Foreign correspondent Peter Ross Range's career has taken him many exotic places--Europe Japan and Vietnam, to name a few.

And his personal love of travel has taken him to even more exotic places: while in college, he "hitchhiked" from Germany to India on an overseas trip that included a voyage to Kuwait aboard a Norweigan tanker.

But this semester, Range's career has led him to a slightly less exotic milieu--Harvard's Institute of Politics (IOP), where he is one of six visiting fellows.

Range, who was Time magazine's Saigon bureau chief during the last seven months of the Vietnam War, is currently leading an IOP study group titled "War, Peace and the Press: Journalism and the New World Order." The study group, he hopes, will draw upon his personal experiences to give students a realistic view of the role of the press in time of war.

Range recalls how the Vietnamese would not allow reporters near battles after the American evacuation. This provided him with little close-up exposure to battle. But the battle scenes which he did witness, he says, left a deep impression on him.

"You don't have to see a lot of people blown up," Range says. "One or two is enough to tell you that war is a horrible, horrible thing and that almost anything else is better."

Although Range had already traveled widely, he says, the effects of war on Vietnam came as a shock to him.

"I thought I was very worldly," Range says. "I thought I knew something about poverty. But when I got to Saigon, it was much worse than I had experienced before."

"Gradually I learned to enjoy Vietnam," Range adds. "It's a wonderful, beautiful country with some beautiful old French colonial architecture, wonderful food and wonderful people. But it takes you a while to connect with all that when at first you're hit in the face with all the poverty and with all the smells and with the country falling apart."

Range notes that the immediacy of the television coverage during the Gulf War was an improvement over media coverage from the Vietnam War because it gave people "a sense of the war and its enormity."

But the press coverage of the recent Gulf War was much more heavily controlled by both the Iraqi and American governments, Range notes. "People need to know the consequences of war," he says.

According to Range, governments traditionally use the wartime press as a pawn, to send messages back and forth. But the immediacy of coverage during the Gulf War changed the role of the press somewhat, Range says.

"When CNN made history on the night of January 16 with their continuous live reporting from Baghdad, they were in a certain sense players because the U.S. military could watch CNN and judge instantly the partial success of the operation," Range explains. "That's never happened before."

Accidental Tourist

Range says that he began his career as a foreign correspondent "by accident."