“Six minutes!”
“Get ready!”
“Stand up! Hook up! Check static lines!”
Soldier after soldier hooked onto the line of steel cable suspended above them, stamping their feet and shouting. The green light above the door lit up.
“Go!”
Leroy fell in with the others. The jumpmaster grabbed the static lines, guiding each soldier out with a “go, go, go, go.”
Like a controlled explosion the men thundered down the long dark aisle toward the back of the airplane, Leroy keeping pace with them.
She jumped out the door with butterflies in her stomach, her dark blond pigtails lifting as she fell. Then: “Everything became light.”
Leroy’s parachute opened into cool air with no trace of wind. From above, the menacing jungle was an undistinguished blur of deepening shades of green. Almost beautiful. She grabbed the Leica, then the Nikon cameras around her neck, and photographed the hundreds of parachutes as they opened. She shot their images from above and below and sideways. Even in their helmets and heavy boots the soldiers reminded her of flowers opening their petals.
In no time the lush earth raced up to meet her. “I landed in a drained rice paddy, lovely and springy and soft, rolling over in my easiest landing.”
Operation Junction City looked majestic in Leroy’s photographs that first day. Parachutes filled the sky in artful patterns; soldiers hit the ground running, echoing the operations over France and Holland against the Nazis. But there the similarities ended. This tropical assault was a search-and-destroy mission in Tay Ninh Province in southwest Vietnam. It was not a set piece battle intended to capture a city or heavily armed positions. These soldiers were dispersed over rice paddies and villages looking, sometimes blindly, for the elusive headquarters of Vietnamese communists.2
In Washington, President Lyndon B. Johnson was waiting for news, anxious for a winning operation. His experience of World War II had been a series of battles that led inexorably toward victory. He had been a naval officer awarded a Silver Star for bravery as the observer member of bombing missions in the South Pacific.
Vietnam stumped him; the war was nothing like that. After nearly two years of disappointment as commander in chief, Johnson expected Operation Junction City to deliver a classic military turning point, an outright success that would impress the American public.3
With so much riding on the operation, other reporters had demanded to be on the ground with the paratroopers. Many were upset, some even disdainful, when they found out Leroy would be the only accredited journalist to jump. For over a year, Leroy had been the only woman combat photographer in Vietnam and had given up trying to change attitudes. Even the great photographer Don McCullin, who admired Leroy’s work, was taken aback seeing her on the battlefield. She did not want to be a woman amongst men but a man amongst men. Why would a woman want to be amongst the blood and carnage?… I did have that kind of issue with Cathy.”4
After the initial landing, the rest of the press arrived by land and filed their stories. The next morning Brig. Gen. John R. Deane showed up in the press tent with a surprise for Leroy. He pinned the master jump wings badge, its gold star signifying a combat jump, onto her shirt. “Wear this,” he said. “That was your eighty-fifth jump.”5
She wore the badge permanently on her crumpled fatigues, an eloquent rejoinder to anyone who had questioned whether she was qualified to cover the war.
LEROY’S PHOTOGRAPHS FROM that day became historic. She had memorialized the first and, it would turn out, the only airborne US assault of the Vietnam War.
Only one other woman had preceded Leroy with a camera in the paddy fields and jungles of the Vietnam War—the celebrated photographer Dickey Chapelle. Chapelle became famous in World War II photographing battles of Guam and Okinawa. She had maneuvered around the official American ban on women covering combat by accepting an assignment aboard a navy hospital ship off the coast of Iwo Jima in 1945 and from there getting local permission to go on the island. On Okinawa she was caught photographing combat and placed under arrest in quarters. After the war, she photographed the struggles of postwar Europe, the uprising in Hungary, and wars in Algeria and Lebanon.6
Chapelle spent several months in Vietnam in 1961, before the American buildup, when President Kennedy sent 3,205 US troops as advisers to the South Vietnamese army. She burnished her reputation by winning a George Polk Award for her memoir. Her return to Vietnam in 1965 as the sole woman combat photographer was treated like a news event.
