Mr. McArthur had been in Vietnam since 1965; Messrs. Osnos and Cloud for about a year. They all agree that despite their own best efforts, people back home have a skewed view of Vietnam and the war. They give vivid accounts of what they found there, starting with Mr. Osnos's surprise when he first arrived ("When you get off the plane, somehow, you expect to have to duck, mortars flying, and it's not like that at all"), and Mr. McArthur's account of how he went about assigning stories: "Everything had a tendency to get covered if you simply left it alone with ten more or less energetic newsmen doing the job. And you wouldn't say, 'Go do me atrocity stories,' or 'Go do me a pacification story' ... Occasionally you'd make some specific assignments, but it wasn't in some limited field or some limited range of what you might call emotional appeal."