Wallace Terry

Terry was born in New York City and raised in Indianapolis, Indiana, where he was an editor of the Shortridge Daily Echo, one of the few high-school dailies in America. As a reporter for The Brown Daily Herald, he interviewed Orval Faubus, the outspoken segregationist governor of Arkansas, and gained national attention when a photograph of him shaking hands with Faubus hit the front page of The New York Times on September 14, 1957. Later, Terry became the newspaper's editor-in-chief, and the first African American to run an Ivy League newspaper. He did graduate studies in theology as a Rockefeller Fellow at the University of Chicago, and in international relations as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.

Terry was hired by The Washington Post in 1958 at the age of 19, becoming the youngest reporter hired by the paper. Three years later, he was hired by Time magazine. In 1967, Terry left for Vietnam, where he became the magazine's deputy bureau chief in Saigon and the first black war correspondent on permanent duty. During his two-year tour, he covered the Tet Offensive, flew scores of combat missions with American and South Vietnamese pilots, and joined assault troops in the A Shau Valley and on Hamburger Hill. He and New Republic correspondent Zalin Grant retrieved the bodies of four newsmen killed by the Viet Cong on May 5, 1968, during the Mini-Tet Offensive in Saigon, following directions from ambush survivor Frank Palmos and New Zealand military personnel. Terry's Time cover story, "The Negro in Vietnam", was written in 1967 and the book Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans was published in June 1984. The New York Times wrote that "many of the individuals featured in [the book's] pages speak about their experiences with exceptional candor and passion; and in doing so, give the reader a visceral sense of what it was like, as a black man, to serve in Vietnam and what it was like to come back to 'the real world.'" Terry wrote and narrated the only documentary recording from the Vietnam battlefields, Guess Who's Coming Home: Black Fighting Men Recorded Live in Vietnam, which was released by Motown in 1972. He wrote and narrated the PBS Frontline show, "The Bloods of Nam".