words trailing off . . .

"The thing about David Halberstam was that he stayed the course and he kept the faith in the belief in the people's right to know," said George Esper, who spent 10 years in Vietnam with the Associated Press.

Neil Sheehan, former Saigon bureau chief for United Press International, said he had lost his best friend, a man of enormous physical and mental energy who had "profound moral and physical courage."

"We were in Vietnam at a time when we were being denounced by those on high," said Sheehan, who went on to write A Bright Shining Lie, a Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the Vietnam War. "There was tremendous pressure. David never buckled under it at all."

-lisa leff, ap

i like to tell myself that i'm very reasonable and not at all one for superstition, but life has consistently proven that my mother and other old wives are far from wrong to fret about things like this happening in threes. i doubt my mother would recognize halberstam's name, and she was never big on vonnegut, so today i am doing the sniffling and hand-wringing for both of us. it would have been enough to be so terribly sad, but now i am terribly sad and terribly anxious. ah, well; we do our parts and shuffle on, i suppose. we can only hope, at the end, that we've gotten at least some of it right. not this right, perhaps, but close enough that we can be proud of it. so a toast to the people who've managed it, because in this particular triad, one of them is going next.