawyer's office, in a bar, signing autographs in a barbershop. Part of the reporting and most of the in-house research for Sport is done by Researcher Geraldine Kirshenbaum, who is often amused when sports people get nervous about having a feminine reporter around. Some hockey public relations men tried to keep her away from the players "because their language is so terrible and these men would be embarrassed to have a girl hear it." She heard enough to confirm the point: the players' language is terrible. Key man on our Sport team is Charles Parmiter, who has been writing the section since 1961 and whose application of talent to subject matches the intensity of Bobby Hull devoting himself to hockey.

Together, Daniels, Parmiter, Goodman and Kirshenbaum go at their tasks in the belief that what we must aim to give the reader is not the results but the reasons.

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