Abstract
There is gold dust for researchers in You Don’t Belong Here, but they might miss it, discarding the book because of its pop nonfiction subjectivity. It is a book without a bibliography but with a stated agenda. Elizabeth Becker is out to rescue from the brink of obscurity three female Vietnam War journalists—prize-winning freelance photographer Catherine Leroy; United Press International (UPI) combat reporter Kate Webb; and Frances FitzGerald, author of Fire in the Lake. Becker intends to put their names on the all-male Vietnam journalist A-list alongside David Halberstam of the New York Times, UPI’s Neil Sheehan, Peter Arnett of the Associated Press, Morley Safer of CBS, and others. Becker was a friend of Webb and considers all three women to be mentors. They inspired her own career as a freelance war correspondent (Cambodia, 1973–1974) and foreign affairs journalist for the Washington Post, NPR, and the New York Times. Her book is highly entertaining and written in clear, simple prose—two traits almost guaranteed to arouse academic suspicion.
Even so, I recommend You Don’t Belong Here to researchers, especially those who study the history of women breaking journalism’s gender barriers. Becker’s account of her protagonists’ day-to-day struggles and achievements in Vietnam is fascinating and solidly sourced, largely consistent with earlier accounts but rich with new material. Women who covered Vietnam are rapidly dying off. A book that taps their recollections deepens the historical record. Becker interviewed FitzGerald and had access to her personal letters. Webb and Leroy had died before she started work on the book, but Becker tapped their unpublished memoirs and letters; she also interviewed family members and former colleagues. Becker describes her own war reporting. She was the first Western journalist to identify Pol Pot as Cambodia’s Communist leader and interview him.
Biases notwithstanding, Becker makes a powerful case for including the three women among the top Vietnam journalists. Leroy (1944–2006), a French national, was the war’s most prominent female combat photographer, the first woman to win the George Polk Award for photojournalism. Disdained and harassed by male colleagues, she distinguished herself with searing, close-in shots of GIs under fire and daring photos of North Vietnamese Army (NVA) soldiers in the 1968 Battle of Hue, taken after she crossed from American positions into enemy lines. Millions saw her work in Look and Life magazine photo spreads and newspapers worldwide. Webb (1943–2007), an Australian, became the first female UPI staffer to cover combat, UPI’s first woman war zone bureau chief (Phnom Penh, 1970), and an expert on South Vietnamese and Cambodia armies. She wrote a book about her 3 weeks as a captive of the NVA. FitzGerald (born 1940), a wealthy, well-connected, and erudite American, was dismissed as a “dilletante” by U.S. Embassy officials. Nonetheless, he wrote in great depth of how American bombing and forced civilian relocation were destroying the ancient rural culture of South Vietnam. She won the Pulitzer, Bancroft, and Hillman Prizes and the National Book Award for Fire in the Lake. Her lesson briefly stuck then slipped from the national mind: avoid waging war in a country whose culture you do not remotely fathom unless you want to kill hundreds of thousands needlessly and suffer defeat.
In You Don’t Belong Here Becker delves into how, and with what difficulty, women journalists broke into Vietnam combat coverage, setting a precedent that has made female journalists on battlefields routine today. Leroy, FitzGerald, and Webb each flew to Saigon at her own expense to take advantage of new military rules allowing women regular access to combat. They were not welcomed warmly by gate-keeping editors. The UPI Saigon bureau chief rebuffed Webb when she applied for work. But as the United States was taking over the fighting and expanding the war in 1966–1967, the demand for war news was surging in America, and Saigon news bureaus needed more reporters. Webb eventually got her job at UPI. Associated Press photo editor Horst Faas gave Leroy a reluctant nod for much the same reason—practical necessity. The AP, even more patronizing than UPI, barred female staff from combat. Leroy slipped through a loophole. As a freelancer, she was not technically an AP employee. The agency could say it was protecting “its” women while taking credit for Leroy’s brilliant photos.
Becker has produced three, three-dimensional biographies in one book. She avoids hagiography, describing in detail Webb’s alcoholism and Leroy’s almost feral lack of social skills. The personal struggles of the three women dovetail with their professional ones, men being a major cause of grief in both situations.
Becker makes no pretense of aspiring to scholarly heights. That does not excuse her factual errors. She asserts that Matthew Brady was known for “extensive photography” of both sides in the Civil War (p. 119) Brady never embedded with the Gray, although he or his team members did photograph Confederate prisoners of war and battlefield dead. Becker states that South Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Cao Ky’s regime was Catholic (p. 53). It was not. In fact, Ky wrote a memoir titled Buddha’s Child: My Fight to Save Vietnam.
Becker also has a consistency problem. She says FitzGerald, Leroy, and Webb are close to being erased from journalism history or at best relegated to its footnotes, laying much of the blame on male journalists whose Vietnam memoirs either ignore or disparage the women. Elsewhere she says FitzGerald is not being erased, that her work has inspired “generations of journalists and historians to see war far beyond the battlefield, to examine the culture and history and war of civilizations as seriously as the armed conflict itself” (p. 296). Becker acknowledges women writers—including Joyce Hoffman, author of On Their Own: Women Journalists and the American Experience—whose work saved Webb, FitzGerald, and Leroy from erasure. Becker’s more detailed, didactic, and highly publicized account may lead to broader acknowledgment of the three journalists’ extraordinary work.
The following sentences (in which Becker’s usual clarity deserts her) are perhaps the most vexing in the book: “Leroy, FitzGerald, and Webb were the three pioneers who changed how the story of war was told. They were outsiders—excluded by nature from the confines of male journalism, with all its presumptions and easy jingoism—who saw war differently and wrote about it in wholly new ways” (p. xvi). Many people believe that on the whole women cover war with greater humanity and compassion than men, a proposition that calls for intense, systematic research. But Becker’s claim is more specific. She asserts that it was her small band of sisters, Webb, Leroy, and FitzGerald—“the three pioneers”—who “rewrote the story of war.” Given the themes of her book, it is perplexing that Becker omits other women whose Vietnam reporting was also humane, compassionate, and widely circulated. Beverly Deepe (New York Herald Tribune, Newsweek), Elizabeth Pond (Christian Science Monitor), Jurate Kazickas (freelance), Martha Gellhorn (freelance), and Gloria Emerson (The New York Times) come to mind. The ones still with us can fire off angry tweets. The rest of us can focus on the book’s useful parts and wait for, or contribute to, comprehensive, meticulous research on gender differences in war reporting.