KJ
Reviews
War
Torn: Stories of War from the Women Reporters Who Covered Vietnam
by Tad Bartimus, Denby Fawcett, Jurate Kazickas, Edith Lederer, Ann
Bryan Mariano, Anne Morrissy Merick, Laura Palmer, Kate Webb, Tracy
Wood; introduction by Gloria Emerson; Random House, New York, 320 pp
Reviewed
by Donald Kirk, in KJ#57
(Posted in tribute to Kate Webb, who died May 13, 2007; TimesOnline
obituary here)
This
book makes a significant point about evolving attitudes toward women
as they compete to cover wars. Paralleling the dramatic increase in
recent years in the percentage of women in media, many more women now
routinely go to war as correspondents than was conceivable during World
War II or Korea or even Vietnam. Although I recall seeing a number of
women reporting from Saigon, including most of those in this book, they
were in a distinct minority. Moreover, as these women tell us, they
encountered barriers that their male colleagues never knew. Bosses back
home, as well as bureau chiefs in Saigon, were reluctant to send women
into danger. It was far easier to tell the aggressive female in the
bureau to interview refugees and monks, street kids and aid workers,
maybe a few politicians, than to say, join the marines under siege in
Khe Sanh, or the soldiers dying on Hamburger Hill, or GIs on a sweep
through War Zone C, to name a few old datelines.
One or two of the women represented here ranked among the finest correspondents
of the war. Kate Webb writes with verve and humor, not to mention pathos
and sadness, of her experiences beginning with her early days stringing
for the Overseas Weekly to her coverage for United Press International
of some of the war’s turning points, including the Tet offensive.
She reports with sardonic humor on the rejections she got as a woman
and maintains her sense of irony in contrasts between encounters with
GIs and the comforts of Saigon. Later, she evokes the ambience of Phnom
Penh, where reporters lived in luxury in the Royale but died chasing
war in old Mercedes taxis.
The highlight of Webb’s chapter, and possibly of the entire book,
is her account of the days and nights she spent as a prisoner of North
Vietnamese troops after she was captured along with one Japanese and
four Cambodian reporters. She describes this period in a tone of adventure,
made all the more readable by minute details of the scene, the people,
the fears of execution.
Webb writes in staccato wire-service style, short paragraphs with quotes
and adjectives, but avoids the clichés of agency reporting and
steers clear of moralizing that would blur her tersely moving memories
of those who lost their lives, some of whom all of us knew. I had a
feeling, though, that Webb had much more to say, that she could expand
her chapter into a book in which her experiences as a prisoner, reported
to have died before she surprised the world by showing up again with
the others, could fill two or three chapters. Now that she’s retired
from her last posting in Jakarta with Agence France Presse, she may
have time to put down the story of her up-and-down career, including
tours from Afghanistan to Korea and Indonesia.
If none of the others matches Webb for breadth of experience relayed
with humor and sadness in fast-moving prose, some of them have stories
to tell. Denby Fawcett, writing for The Honolulu Advertiser,
reflects the ethos of those early days, when official optimism was rife
and much of the press corps spent more time reveling in the pleasures
of Saigon than covering the war. Fawcett ranges from the restaurants
and hangouts of old Saigon to a room of the dying in the infamous Third
Field Hospital that she toured with Eppie Lederer, aka Ann Landers,
but her most significant contribution is her story-behind-the-story
of a directive by General William Westmoreland, the U.S. commander in
Vietnam, banning female reporters from a single night in the field.
Westmoreland, who had been a neighbor of Fawcett’s parents in
Honolulu, issued the directive after encountering her at a base in the
central highlands. She and two of the other writers, Ann Bryan Mariano
and Anne Morrissy Merick (they acquired their last names during the
war by marrying correspondents), lobbied all the way to the Pentagon
to get the directive reversed.
Mariano adds the dimension of the history of the Overseas Weekly,
an independent, irreverent paper that found an audience among GIs and
other expatriates who were tired of the pap served up in the semi-official
Stars and Stripes and the official military press. She not only opened
the Weekly’s Saigon bureau but also recruited a colorful
assortment of free-lancers, taking on Kate Webb and also hiring Richard
Boyle and Don Hirst, two names that I remember well from those days.
Mariano’s greatest triumph was the yearlong battle she waged against
the Pentagon, under Robert McNamara, who loathed the paper, for the
right to get the Weekly onto military newsstands. The Weekly’s
final victory, in a court decision on October 3, 1967, was “a
fine moment for the First Amendment,” she writes, understating
the importance of the ruling that she helped bring about.
