The correspondent for Newsweek. He is staying in the same hotel as Caputo, the Continental Palace Hotel in Saigon. Caputo moves into Proffitt’s room two floors below after “an enemy rocket had devastated the top floors of the nearby Metropole Hotel.” Caputo identifies with Proffitt because he, too, is “an ‘old’ Indochina hand.” Proffitt began working as a correspondent in Vietnam in the late-1960s and early-1970s. They also worked together in Beirut as Middle East correspondents for their respective publications.