From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. William Walter Prochnau (1937- ) is an American journalist. His work on the Vietnam War while at the Seattle Times landed him on the master list of Nixon political opponents. His Vanity Fair magazine article "Adventures in the Ransom Trade" was inspiration for the 2000 film Proof of Life. His novel Trinity's Child was the basis for 1990's By Dawn's Early Light. He also wrote Once Upon a Distant War: David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, Peter Arnett--Young War Correspondents and Their Early Vietnam Battles. Prochnau won an Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellowship  in 1988 to research and write about the media as it operated in the Vietnam war and its aftermath. Description above from the Wikipedia article William Prochnau, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.