Listening To The Voices Of The Century

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By Newsweek Editors

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David Douglas Duncan, the celebrated photographer who shot the picture that appears on this week's cover, remembers well the morning he took it--Sept. 19, 1967, at Con Thien. "There was mortar coming in, a bit of machine-gun fire," says Duncan. "It was very foggy." He snapped his picture; Duncan never knew the young marine's name. The photographer, in Vietnam on assignment for Life, carried the film back to New York. The image of the young warrior was buried under layers of mist on the film. "On the contact, you couldn't see him," Duncan says. "So in the lab we burned and burned and burned, and there he was." Excavating the past--and telling the human stories behind history's momentous hours--is the mission of NEWSWEEK's "Voices of the Century." The 20th century was a bloody and riveting epoch--a time of war and peace, depression and prosperity, glamour and glitz. Grand days, and epic years, but we believe the best way to understand the temper and tensions of the time is through the personal stories of the people who changed the way we live now. This issue, "Americans at War," is the first of four planned special "Voices" offerings that will use oral histories to tell the tale of the century in rare, first-person interviews. The later installments will cover arts and entertainment; the changing face of America, and faith and technology. Choosing what to cover was difficult. Many men and women fought in conflicts not mentioned in these pages; their stories are also integral to the tapestry of the century. To produce this remarkable issue on the major wars, NEWSWEEK interviewed more than a hundred people, occasionally drawing on diaries or letters. It took a team that included Jon Meacham, Deidre Depke, Sarah Van Boven, Marc Peyser, Weston Kosova, Matt Bai, John Barry, Amid Capeci, Yahlin Chang, Lynette Clemetson, Eleanor Clift, Matthew Cooper, Alisha Davis, Beth Dickey, Deborah Edelstein, Arlyn Tobias Gajilan, Michael Hirsh, Scott Johnson, Daniel Klaidman, Maggie Malone, Tom Masland, Owen Matthews, Stryker McGuire, Ron Moreau, Andrew Nagorski, Rod Nordland, Bill Powell, Hideko Takayama, Evan Thomas, Rich Thomas, William Underhill and Gregory L. Vistica. We owe special thanks to our distinguished contributors: Lally Weymouth, Michael R. Beschloss, Douglas Brinkley and Annie Wedekind. The real stars of this issue are the men and women who agreed to share vivid and sometimes painful accounts of days in which it was up to often ordinary people to do extraordinary things. We hope our readers will be as moved as we were as you listen to the Voices of the Century.

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