You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War by Elizabeth Becker tells an important story and tells it well. Actually, the book tells multiple stories. Most obviously, she recounts the lives and reporting of three iconic female journalists who covered the war in Indochina: Kate Webb, Frances Fitzgerald and Catherine Leroy. In telling their stories, Becker documents the sexist obstacles these three women had to overcome. To background those stories she provides a useful account of the stupidity and cruelty of the war in Vietnam and Cambodia.
Becker brings personal experience to the story. She was herself a journalist covering the war and she knew the three women. But she expands on the public record and her personal knowledge with extensive interviews as well as quotes from the women’s personal letters and journals.
Like the war itself, the three women lived with both heroism and tragedy. All three suffered from the trauma of war, losing colleagues, friends and lovers. Long after the end of the war, their lives were marred by the horrors they had experienced. Webb and Leroy, who did extensive frontline reporting were especially damaged, suffering, like many combat veterans from post-traumatic stress disorder. Although Fitzgerald faced fewer physical dangers than the others, she showed a kind of moral bravery in writing a book that overturned conventional thinking about the war and antagonized high-ranking friends in government.
Their bravery produced accurate, moving and insightful reporting and photography. The book includes a number of Leroy’s stunning photographs of the fighting. It also includes snippets from the reporting of Webb and Fitzgerald. My main criticism of the book is that we don’t get enough of that reporting. I would have liked to have more analysis of Fitzgerald’s ground-breaking book, “Fire in the Lake,” which I read before first coming to Southeast Asia in 1972. Becker hints at elements of the book that have not held up well, but does not go into detail. More examples of Webb’s frontline reporting would have shown more clearly how the risks she took led to important news stories. Hopefully Becker’s book will lead readers to the books by Webb and Fitzgerald and the website with Leroy’s photographs.
Woven into Becker’s account of the war and the lives of these three women correspondents is their experience of the male chauvinism of many reporters and news organizations. Each of them faced and overcame male resistance to women covering a war. At the same time, they were subjected to double standards critical of their personal lives and pressure for sex from some of the men who were supposed to be their colleagues.
It is gratifying that the work of Fitzgerald, Webb and Leroy, along with many others, such as Dickey Chapelle, Sylvana Foa, Gloria Emerson, Denby Fawcett, Jurate Kazickas, Edith Lederer, Anne Bryan Mariano, Anne Morrissy Merick and Laura Palmer helped change the prevailing male chauvinism in international reporting. Ultimately, more than 400 female reporters and photographers had credentials to cover the war. By the time I went to the Columbia School of Journalism in 1976-7, the majority of my classmates were women. Once I joined UPI, I benefited from the experience and advice of female colleagues including Sylvana Foa and Suzanne Fisher Staples. The prejudice against women may not be gone, but the days when difficult and dangerous news assignments were reserved solely for males are over. My own daughter, Pailin Wedel, has benefited from the pioneering of Webb, Fitzgerald and Leroy, to become a successful photojournalist and documentary film-maker.
I was fortunate to chat with Kate Webb on a few occasions, but she wasn’t interested in talking about herself, so I am grateful to Becker for explaining so much, so well.
“You Don’t Belong Here” is available on Amazon.com.
A website dedicated to the life and work of Catherine Leroy can be found at: https://dotationcatherineleroy.org/en/
Webb’s book, “On the Other Side: 23 Days With the Viet Cong,” is on Amazon at: https://www.amazon.com/Other-Side-Days-Viet-Cong/dp/0812902785/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Kate+Webb+23+days&qid=1614742872&sr=8-1
Also worth reading is “War Torn: Stories of War from the Women Reporters Who Covered Vietnam” at https://www.amazon.com/War-Torn-Stories-Reporters-Covered-ebook-dp-B004W3GWS0/dp/B004W3GWS0/ref=mt_other?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=1614743070
Fitzgerald’s first book, “Fire in the Lake” can be found at https://www.amazon.com/Fire-Lake-Frances-FitzGerald-ebook/dp/B0028MM2MM/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=Frances+Fitzgerald&qid=1614743196&s=digital-text&sr=1-2
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