Sadly, Mariano, whom I last saw in Washington seven years ago, now suffers
from Alzheimer’s and did not actually write a lot of the chapter
that appears under her name. It is difficult to believe that Mariano,
returning to Vietnam with her adopted daughter Mai in a search for Mai’s
roots, “realized that at some level she saw me as a war criminal,
allied with the Americans who had shattered her birth country with bombs
and bullets.” Mariano was not one to engage in such moralizing
or recriminations. These words are at variance with the kind of writing
and editing that she espoused.
There’s no doubting the writing of Jurate Kazickas, who spent
more time than most other journalists, men or women, in the field. She
writes with a degree of empathy for the GIs that one seldom encounters
in reporting from Vietnam, and she also conveys the unique quality of
her presence as a woman in that man’s world. “So, what’s
a woman like you doing out here,” one GI asks her. “I’m
a reporter, and this is the biggest story of our time," she answers.
She also has a story to tell, her own story of being severely wounded
at Khe Sanh, and the story of going on a patrol whose leader, a young
captain, she learned much later, was killed. “To this day,”
she writes, “Vietnam taunts, haunts, and still mystifies me.”
Hackneyed, perhaps, but those who were there know the feeling.
None of the others lived with quite such intensity, in or out of Saigon,
and some glorify what were extremely prosaic experiences. Ann Merick,
producer for ABC News, picking up the color of Saigon, tells you, in
apparent all-seriousness, “You put your life in jeopardy if you
jaywalked.” From there, she writes that Saigon was “dirty
and seedy,” retaining “little vestige of the days when it
had been the southern capital of French Indochina.” It’s
hard to believe she neglected to look around enough to savor the city’s
colonial charm, though she does mention the “very French”
Majestic Hotel, where I lived and wrote for two years, and the “wonderful
old Continental Hotel.” Her biggest adventure was to discover
she was pregnant while husband Bud, with U.S. News & World Report,
was out of Saigon, then to give birth in Third Field and finally to
care for her baby girl in an apartment not far from the ABC bureau.
We all heard the whine of Viet Cong rockets from time to time, but few
if any other correspondents were bundling infants into shelters during
such attacks.
Edith Lederer, now at the AP’s United Nations bureau, devotes
much of her chapter to the trivia of learning she was going there, writing
her Aunt Tillie, the early days in Saigon, reporting to the AP bureau,
putting on a helmet “for the first time” — you get
the idea. She even quotes a poem she wrote, and she seems to think she’d
had a “real brush with war” when she “saw smoke from
air strikes and heard the booming of artillery” during a trip
out of Saigon on well-traveled Route Four. She gets better as she moves
to the “Christmas bombing” around Hanoi, as covered from
Saigon, the first prisoner release, which I also witnessed, the bittersweet
farewells and the realization that “the North Vietnamese and the
Vietcong looked like the winners seeing off their defeated enemies.”
The most questionable contribution is that of Tad Bartimus, an AP reporter
who had the terrible misfortune of coming down with a mysterious, debilitating
illness that severely weakened her. Bartimus appears to be compensating
by over-dramatizing her experiences and her memories, giving the impression
she wants to show off her writing skills in an effluence of high-flown
clichés. “I pushed beyond the boundaries of my own inhibitions,
to love passionately, risk completely, and learn we’re all capable
of the best and the worst,” she gushes. A page later: “I
tasted real fear under fire in a ditch in the Mekong Delta… I
trembled with wonder as I faced down a tiger on a Laotian mountainside.”
Yeah, right.
Bartimus’ tendency to exaggerate reaches an apotheosis, after
she’s taken us through the requisite relationships with family
and introductions to the AP bureau, when she tells us she risked her
life when she realized she'd “been caught on a dark Saigon street
after curfew.” Only the intervention of an AP photographer, it
seems, rescued her from “the trigger-happy policeman…”
As one who frequently was out after curfew, often encountering the “white
mice” of the Saigon police, I can’t help but feel such fevered
prose raises a serious credibility issue. Her recollections of Phnom
Penh are similarly flawed. Might she have a movie in mind when she describes
“neat little drivers in black patent-leather shoes with pointy
toes… polishing gleaming chrome bumpers” behind the Royale?
The only drivers I ever saw wore rumpled shirts and tennis shoes, and
the Mercedes on which they took us out of the capital were dilapidated
models assembled in Singapore. (I was quoted $2,000, negotiable down,
if I wanted to buy one, but it would never have passed inspection in
any other country.)
