An early defining moment of the American experience in Vietnam came on January 11, 1963, when Adm. Harry Felt, commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, was conducting an airport press conference following a visit to Saigon. As the American correspondents in general and Malcolm Browne of the Associated Press in particular bombarded him with critical questions, Felt glared and then snarled: “Why don’t you get on the team?”

Felt’s snap remark has reverberated through 30 years of remembering and recasting the catastrophe of Vietnam, repeated in thousands of barroom conversations by journalists and recorded in dozens of articles and books. The story is now retold in William Prochnau’s Once Upon a Distant War: Young War Correspondents and the Early Vietnam Battles (Times Books, 546 pages, $ 27. 50).