For the first time since the end of the war in Vietnam, the GIs who covered the combat there for Pacific Stars and Stripes gathered for a reunion. Held in the ground-floor common room of a condominium in Arlington, Va., the meeting was called by Robert Hodierne, now senior managing editor of Army Times. The rest of us came from around the country, a gathering of what had been – and still is, I discovered – one of the generation’s merriest band of newspapermen.

Caps were pried off the bottles of Biere 33, the brand that used to be served in glasses with big lumps of ice on the terrace of the Continental Palace in Saigon. A buffet of Vietnamese vittles was laid out. First asked to speak was Jim Clare, who became a political consultant in Pennsylvania after the war. As an enlisted man on loan to Stripes from the 1st Infantry Division he had pulled off a stunt that startled the world. From the Demilitarized Zone dividing Communist North Vietnam from South Vietnam, he hitch-hiked the length of the war-torn country all the way back to Saigon.

His exploits were not only chronicled in Stripes but tracked by United Press International. When he got back, he was upbraided for having traveled out of uniform. When he was finally carpeted by one general or another, the GI reporter, who held the fourth lowest rank in the entire Army, strode in, held out his hand, and said, “Hi, I’m Jim Clare.” The dumbfounded general demanded, “Soldier, don’t you usually salute?” Mr. Clare replied, “Come to think of it, no.”

Not that he was unpatriotic. It’s just that he was upholding a certain tradition, established several wars ago, that Stripes would operate on its own terms. One of its early managing editors was Private Harold Wallace Ross, who, lore has it, was arrested during World War I by an officer in an argument over a comma. Ross, who would go on to found the New Yorker, was un-arrested when it turned out that the major didn’t know how to get a newspaper out. His de-arrest is said to have established the tradition that Stripes was to be edited by enlisted men and written for the GI.

In Vietnam, by the time I got to Stripes, Mr. Hodierne was already a legend, people having lost count of the number of times he had been set down in what was called a “hot LZ,” or a helicopter landing zone under fire. Phil Mc-Combs, who made his career at the Washington Post, recounted Saturday the story of how, during the invasion of Cambodia, he and Jack Fuller, another Stripes reporter, went into what was called the Parrot’s Beak in pursuit of American armor. Mr. Fuller was driving a Stripes station wagon.

Eventually, the road became ominously deserted. They pressed on until they spotted, in a bombed-out village, an American officer. A radio crackled. The American was poring over a map. Messrs. Fuller and Mc-Combs plied him with questions, but he would answer none of them. Finally, Mr. McCombs asked, “How far can we go until someone kills us?” The laconic American looked off into the middle distance and, finally, said: “Eight klicks.” They got back into their station wagon and drove until they caught up with the American tanks – 12 kilometers up the road.

That was Stripes.

John Cody, who since the war has worked as a reporter for WBBM news radio in Chicago, told a story about how he was asked to pull guard duty one night in the field. He was manning a .50 caliber machine gun, when, through the darkness, he realized that the green tracers the enemy used were coming toward his unit. He tried to get the machine gun into action, only to discover he’d forgotten how to chamber a round. A sergeant raced to help him, but when they got the weapon cocked, they could see the enemy tracers were growing less frequent. So they held their fire. In the morning, their unit was intact. When the fog lifted, they discovered what would have happened had Mr. Cody fired the heavy machine gun. They were but yards from a village full of civilians.

Pat Luminello, now 74, was the civilian chief of Stripes’ Saigon bureau for much of this time. He told another classic of Stripes reporting. He had gone out in Vietnam with a South Korean unit, whose commander showed him a freshly covered mass grave for the scores of enemy said to have been killed. Mr. Luminello appeared skeptical. So the Korean commander got on a bulldozer and ploughed into the ground, turning up a ghastly tangle of dead enemy bodies.

The editor of economicprincipals.com, David Warsh, was there Saturday evening. When he was in the Navy, he covered Hamburger Hill for Stripes. He talked about Paul Savanuck, who had been in the Stripes bureau a week when he went into the northern part of South Vietnam, known as I Corps, and found himself with a unit that came under attack. Mr. Warsh was sent to identify Savanuck’s body.

“He had the beauty of youth,” Mr. Warsh remembered. “I suppose we all did.”

Savanuck was the only Stripes reporter killed in the war. I’d like to think it does only honor to his sacrifice to report that so many of his Stripes colleagues went on to newspaper careers. Charlie Self, who was with UPI before being drafted and landing on Stripes, made his career teaching journalism at Iowa, Alabama, and Oklahoma, where he still holds a tenured chair. Ron Shaffer, who writes “Dr. Gridlock” in the Washington Post, was a reporter for the Stripes who, while in the Navy, adopted a Vietnamese boy living on the streets of Saigon and gave him a home and upbringing in America.

Bill Toliver, who had been studying plants before being drafted and ending up on Stripes, couldn’t be located for the reunion. But we talked about how one day in Saigon he opened a letter from his professor back home asking him to try to find a specimen of a poisonous yellow flower that grew only in the remotest – and most dangerous – parts of the Central Highlands. So he borrowed a flower press from the University of Saigon and disappeared. A week later we were preparing to report him missing in action when he walked into the bureau triumphantly bearing the poisonous yellow petals, along with an account of his expedition that was run out in Stripes under the heading “Combat Botanist.”

Nor could we locate Dan Evans, who was walking through Hue after curfew one night only to be stopped by American military policemen. When the MP learned that Evans was with Stripes, he asked him whether he’d like to visit every brothel in the city. The purpose of the nocturnal tour, it turned out, was to police drug pushers, which gave Mr. Evans his start in Stripes by breaking the story of how the communists were using heroin as a weapon of war.

John Olson, a photographer for Stripes, couldn’t make the reunion. He and his wife run a digital imaging business called Nancyscans in Chatham, New York. But there was mounted on the wall a photo taken in April 1968 of him and his blown-up cameras. The cameras had been, he told me via email, in a pack that he was using as a pillow until shortly before his position was rocketed near the DMZ. “We took 14 dead and many wounded,” he wrote. Mr. Olson’s intrepidity resulted in one of the most famous photos of the war, of injured Marines on a tank, taken during the battle for Hue. He was almost court-martialed for publishing the picture, but it won the Robert Capa Award in 1968.

A number of Stripes veterans visited Vietnam in the years after the communist conquest. Jack Fuller, who returned as publisher of the Chicago Tribune in a jet owned by the Tribune Company, told us that it was hard to find the villa that housed the Stripes reporters and the bureau. It had been just up Plantation Road from Tan Son Nhut air base, but by the time Mr. Fuller went back, Tan Son Nhut had been overrun by Saigon sprawl.

Eventually, Mr. Fuller found the Stripes villa, and before his communist minders could stop him, he bounded inside, only to discover that it had become a preschool. He was welcomed by the schoolmistress, who gave him a tour. There was a curtain in front of the room that had held our maps and radios and whiskey and typewriters. And when the school mother pulled it aside, Fuller was stunned, moved speechless, to discover two or three dozen little girls, neatly arranged on the floor, asleep for their afternoon nap.

One of the astonishing things about war turns out to be the fact that while it is the greatest of stories, it is transient. Eventually life gathers the survivors and moves on. Maybe that is what made the reunion of this graying but still merry band of newspapermen so affecting – along with the discovery that the esprit of the Stars and Stripes is alive and well.