The Press: Death of the Daring

Japanese Newsman Kyoichi Sawada was the best, certainly the most daring, photographer working for United Press International in Indochina. His risks were calculated, but they were no less risky. Last May he and U.P.I. Bureau Manager Robert Miller were captured by Communists in Cambodia. Sawada tolerated the situation for eight hours, then vehemently announced that he would rather die than spend the rest of the war in captivity. The startled Communists promptly released both their captives.

Sawada appeared willing to do anything for a story: hitch rides on helicopters going into the heart of battle, invite reprimands by darting through a minefield to get pictures of American troops. He got reprimands, but he also won the Pulitzer Prize in 1966 for a picture of a Vietnamese mother shepherding her family to safety through a river. Newswriter Frank Frosch, also of U.P.I, resembled Sawada in many ways. Like the photographer, Frosch chose the tough way to cover news. During the recent riots in Augusta, Ga., Frosch was the only reporter able to produce an eyewitness account of police killing a looter. He managed it by dodging black snipers’ bullets half the night, police bullets the remainder. His Cambodian reporting was just as firsthand: he would listen to the military briefings, then set out to check them himself. Before Frosch’s arrival in Cambodia, U.P.I, had suffered from embarrassing gaffes, even reporting the proclamation of the Cambodian Republic twice before it really happened, months later. With Frosch’s appearance, cool reason and uncommon accuracy became standard. Violence scared Frosch, and he admitted it. But fright was a thing to be lived with in order to do a job.

One afternoon last week Frosch and Sawada climbed into a car together and headed for Chambak, the Cambodian army’s southernmost outpost. At about 5:30 that afternoon, Cambodian soldiers heard gunfire and set out to investigate. They found the blue car riddled with bullets and smashed against a tree. The next morning the bodies of Frosch and Sawada were found. They had been savagely beaten in the neck and head, then shot repeatedly in the chest. No bloodstains were found in the car, indicating the execution had been performed after the crash. It was a reminder that, in this most random of wars, no risk can ever be completely calculated.