ANN BRYAN MARIANO, 76
Vietnam war correspondent
Ann Bryan Mariano, who covered the Vietnam war for Overseas Weekly and successfully fought Pentagon efforts to bar the pro-GI, anti-establishment paper to American troops in the war zone, has died.
Ms. Mariano died Wednesday in Belmont, Mass., of Alzheimer's disease, according to her second husband, Robert McKay.
A Texas native who received a journalism degree in 1953 at Texas Tech University, she signed on in Germany in 1959 with the Overseas Family, a paper for American service members in Europe. As U.S. combat forces expanded in Vietnam in 1965, she was named Saigon bureau chief for the Overseas Weekly, a sister paper geared to military readers as an alternative to the semiofficial military daily, Stars and Stripes.
With a small staff of ex-soldiers and freelancers, the OW reported on equipment shortages, corruption, race tensions, morale and other topics. Its coverage annoyed U.S. military officials enough that they banned it from newsstands in Vietnam, Japan and other Asian countries.
In 1966, the Overseas Weekly sued the Pentagon. It lost the case, only to have it reversed a year later on appeal. In 1973, Ms. Mariano returned to Vietnam, where she worked as a stringer for the Associated Press and the Daily Express of London.
Ms. Mariano also worked for several years as an editor and writer at The Washington Post.