The work of war correspondents involves violence, danger, and drama; and what they endure to get a story is often as interesting as the actual news itself. Anglo-American fiction tends toward an ironic, even cynical, view of combat reporting that serves as a corrective to the notion, fostered in journalists' autobiographies, that war is fun. It also suggests that reporters are frauds and thrill seekers who callously profit from the misery of others, but who cannot continue in their jobs without losing their essential humanity. War reporting is depicted incisively by British writers in "Scoop" (1937) and "The Quiet American" (1955), and by American writers in "DelCorso's Gallery" (1983) and "The American Blues" (1984). Britain's long history of colonialism gave British writers a head start in questioning the ethics of war correspondence, but it was not until the Vietnam War that American writers began to seriously examine the darker aspects of combat reporting. The war correspondents of contemporary fiction doubt the sanity and morality of their role and see war as an unalleviated disaster. If they are to remain human, they must shed professional calm, stop treating the tragedy of war as just another news story, and take sides. (SRT)