Chapelle was killed in November 1965, only months after she arrived. While on patrol with the Marines in Quang Ngai Province, she was hit by a piece of shrapnel from a booby trap. Her death made history: she was the first female war correspondent to be killed in combat. The news was published around the world, with accompanying photographs. When news organizations saw the picture of a Marine bending over her bloodied body crumpled on the ground, her pearl stud earring barely visible, they solidified their policies against allowing women to be combat photographers.
“There was a horror of assigning women to sports much less war,” said Hal Buell, the New York photo editor of the Associated Press who worked with the Vietnam War photographs sent from Saigon. “Look at the history of photography. It was male oriented for so long: the equipment, the printmaking. We didn’t think women could handle it. Women just weren’t part of that pool.”7
Leroy was the first woman photographer daring enough to follow Chapelle to cover combat in Vietnam and stick with it. For two years, Leroy remained the only one.
HER MOTHER SAID that Catherine Leroy was born angry, on an angry night of heavy Allied bombing toward the end of World War II. Their home in suburban Paris was not hit, and Catherine grew up in peace, in a prosperous bourgeois household where her father, Jean Leroy, an engineer, managed an iron foundry and her mother, Denise, doted on her only child.8
Young Catherine’s anger and stubborn temperament may have been part of her DNA, but it was exacerbated by severe asthma. Tiny and in generally poor health, Catherine had to endure traditional treatments that failed to alleviate her condition. Despite the cost, her parents sent her to a boarding school in the French Alps for one month at a time to strengthen and clear her lungs. She despised the school, but the fresh air worked. Back at home, young Catherine was routinely forbidden to overexert herself. “You can’t do that” was a familiar refrain of her childhood.
Her Catholic parents sent her to strict Catholic schools in their community of Enghien-les-Bains, best known for its casino. Monsieur and Madame Leroy were loving parents but repressed their feeling much of the time. Catherine saw her father break down only twice. In 1954, when she was ten years old, her father was listening to the radio, tears running down his face, as the announcer described the rout of the French army at the battle of Dien Bien Phu. Catherine had heard her father argue with his brother over the war to keep French colonies in Indochina. Until then, she hadn’t grasped its profound importance to her father.
The second time was over the death of Michel Leroy, her father’s twenty-one-year-old son from a previous marriage. Michel had died suddenly at a Catholic seminary where he was studying for the priesthood. To Catherine, he was a distant figure, more like a cousin.
As a young teenager, Catherine took up piano with a discipline she hadn’t shown before. She was talented, and with practice she mastered the keyboard and found a style she loved. Catherine told her mother she preferred the blues, to which Denise answered simply: “Do you want to end up in a brothel?”
Catherine was determined to concentrate on popular music, and when she was fourteen years old was granted an audition with Bruno Coquatrix, the director of L’Olympia in Paris, Europe’s biggest music hall. Top celebrity artists like Édith Piaf and Jacques Brel performed on the Olympia’s stage. Acceptance by Coquatrix would bring Catherine close to her dreams of playing American jazz.
Her audition went well. Coquatrix complimented her, saying she was very goo
d but also very young. Come back in a few years, he told her. Leroy would have none of that. Instead, she closed the lid of her piano and said: “I know all I need to know about piano.”
She stopped playing forever.
She still loved music and stole away to Paris at night to hear jazz and meet boys. She was more than ready for the 1960s and a looser lifestyle and spent nights with her best girlfriend to avoid her mother’s restrictions. To her parents’ horror, Catherine dropped out of secondary school. Frustrated, they sent her to England, to London, where she was supposed to learn English.
Rather than play cat-and-mouse games with her English teacher, Catherine explained early on that she had no interest in formal language lessons and offered a compromise: she would make herself useful washing windows in exchange for enough money to disappear into the London nightlife.
Her parents called her home.
