With some of the correspondents now in their 70s, the reunion had all the trappings of a last hurrah. But don't bet on it. For many of us, so young and brash back then, Saigon—don't dare call it Ho Chi Minh City—had a narcotic quality that could hook for life. So the boys trooped back for the 30th anniversary of the end of "their" war and their youth. Life afterward was never the same. Peter Arnett mimicked it by chasing the world's endless wars, surely taking more fire than any other correspondent in history, only to be felled by his own words. In Baghdad in 2003 he said what a lot of Americans were thinking, but clearly chose the wrong forum—Iraqi-run television. NBC canned him flat. Arnett knew he had given the right wing one bull's-eye too many: "There's a small island in the South Pacific, uninhabited, which I'll try to swim to," he said and did a fade. But he showed up in Saigon. So did Joe Galloway, who went to war as a U.P.I. rookie armed with a pencil only to discover his choice would be a different weapon or death in a valley called la Drang (the ordeal was dramatized in the 2002 film We Were Soldiers), and Huynh Cong "Nick"Ut, an A.P. photographer who put the agonizing face on his own country's war with a Pulitzer Prize-winning 1972 photograph of a burned and naked girl who ran screaming from a napalm attack. Seventy-nine media veterans returned, close to the number of their colleagues who had died there. For all its "young man's allure," it was a hard war on reporters and photographers.

This reunion photograph has its own poignancy. Only days after it was taken, the great German war photographer Horst Faas was stricken by a rare ailment—a blood clot on his spinal column. Photographers are a conflict's easiest targets, their death toll highest, but Faas survived the war with only one wound. Now his illness has left him paralyzed from the chest down, the last casualty of Vietnam. He was airlifted to Bangkok and then to a Munich spinal clinic, where he undergoes daily therapy. But the last hurrah? Get a bet down, if you can find the sucker. Five years from now Arnett will be back if he has to swim, Faas if he has to zigzag his motorized wheelchair through Saigon's crazy scooter traffic. Odds-on.