You Don't Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War, Becker - B+

      Prior to Vietnam, the term war correspondent applied exclusively to men. A Frenchwoman, an American and an Australian were the groundbreakers who altered that dynamic. Catherine Leroy was a photographer; Frances Fitzgerald wrote for US magazines and was skilled at writing about the war from the Vietnamese perspective; Kate Webb excelled at combat reporting.

     MACV selected Leroy to cover its first and, as it turned out, only airborne offensive in early 1967. She was 5 feet tall and weighed 87 pounds, but had made dozens of jumps in France. She had arrived in Saigon a year earlier. She had a vague affiliation with Paris Match and talked her way into being a stringer for the AP.  She spent more time in the field in 1966 than any other journalist. She smoked, cursed and lived with the soldiers in the jungle. Her photographs garnered world wide applause.

    Also arriving in theater in 1966 was Frances Fitzgerald, the daughter of a senior CIA executive, and a Peabody heiress on her mother's side. She had graduated from Radcliffe in 1962 after a childhood of remarkable privilege. She had planned to write a few articles and stay in Vietnam for a month.  She was intrigued by Buddhist culture and reported in depth about the Buddhist opposition to the Saigon government. Her articles began to appear in the Village Voice, the Atlantic and the New York Times. Exhausted and ill, she returned to New York in the fall.

   Early the following year, Leroy accompanied the Marines into their battle for Khe Sanh. Her intimate photographs of the anguish and pain of combat were featured in Life, the NYTimes, and Paris Match and led to an article about her in Time. Her work was compared to the iconic photograph of the Marines on Iwo Jima. A few months later, she was seriously wounded, after being hit by 35 pieces of shrapnel. After a respite in hospital and in Paris, Leroy returned to the field. When the Tet offensive broke out, she went to Hue, the scene of heavy fighting. She was briefly captured by the NVA and her pictures of the North Vietnamese soldiers were the first of the war. Her fame increased as Life used one of her photographs for its cover. Award followed award. Look used a 10 page spread of her photos to announce its opposition to the war. Worn out and haunted by what she had been seeing for three years, she left Vietnam at the end of 1968.

   On the opening morning of Tet, an Australian stringer for UPI, Kate Webb, ran to the US Embassy. Her article used the phrase "a butcher's shop in Eden" to summarize the scene. The line was quoted around the world and led to a full time job.  UPI put her into a regular combat rotation, something neither the Times nor the AP would do for four more years. Her specialty was covering the ARVN and the impact of the war on civilians. In 1970,  UPI sent her to Cambodia, where she would become a legend. That year, the US expanded the war with extensive bombing and a brief invasion of the country. Reporters following the war in Cambodia were dying at an incredible rate, as they entered the war zone without the protection of American forces. The rather ineffective Cambodian army could not hold off the communist Khmer Rouge. She became bureau chief when her boss was killed.  In April 1971, Webb and five other journalists were captured by the North Vietnamese. Weeks of interrogation and marching followed. They were released three weeks later.  Kate was an international celebrity, but a very ill one, having contacted two different strains of malaria.                                                                One of Fitzgerald's last reports was a 15 page article in the Atlantic in 1967. It would become the outline for her masterpiece, 'Fire In The Lake', which was published in 1972. Unlike most journalists and the American military, she understood that the issues in Vietnam went back longer than the last few decades. She wrote of the half-millennium of Chinese overlordship that fostered the desire for freedom. Her focus was on Vietnam, its people and culture. The New Yorker serialized it, something it had last done for Hersey's Hiroshima. The book was an immediate best seller, and won the Pulitzer, National Book Award, and Bancroft Prize, besting Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest. 

     When the end came in April 1975, Leroy was in Saigon, Fitzgerald in Hanoi and Webb in Manilla. Leroy continued as a war photographer around the world in the 70's, 80's and into the 90's. She died in 2006. Webb left journalism for a decade and then went to work for Agence-France Press and reported throughout Asia. She retired in 2001, returned to Australia and died in 2007. Fitzgerald stayed on in the upper echelons of American society and academic circles. She published a book on American history text books, and won a second set of awards for a 2017 book on American evangelicals.

    This is a fabulous book, very well written and a testament to the extraordinary courage these three young women showed in daily risking their lives and in overcoming the prejudices they faced.  For almost fifty years, 'Fire in the Lake' in its bright yellow dustcover has been in my library and my heart. It, along with 'The Best and the Brightest' , helped me come to understand the paramount political issue of my youth.