Back in France, in need of an alternative source of excitement, she took up sky jumping. One of her instructors was a veteran French Foreign Legionnaire who had been scarred from stepping on a land mine. His stories brought to life the photographs of war and conflict in Paris Match magazine she admired, especially of the French paratroopers. She took photographs of the instructor with a small Instamatic camera.
“We talked a bit,” she said. He introduced her to a professional skydiver who had been a freelance journalist in Saigon. She was intrigued. “I persuaded myself that if I could not be a blues singer like Billie Holiday, I would be a photographer,” she wrote in a fragment of an unpublished memoir.
She was serious about photography and found a mind-numbing job at a temporary hiring agency in Paris, abandoning any idea of returning to school. In her free time, she roamed Paris, practicing with her camera. Working overtime, she saved enough francs to cover the costs of a Leica camera and a one-way ticket to Vietnam. After her twenty-first birthday, when a French child could legally leave home without parental consent, Catherine told Jean and Denise Leroy that she was going to Vietnam on her own for three months. In France, this was especially gutsy for a female, since the French were behind the times for gender equality. French women only gained the right to vote in 1944. But Leroy told her parents a white lie saying she would go only long enough to photograph a nice feature story on women in Vietnam. In fact, she was fully focused on being a war photographer, getting as close to the battle as she could.
Photojournalists are my heroes. I want to be a photojournalist. The biggest story in the world right now is the Vietnam War,” she wrote. Knowing next to nothing about Vietnam, Catherine Leroy arrived in Saigon in February 1966.9
JEAN LEROY HAD raised his daughter to believe in France’s civilizing mission in Indochina—Cambodia and Laos as well as Vietnam. In her first vote in a French election, Leroy cast her ballot for Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour, an extreme right-wing politician who never forgave the French loss at Dien Bien Phu.
The history behind the end of the colonies wasn’t discussed in her family, nor how and why the United States came to replace France as the reigning foreign power in Vietnam. Preferring to look at photographs rather than read long newspaper articles, Leroy had a negligible grasp of the history of the French and American occupations.
During World War II, Vietnam and every other colonized country was promised “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they live” at war’s end. The American president Franklin D. Roosevelt convinced Great Britain and then the other allies to make the pledge in the Atlantic Charter of 1941. The United States, at least, considered this a European promise to give up their colonies in Asia and Africa once the Axis powers of Germany, Japan, and Italy were defeated. President Roosevelt was determined to prevent France from resuming its colonial rule in Indochina.10
The British kept their word in India, Pakistan, and Burma by 1950, though the African colonies were not yet free of colonial interference. But France hesitated.
French leaders in Paris, trying to boost the local population’s confidence after the war’s devastation as well as the shame of occupation by the Nazis, were divided over whether to relinquish their colonies despite the Atlantic Charter.
After a series of failed negotiations, the French army returned to Vietnam and in 1947 began fighting to dislodge the provisional independent Vietnamese government of Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi. During World War II, Ho had worked with the United States Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA. He was recruited in Kunming, China, at the Dragon’s Gate Café. As Agent 19 of the OSS, Ho shared intelligence on the Japanese invaders with the OSS. Importantly, the Americans worked with Ho and his government in exile knowing they were communist.
But by 1948, the United States viewed communism as a global threat and was manipulated by France to change its priorities to line up with the French goal of retaining the Indochina colonies. Ho Chi Minh, once the intelligence asset, became the enemy.11
By the 1950s, Asia had changed dramatically. Communist Soviet Union developed and exploded an atomic bomb. China became a communist country after Mao Zedong’s army won the civil war at the end of 1949. The anticommunist Red Scare in Washington, fueled by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, led to accusations that some of the State Department’s top China specialists had been disloyal and “lost China,” the baseless accusations ruining their careers. The US Army faced off against the Chinese communist army in a war in Korea ignited by an invasion of the south by Soviet-backed Korean communists. The war ended in 1953 with a standoff that has endured into the twenty-first century.
