War Correspondents Drawn to the Story : Media: Few reporters love battle, but the assignment is hard to resist. And once they are there, combat can be hard to leave behind.

For us, the war correspondent and combat photographer, a front-row seat at life’s ultimate existential act transcends everything else.

We go to war not because we love it but because of its challenge and our journalistic calling.

For many of us, it will be the biggest thing we will do in our lives. It will assure us lasting membership in one of the most exclusive clubs in the world.

War propels some of us far beyond where we intended to go. We are seduced by its journalistic glamour and romance. Some of us, the least likely, are drawn into it innocently enough through strange twists of fate.

Homer Bigart, who reported World War II, Korea and Vietnam and won two Pulitzer Prizes, never really gave it much thought. “It’s something that I personally drifted into. No great drive. . . . Certainly not the love for war.”

But once there, he pushed ahead because of the rivalry among correspondents. “I hated to be beaten. . . . I thought I’d be yellow if I left. You’d feel the same way. You wouldn’t want to admit that you had it.”

I never intended to go to Vietnam, never volunteered. I was part of the press buildup that matched the U.S. military buildup in the summer of 1965.

Once there, it became my life. I felt that sense of adventure that a war correspondent before me in Korea, the late Bob Considine, had written about:

“Every time a reporter picks up a story or swings aboard a plane on assignment, or spins a fresh sheet of copy paper into his typewriter, he shoots his roll--like a craps player going for broke.”

I feel that same excitement now.

I think often of what another war correspondent, Associated Press colleague Terry Anderson, who has been held hostage for nearly six years in Lebanon, said when he first went to cover the explosive Middle East. “After all, what kind of reporter could turn down the world’s top news story?”

Not Anderson, whose plight symbolizes the peril reporters face in many parts of this dangerous world.

Not Elizabeth Pond, a correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, who was held captive in Cambodia for 40 days by anti-government forces. With a gun pointed to her head, she was displayed as an American prisoner of war, blindfolded and marched through a gantlet of jeering villagers.

Not the three Cambodian reporters for the Associated Press, Mean Leang, Sang Hel and Sun Heang, who stayed behind to cover the fall of Phnom Penh in 1975 despite the genocide of the conquering Khmer Rouge forces.

We fondly called them the “Big Three.” Mean Leang worked in the office filing reports from the other two out in the field.

“I alone in office, losing contact with our guys,” he cabled at the end. “I feel rather trembling, do not know how to file our stories now. Maybe last cable today and forever.”

It was the last time he would file. A year later, he was executed.

Not Cathy Leroy, a 22-year-old photographer whose 90-pound frame was riddled with steel from her face to her legs during a North Vietnamese mortar attack.

Her concern was not with her swollen face covered with bandages, or her fractured jaw. She wanted only to get back to covering the war.

“Why do I want to stay?” she said through wired teeth. “I don’t know exactly. I guess I just want to. I want to take good pictures of the war, better than anybody else. So I have to be where things are happening.”

Soldiers are not the only casualties of war. The photos and plaques on the walls of news offices across the country attest to the toll our profession paid in the lives of war correspondents and combat photographers.

Two years ago we honored the 63 fallen journalists of the Vietnam War at a ceremony in Jeffersonville, N.Y. One of the speakers who could not speak because he was so choked with emotion was Huynh Cong Ut, whom we fondly called Nick.

Nick’s brother, Huynh Thanh My, an Associated Press photographer, was killed covering a battle in the Mekong Delta in 1965. In the true tradition of the war correspondent and photographer, Nick Ut stepped in and courageously took his brother’s place. He was 17 years old.

Eight years later, Nick won a Pulitzer Prize for his photo of a terrified Vietnamese girl running naked down a highway after an accidental napalm strike by South Vietnamese bombers seared her body.

Some war correspondents are walking casualties. Their hearts and minds never quite make the transition back to what the GIs in Vietnam called the real world.

They are unable to find their place or their meaning. Some are unable to write again. Others, like the old soldiers in the barracks ballads of another time, just fade away.

We take pride in staying the course and pursuing the truth. We are driven by belief in the people’s right to know. We treasure the competition among us as well as the camaraderie.

Bob Simon of CBS and his camera crew went off on their own in search of the war in the gulf. In this censored and escorted war, they were vulnerable. Now it appears they became lost, ran out of gas and may have been captured by Iraqis. Their story has yet to be told.

Like old soldiers, sometimes boring with their stories of wars, we treasure the freewheeling, adventuresome, heady spirit that enveloped us during the midst of battle, to be trotted out for reunions like, yes, we have to admit it, the Old Grad who relives the 80-yard touchdown run or the winning free throw at a long-ago basketball game.

I remember seeing correspondent John van Doorn for the first time in 10 years after the Vietnam War ended.

“There is somehow, corny as it sounds, a bond among people who have gone to a war for whatever reason,” he wrote after that meeting. “I felt it strongly, and felt like talking on and on to someone who proceeded from the same foundation as I. Very curious.”

Most correspondents feel the compulsion to cover wars in their gut but they are hard put to explain why.

I finally found the answer in an interview with a 22-year-old Army nurse who had come from Upstate New York to the mud, monsoons and mortars of Vietnam to treat the wounded.

Jackie Navarra stood over maimed soldiers, trying to comfort them, to cheer them with her smile and wit. Within minutes they were gone. But they did not die alone. She was at their side.

I asked her why she was there. She said it was because she would never feel more worthwhile in her life.