Bartimus’ overwriting turns into distortions of history as she
tells about going to Hue to chronicle “the rebuilding of the old
imperial city mostly destroyed during the 1968 Tet offensive.”
Sorry, I was in Hue before, during and after Tet and again in 1988 and
2000, and I can report bullet-pocked walls but no such destruction beyond
a gaping shellhole, quickly repaired, in the palace roof, the heart
of a one-time royal capital that was scrupulously avoided by air strikes.
And why, writing about her work on Requiem, the coffee-table
book of photos by photographers who were killed, does she give full
credit to AP photo chief Horst Faas as co-editor but fail to mention
Tim Page, the crazed, indefinably brilliant photographer who was the
other co-editor? One can only feel sorry for her as she struggles with
illness, but it’s too bad she feels this impulse to skew the facts.
One virtue of War Torn is that each of the correspondents writes
from the perspective of a particular period, beginning in the early
days and on to the end of the war and beyond, offering, when not wallowing
in self-promotion, an eyewitness view of history. Tracy Wood, then with
UPI, was there during the period of ceasefire and negotiations, and
gets it right in her sense of the betrayal of the South Vietnamese and
the show of useless talks at Tan Son Nhut with the Vietcong and the
East European peace-keepers. She also relates her part in arranging
for journalists to cover the release of the last U.S. prisoners in Hanoi,
negotiating with the North Vietnamese, her own bosses, and network biggies,
including Walter Cronkite, to charter a plane from Vientiane to Hanoi.
I was there too, with the Chicago Tribune, on the same plane,
but came away with different impressions. She portrays the POWs as zombies,
almost broken by torture, but doesn’t seem aware that most in
that last batch were captured several months earlier during the “Christmas
bombing” and had not endured the same suffering as those who were
freed in previous sets of releases. So doing, she infers a lot that
was just not there. She describes the POWs she saw as “blank,
deliberately emotionless, avoiding eye contact,” but didn’t
hear them murmuring, out of earshot of their captors, that much of what
the North Vietnamese were telling us in a briefing was “not true.”
Laura Palmer wraps up the book with a chapter that encapsulates not
only her own story but that of the final abandonment of Saigon in 1975
and her emotions more than a decade later as she researched the lives
of those who lost loved ones in the war. Her chapter is remarkable for
providing continuity from the talks at Tan Son Nhut to the evacuation
of Saigon, to the long lingering tragedy that the war inflicted on the
families of those who died. Yet she descends at times into pointless
polemics, as when she describes “the Nixon doctrine” as
“war and savagery” when it is better understood as a way
out of the nightmare. And, returning to Saigon in 1989, she reports
her meeting in the Majestic with Pham Xuan An, the former Time
journalist who turned out to have been a senior official for the victors.
“No one who knew An felt betrayed,” she says matter-of-factly,
but she obviously never met my former assistant, among those whom An
interrogated in prison while skillfully courting the foreign journalists
who were so easily taken in by his duplicity. Still, she echoes a common
refrain when she writes that she had gone to Vietnam “with all
the answers and left with only questions.”
Not the least important part of this book is the introduction by Gloria
Emerson, the former New York Times correspondent, who reminds
us of a heritage of women who were correspondents beginning with Martha
Gellhorn during the Spanish Civil War. Emerson cites a number of other
women who made in some cases greater contributions than most of those
in this book, but she misses some too. Beverly Deepe of the New
York Herald Tribune and Christian Science Monitor, Elizabeth
Pond of the Monitor, Claire Hollingsworth of the London
Telegraph and Georgie Anne Geyer of the Chicago Daily News
all come to mind. I knew all of these women, some better than others.
They all deserve a place in the study that begs to be done of women
correspondents in Vietnam. War Torn suggests the possibilities but neglects
to pay homage to those women who did far more to report on the war than
most of the ones represented here. Whoever writes that study might draw
material from this book but should avoid the hyperbole that mars the
offerings of some of its contributors.
Donald Kirk covered the war in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos from the arrival
of American troops in 1965 to their withdrawal in 1974. He is the author
of Wider
War: The Struggle for Cambodia, Thailand and Laos (Praeger,
1971) and Tell
It to the Dead (Nelson-Hall, Chicago, 1975, subtitled
“Memories of a War”, and M.E. Sharpe, Armonk, N.Y., 1996,
with six new chapters, subtitled “Stories of a War”). www.donaldkirk.com
Copyright
held by the author
Back to Selections
Subscriptions
