David Lamb, right, interviewing Army Maj. Gen. Melvin Zais during the Vietnam War. Mr. Lamb covered the war for United Press International before joining the Los Angeles Times in 1970. (UPI)

David Lamb, a wide-ranging author and Los Angeles Times foreign correspondent who covered wars and coups and was adept at capturing the small-scale human dramas at the heart of global events, died June 5 at a hospital in Alexandria, Va. He was 76.

The cause was esophageal cancer and cutaneous T-cell lymphoma, a cancer of the immune system, said his wife, documentary filmmaker Sandy Northrop.

As a reporter with the Times from 1970 until his retirement in 2004, Mr. Lamb filed stories from more than 100 countries and several conflicts, including the Vietnam War, the Persian Gulf War and the Rwandan genocide.

Kim Murphy, the Times’s assistant managing editor for foreign and national news, said Mr. Lamb “not only captured the human micro-drama behind cataclysmic world events, he lifted it to an epic scale.”

Visiting Cambodia in 1999, Mr. Lamb chose to profile a remote town home to former leaders of the Khmer Rouge, the brutal regime in power from 1975 to 1979 that inflicted countless horrors on the population. Pailin, he wrote, was “a purgatory of last resort, a one-horse town so isolated and primitive and full of sullied memories that life itself feels otherworldly and the darkness of the night is unsettling.”

Covering the decline of Appalachia on a rare stint home in the United States, Mr. Lamb took a similar approach, highlighting the coal-mining traditions of one West Virginia town. “For more than 100 years,” he observed, “the thick coal-laden seams that reach back into the wooded hills have sustained the men of these coal camps who, like their fathers and grandfathers before them, disappeared each day into the bowels of the earth.”

Mr. Lamb was a prolific writer — in addition to his stories for the L.A. Times, he penned a half-dozen books on subjects ranging from sub-Saharan Africa to the glories of minor-league baseball — but was perhaps best known for his work on Vietnam.

He arrived in the country in 1968 as a young reporter for the United Press International wire service, eager to take advantage of the access that the military offered war correspondents at the time.

Traveling between outfits and across the war zone, he found his way to the A Shau Valley in the spring of 1969, where paratroopers were making a bloody frontal assault on a nameless mountain encampment. Mr. Lamb, seeking a more colorful story, asked one of the troopers whether soldiers had a name for what was then known to military personnel only as Hill 937, the hill’s height in meters.

“I was hoping he would come up with a punchy, descriptive label that I could use in that day’s dispatch,” Mr. Lamb later remembered. “Something like Pork Chop Hill from the Korean War.”

The soldier demurred, saying, “I don’t know what anyone else is calling it, but with all this chopped-up red meat, it reminds me of a hamburger.”

Mr. Lamb jumped on the description. Generalizing to “juice the story up a little,” as he later put it, he filed a report about “the battle that GIs are calling Hamburger Hill.”

The name stuck, joining place names such as Khe Sanh and Ia Drang in a popular catalog of the war’s futility. News dispatches from “Hamburger Hill” quickly escalated public criticism against the war. The hill was abandoned by U.S. forces two weeks after it was taken.

David Sherman Lamb was born March 5, 1940, in Boston, where his father was a private investment manager. He attended the Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire but was expelled five months before graduation for running an illicit gambling ring that featured bets on Major League Baseball games. His affection for the sport would later result in “Stolen Season,” his 1991 book on baseball’s minor leagues.

Mr. Lamb finished high school in the Boston suburb of Brookline, and graduated from the University of Maine’s journalism school in 1962. He began his reporting career at the Okinawa Morning Star, an English-language newspaper in Japan, before working at papers in Las Vegas and Oakland, Calif., as well as at UPI bureaus in San Francisco and Denver.

He and Northrop, a documentary filmmaker, married in 1977 while Mr. Lamb was posted in Nairobi for the Times. She is his only immediate survivor.

The Nairobi posting led Mr. Lamb to travel among 48 African countries in four years and resulted in his first book, “The Africans” (1983), which mixed travelogue and reportage with a general overview of the continent’s history and culture. His follow-up, “The Arabs” (1987), took the same approach to the Arab world.

“The professionals who observe, report and shape opinions on the Middle East for their governments, foundations and faculties should all be as sharp and concise and honest as Mr. Lamb,” journalist James F. Clarity wrote in his review for the New York Times.

Mr. Lamb also wrote two travelogues: “A Sense of Place” (1993), about two decades of intermittent traveling through the American heartland, and “Over the Hills” (1996), about his 3,100-mile solo bike ride across America.

“No other story, no other war, quite measured up” to Vietnam, Mr. Lamb once said. After joining the Times, the paper sent him back to Saigon on two separate occasions: first for several weeks in 1975, when he covered the close of the war, and again in 1997, when he became the only American newspaper correspondent from the war to live in peacetime Vietnam.

His years in the country resulted in a well-received 2002 book, “Vietnam, Now,” that explored the nation’s efforts at modernization and its unlikely optimism after the deaths of 3 million Vietnamese during the war. The book was accompanied by a PBS documentary, “Vietnam Passage,” produced by his wife and narrated by Mr. Lamb.

In one segment, typical of Mr. Lamb’s personal approach to reporting, he recounted riding in a taxi when he learned that his friendly cabdriver had fought for the North Vietnamese. Mr. Lamb wanted to know whether the man hated him because he was an American.

“We fought the Chinese for 1,000 years, we fought the French for 100,” the man said. “You were here just for 10. You were just a blip in the history of a proud nation.”

Correction: The photo caption in an earlier version of this story incorrectly referred to Gen. Melvin Zais, whom David Lamb interviewed during the Vietnam War. He was a major general at the time, later promoted to four-star general. The story has been revised.