Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Elizabeth Becker, Black Inc., $32.99.
An inspirational story of how three women forged a place for themselves and for generations of female reporters to come.
At a time when women were considered unfit to be foreign reporters, Kate Webb, an Australian iconoclast; Catherine Leroy, a French dare devil photographer; and Frances FitzGerald, a blue-blood American intellectual, were the first female frontline journalists in the history of US war reporting.
Over the course of the Vietnam War they challenged the rules imposed on them, all in an effort to get the story right.
The stories of these women is told by Elizabeth Becker – herself an award-winning journalist – to trace the Vietnam War from the 1965 American buildup, through the Tet Offensive, the expansion into Cambodia, the American defeat and its aftermath.
Catherine, Kate and Frankie arrived in Vietnam with starkly different life experiences, but one shared purpose: to report on the most consequential story of the decade.
Webb was captured by the Vietcong only to continue her fearless reporting after her release. Powerful coverage by Fitzgerald earned her bylines in The New Yorker, and she became the first female war reporter for the magazine. At only 22, Leroy was one of the only female photographers in Vietnam.
They paid their own way to war, arrived without jobs, challenged the rules imposed on them by the military, ignored the belittlement and resentment of their male peers and found new ways to explain the war through the people who lived through it.
“They made their way to Vietnam at the beginning. I came at the tail end, following their paths, which I’ve retraced, scouring their diaries, notebooks, letters, photographs, classified military files, and writings and interviewing those close to them. Together, their lives offer a new way to see the war. And it is long overdue.”
Becker began her career as a war correspondent for The Washington Post in Cambodia. Elizabeth writes as an historian and a witness to what these women accomplished.
What emerges is an unforgettable story of three journalists forging their place in a land of men, often at great personal sacrifice and forever altering the craft of war reportage.
