A Letter From the Publisher

By Richard B. Thomas

When fighting breaks out, the first instinct of a good journalist is to get close to the action. But as TIME correspondents found in reporting this week's stories on the clashes in the Gulf of Sidra and Central America, the best seats are usually hard to come by. Says Middle East Correspondent John Borrell, who has covered numerous wars: "All too often you are either too far away or too close."

Borrell began making travel plans as soon as news of the U.S.-Libya clash reached Egypt. Since it was already past midnight in Cairo and direct air travel from Egypt to Libya is nonexistent, Borrell phoned a travel agent in Seattle (where it was still midafternoon) to book air passage through Zurich. Eight hours later he was in Tripoli, trying to pry a few nuggets of information from the Libyan government. "The biggest frustration," says Borrell, "was that the action was hundreds of miles away, out in the gulf."

Although the major decisions about last week's events took place in Washington, State Department Correspondent Johanna McGeary found herself closer to the action than she had anticipated. Flying over the Aegean Sea from Turkey to Greece with Secretary of State George Shultz, McGeary was startled to see the red lights of fighter jets nosing up on either wing of Shultz's plane. Officials aboard quickly reassured reporters that the planes were friendly F-4 Phantoms assigned to protect one of the Reagan Administration's chief advocates of forceful action against terrorism.

For a look at the battle-ready Sixth Fleet, Rome Correspondent Sam Allis visited the U.S. carrier Saratoga earlier in March. There, he was catapulted into the sky, with his back facing forward, in a windowless section of a transport plane. "The G forces as we shot off the deck rendered us journalists, for once, helpless, very humble people," says Allis. "As for landing, I found it rather comforting not to see just how small the flight deck looked from the air."

In Honduras, Mexico City Bureau Chief Harry Kelly took the final leg of his journey to the Nicaraguan border aboard a U.S. Chinook helicopter. Like Allis, he found himself flying on the lining of his stomach. "Chinooks ride like New York subway trains going flat out," says Kelly. By week's end, however, all the careering about had got the correspondents safely to their destinations -- and got the story too.