"There was no forever there, just one surprise after another,” writes Denby Fawcett, describing wartime Vietnam. The book for which she and eight other journalists have each written a chapter—War Torn: Stories of War from the Women Reporters Who Covered Vietnam (Random House, 2002; $24.95)—is also full of the unexpected. Some of the women were wounded; some became deathly ill; one was captured by North Vietnamese and wrongly presumed dead, her untimely obit appearing in the New York Times. All were deeply changed in the war that killed 58,178 Americans and probably more than 2 million Vietnamese up to the U.S. withdrawal.
Women covering war no longer raise eyebrows, but they were a small minority in those years. Some of the co-authors had to get to Vietnam on their own and work as freelancers or cajole editors and the military into letting them report the biggest story of their time. Young and mostly inexperienced but adventurous and resourceful, they quickly proved equal to the task.
Fawcett—a Knight fellow at Stanford in 1969—was 24 in 1966, writing for the “women’s pages” of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. Then her boyfriend, Bob Jones, was posted to Vietnam by the Honolulu Advertiser, and she decided to follow. When Fawcett’s editors laughed at the idea of sending her as a war correspondent, she quit. On condition she pay her own way, the Advertiser hired Fawcett to write features on local color (for $35 apiece), telling her to leave the war to Jones. When he went home for a TV job two months later, she took over.
“I was frightened speechless as I watched body bags filled with dead Marines placed in the helicopter that delivered me,” she writes of her first taste of battle. “I already had learned how to tune out the dead to keep functioning. Food arriving, dead leaving. You could never relax because there was always the possibility of being shot to death or stepping on a mine.”
Not all the women correspondents had to fight their way to Vietnam. Edie Lederer, who joined the Associated Press in 1966, had been working in San Francisco covering antiwar protests when she took a round-the-world vacation and stopped in Saigon “on a lark” in 1971. She got acquainted with the AP staff there, and when the bureau chief began lobbying later that year to add a woman to his team, Lederer, MA ’64, was his choice. She covered the release of the first American POWs. “I proved to myself I could compete in the big league,” she writes. Lederer went on to cover conflicts around the world until 1998, when she became AP’s United Nations correspondent.
Like Fawcett’s and Lederer’s accounts, the other memoirs in this book are candid and introspective and cover both sides of the women’s experiences in Vietnam—the daily grind of war and its fallout, relieved by friendships, love affairs, cocktail parties and opium. Laura Palmer, a radio reporter for ABC, then NBC, observes: “Cambodia was where you went to the war in a Mercedes, the only car available to lease, and came back at night and ate smoked salmon and drank St-Emilion in the garden restaurant.” Of her first-ever baked Alaska, she writes, “it was incomprehensibly strange to be served a concoction of meringue, ice cream and flames in the midst of a war.”
The killing fields toughened these war correspondents but never hardened their hearts—especially not to the destitute children of Indochina. Some took street children in while they were there. Others, like Overseas Weekly correspondent Ann Bryan Mariano, helped find American homes for many war orphans. Mariano herself adopted two daughters. “Working with children filled me with hope,” she writes.
The links they had forged with Vietnamese people and with each other made leaving Vietnam difficult for the authors. As Lederer writes, “you live and work so closely with your colleagues that you become part of a very large family. And breaking away leaves you almost rootless in a strange way.”
But you don’t ever fully break away, Fawcett muses. “Vietnam is where I saw butterflies dance in the sun while soldiers tried to kill each other. I pray to leave Vietnam, but I never can.”
Harry Press, ’39, was founding editor of Stanford Observer.
