By Dennis Brack

SAIGON Bureau Chief Marsh Clark was in Hong Kong last week for a week of much-needed rest and relaxation. Then President Nixon sent U.S. and South Vietnamese forces into Cambodia. But Clark and his men reacted with military dispatch. Swiftly, TIME'S team of correspondents was deploying to meet the magazine's needs.

From previous sessions with U.S. intelligence officers, Clark provided a description of the enemy's COSVN (Central Office for South Viet Nam) headquarters. Meanwhile, from Phnom-Penh, Veteran Far East Correspondent Louis Kraar cabled an analysis of the political repercussions in the Cambodian capital. South Viet Nam Correspondent Jim Willwerth described the military situation from his side of the line. In Saigon, Bob Anson pieced together a narrative of the events that led to the historic commitment. Burt Pines was already trailing Vietnamese armored units in his TIME & LIFE Jeep. As troops rolled into Prasaut, 20 miles across the border, Pines breakfasted with III Corps Commander Lieut. General Do Cao Tri, who invited him along for a helicopter inspection of the battlefield.

TIME'S domestic correspondents were no less active. In Washington, Simmons Fentress filed on the important factors considered by the President before he made his decision, Neil MacNeil reported on congressional leaders' reaction to the President's pre-TV speech briefing, and John Mulliken projected the frustrations of a soldier in South Viet Nam, gazing at a border that he may not cross.

Nor was the heavy reportorial action last week confined to the war. Covering the tide of student strikes and riots sweeping across the nation, San Francisco's Bill Marmon sadly noted that the violence at Berkeley "helped ease the cultural shock of coming home after 18 months in Viet Nam"--particularly when an enraged cop walloped him with his billy club while dispersing a crowd. The rage on both sides was especially evident to TIME'S campus "stringers" (part-time correspondents). "Watching one's friends throw rocks at police and reporters and wandering about the campus in eerie clouds of tear gas can be depressing and disconcerting," says Stanford Stringer Philip Taubman. "If you give half a damn for your school, you hate to see it in convulsions." One night last week Taubman found himself behind police lines when students let go a barrage of rocks and bricks. Some of the police were hit, and Taubman narrowly escaped serious injury when a heavy rock crashed two feet from his head. Next day San Francisco Bureau Chief Jesse Birnbaum produced a welcome crash helmet and gas mask.

The Cover: Top photograph by LIFE'S Larry Burrows. Lower picture by Dennis Brack, Black Star.

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