page_title: Vernon Arnold Haugland
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Vernon Arnold Haugland / Career
context_page_description: Vernon Arnold Haugland was a reporter and writer for Associated Press. As a war correspondent, he documented World War II events as they occurred. He was the first civilian to receive the Silver Star medal – awarded normally only to members of the United States Armed Forces.
context_section_description: Haugland started his journalism career at the publications Missoula Sentinel and Missoulian for two years. In 1933 he started work for The Montana Standard before moving to Butte, Montana. In 1936 he joined the Salt Lake City Bureau of Associated Press  then moved to the Los Angeles Bureau two years later, where one of his assignments was dating the ten "most eligible" Hollywood starlets.
  When Japan attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, war was declared and Haugland saw an opportunity in journalism, and in 1942 he volunteered for overseas duty as a war correspondent. He was the first Associated Press reporter in Brisbane, Australia. On  August 7, 1942, during an assignment to New Guinea, the B-26 Marauder bomber (s/n 40-1521) in which he was traveling went off-course and the pilot exhausted his fuel before finding an adequate landing place. Everyone aboard had to bail out and deploy parachutes. Haugland wandered the New Guinea jungle for at least 43 days without finding civilization. He was hospitalized on 23 September in a greatly weakened state. In 1943 he wrote a book titled Letter From New Guinea about his experiences. General Douglas MacArthur awarded Haugland the Silver Star medal on October 3, 1942, for his heroism; he was the first civilian to receive this medal. An Act of Congress was put into effect on December 15, 1942, to enable to the medal to be awarded to civilians in future.
  In 1943, Haugland continued to cover the Pacific Theater of World War II and contributed articles to Time, Newsweek, The Nation and Flying magazines. In mid-1944 he returned to the United States for a short time and married his long-time sweetheart, Tesson Courtney McMahon (b. 1909-d. 1994) on June 3, 1944, in Butte Montana. They had two daughters, Taya and Marcia. Haugland became an "Air Correspondent" with Associated Press in 1945. After the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he was attached to a special group of AP correspondents who were the first journalists to arrive there. In 1945 he was assigned to cover events of the Indonesian National Revolution after the conclusion of World War II, where he contracted jaundice and in early 1946 he was returned in an emergency to the United States.
caption: Map of New Guinea, with place names as used in English in the 1940s
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