With North Vietnamese rocket and artillery fire raking their converted tennis-court helipad, TIME Correspondents Roy Rowan and William Stewart, along with Photographers Dirck Halstead and Mark Godfrey, choppered out of Tan Son Nhut airport last Tuesday shortly before Communist advance units entered downtown "Ho Chi Minh city." Rowan's and Stewart's accounts of the final American evacuation, cabled from the U.S.S. Blue Ridge in the South China Sea, appear in this week's Indochina cover section.

Already safely out of Indochina were the other men who had covered the disintegration of Cambodia and South Viet Nam for TIME: Peter Range, William McWhirter, David Aikman and former Phnom-Penh Stringer Steven Heder. All looked back on two months of dangerous work during which they often dodged rocket-borne shrapnel while moving among insurgent armies and panicked refugees; they took sad professional satisfaction in being able to report the end of the tragic story. News of the evacuation also stirred memories among the correspondents who have reported Indochina's wars for TIME since our Saigon bureau opened in 1966. Their recollections of the fallen capital, and the lost American crusade headquartered there, begin on page 16.

On the receiving end of the cables from Indochina, writers, editors and reporter-researchers in New York have also shouldered an exhausting work load. Since the South Vietnamese rout began in mid-March, the special Indochina section has logged 70-and 80-hour weeks, producing the articles that went with seven of the past eight TIME covers. The staff, under Senior Editors John Elson, Jason McManus and Ronald Kriss, has consisted of members of both our Nation and World sections. The principal contributors: Associate Editors Frank Merrick, Burton Pines and William Smith, Reporter-Researchers Marta Dorion, Sara Medina, Betty Suyker, Susan Reed and Genevieve Wilson. Staff Writer Richard Bernstein, our resident China-watcher, who traveled through the putative "domino" nations of Southeast Asia before joining TIME in 1973, has written many of the main narrative stories during this period.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.