Fear of a worldwide communist movement defined the politics of Washington. The United States considered itself in a cold war with the Soviet Union, which under the dictator Joseph Stalin had turned Eastern European nations into captive communist states. Every Soviet-allied communist country was considered an enemy to the US. The Atlantic Charter would take a back seat to this new and frightening threat.
With ease, the French convinced the United States government that Vietnam was a critical theater of the new Cold War, not a relic of colonial days. The American public went along and accepted the US decision to bankroll the French fight in Vietnam.
The French defeat at Diem Bien Phu was wrenching for Leroy’s father and much of France because they believed that with American wealth supporting French forces they would win and France would revive its stature by keeping Vietnam and Indochina as overseas territories. Defeat was an unimaginable humiliation.
At the 1954 Geneva Conference, which followed the defeat at Dien Bien Phu, the French agreed to withdraw from Indochina. Vietnam was divided into two parts, North and South, until a national reunification election could be held. President Dwight D. Eisenhower decided that Ho Chi Minh was likely to win the election and predicted that would lead to disaster: “The collapse of Indochina would produce a chain reaction which would result in the fall of all Southeast Asia to the Communists.”12
Eisenhower fully backed South Vietnam and rejected holding an election, citing a theory that each Southeast Asian country would fall once Ho Chi Minh won power. This became known as the domino theory. The Soviet Union had no such intentions in the region. It was fixated on controlling Eastern Europe. China barely had the resources to care for its own people after the Korean War and had a long history of antagonism with Vietnam.
President John F. Kennedy inherited Eisenhower’s war in 1961. By then, South Vietnam was mired in the corruption and cronyism of President Ngo Dinh Diem, a Catholic. The Vietnamese, especially the Buddhists, were increasingly disenchanted with the political leadership and with war against the North. Kennedy increased American aid and military advisers to give South Vietnam’s civilian and military leaders time to iron out their differences and unite against North Vietnam and the Viet Cong, the communist guerrillas in the South.13 The South Vietnamese generals decided the solution was to overthrow and assassinate their own President Ngo Dinh Diem. Kennedy had tacitly agreed not to stop the coup d’état against Diem but had not imagined
it would lead to Diem’s murder.
Three weeks later, after Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Vietnam became Johnson’s war. One year after his own election in 1964 as the candidate of peace, Johnson ordered American troops to Vietnam to fight as the main force against the communists. In March 1965, Maxwell Taylor, the US ambassador in Saigon, had given the South Vietnamese premier one-week advance notice that an initial deployment of 3,500 Marines would land in Da Nang to kick off America’s direct involvement in fighting the war. They were joining 23,000 American soldiers already in Vietnam as advisers. Later that summer, President Johnson announced he would raise the number of combat troops in Vietnam to 125,000.
DURING HER FIRST days in Saigon, Leroy was dutiful. She called on Vietnamese and French contacts—friends of friends whose names she had collected in Paris. She introduced herself to officials at the American military headquarters where she received press credentials based on a letter from Paris Match magazine promising to consider publishing her photographs. Leroy called the press pass her “open sesame card.”
After bouncing around, she rented a room for a few nights at the elegant Continental Palace Hotel, a French oasis in the heart of old Saigon across from the ornate Opera House. She convinced Mr. Le, the hotel manager, to allow her to use the hotel as a mail drop once she found much cheaper lodgings.
Half of the trees had been cut down along the streets in central Saigon to make way for the wartime traffic of jeeps, black limousines, motorbikes, automobiles, and GMC trucks, which clogged streets made for rickshaws and bicycles. Yet Saigon still resembled a tropical provincial French city as the colonialists intended. Leroy wrote her mother reassuring letters that she had landed on her feet. Saigon, she said, “is a very pleasant town that you would like. People are insouciant and smiling. Many Americans in civilian dress. All this doesn’t give the impression of being in a country at war.”
You Don't Belong Here Page 2
