Christian Simonpietri, a photographer who met Leroy in the early days, saw something else: a slight young woman distinctly out of place. “She was walking around the city center with only a few dollars in her pocket and a Leica camera strapped around her tiny neck. A tiny French person with a blond ponytail,” he said. “She looked lost, so helpless. That is why we became friends.”14
Simonpietri was part of a Corsican-French network that had kept Indochina running since colonial days. Born in Vietnam, he knew the country, the press corps, and the French expat community. For all those reasons, he was a valued guide for visiting foreign journalists.
With one look, Simonpietri knew Leroy needed help. They lunched together at the Continental, talking about war coverage over plates of spaghetti carbonara.
“I was giving her a few tips on how to cover the war in South Vietnam and how to behave with the troops,” he said.15
Simonpietri was right. Leroy needed help. She was dangerously naïve about the hurdles she faced. But she was also a quick learner. Her letters home included descriptions of beggars, lepers, “thousands of dogs,” and expats gone native. These old-timers, she wrote “are reliving the Indochina war all night long…‘When I was in Tonkin’… the key word, their faces light up. As far as I am concerned, I don’t give a shit. What I’m interested in is today.”
The far more sophisticated French and international society she met at diplomatic meals and social gatherings, like the French Cercle Sportif, a tennis and swim club, was more proper, and Leroy’s wardrobe was barely adequate. She asked her mother to send her more stylish clothes: a new dress from Galeries Lafayette in Paris and, from her closet, the classic red silk dress, her navy-blue bikini—oh, and the top of her white bikini.
The better wardrobe would also help her in her work. After meeting several American officers, she realized that “being a woman, particularly a French woman, really brings a lot of advantages.”
IN LATE FEBRUARY 1966, her confidence and wardrobe boosted, a petite woman with a long elfin face and piercing blue eyes walked into the Associated Press office in the Eden Building opposite the Continental Hotel. Unannounced, she introduced herself to Horst Faas, the editor of photography. Catherine Leroy had decided to jump-start her professional life.
Faas was a minor deity to photographers, especially freelancers. A talented photographer himself—he had won the Pulitzer the year before for his Vietnam War photographs—Faas was also an unusually gifted editor. His organizational skills, his grasp of history and photography’s influence on events, and his deft handling of photographers helped put the Associated Press at the top. Above all, he had an eye for the most expressive photographs. Under his watch, the AP was the source of the best war photographs in Vietnam.
He was also a kingmaker. Faas took one look at Leroy and, new wardrobe notwithstanding, was not impressed. “She was a timid, skinny and very fragile young girl who certainly didn’t look like a press photographer,” he thought.16
He told her as much. “I’m not used to a young woman photographer,” he said. “I don’t know how you’ll be perceived out there. Maybe you should concentrate on the Vietnamese and life in Saigon—pictures war photographers normally wouldn’t like to take.”
Leroy would have none of it. “No, no,” she answered back. “I am a paratrooper.”
Faas laughed: “You—a paratrooper—I can’t believe it.”
Luckily for her, beneath his daunting façade, Faas had a distinctly open-minded attitude within his profession. A German born in Berlin in 1933 who grew up with war’s sorrows, he left his country as a young man, becoming cosmopolitan as he photographed conflicts in Algeria and Africa before arriving in Vietnam in 1962. He won the respect of the troops he photographed by living the war with them, famously wading through streams hoisting his camera above his head.
He worked easily with photographers from around the world: the US, Britain, Japan, and France, along with a few Italians and Vietnamese. They all respected him, not only for his evident talent but because he was fair, decisive, and exceedingly hardworking. And he gave them a chance to prove themselves.
But women? Faas’s policy as photo editor, then a rarity, was to buy good photographs no matter who took them. Even, now, from a woman.
During that first meeting, they spoke in French. Leroy barely remembered English from her party days in London, although she had already started to Americanize her name, introducing herself as Cathy. Faas gave her several rolls of film, an essential gift since freelancers couldn’t afford to buy their own. Then he delivered his routine conditions leavened with his dry humor. Once you’ve taken your photographs, he told her, bring back the film and AP will develop it in the bureau’s darkroom. Photographers receive $15 for every photo purchased by AP, and AP retains the copyright on all these photos. No discussion.
With Faas’s implicit encouragement, Leroy won a degree of legitimacy denied to other young women who had to spend months proving they were good enough to even be considered for freelance work.
Leroy’s first assignment in Vietnam was an immersion in American culture, not war. She photographed the Swedish American actress Ann-Margret who was touring Vietnam to bolster troop morale. Leroy stood offstage as Ann-Margret performed at the US base in Da Nang in front of thousands of American men, all military, all in a frenzy at the sight of the actress in a skintight white costume. All Leroy could hear was raucous American noise—shouting, catcalling, and four thousand pairs of hands clapping, as every eye in the house converged on the dazzling woman singing and dancing onstage.
The coverage in the Stars and Stripes military newspaper was exuberant. How Ann-Margret, one of Hollywood’s hottest stars, brought along a backup band of Johnny Rivers, Mickey Jones, and Chuck Day. How she danced the swim, the frug, the jerk, and the monkey to the deafening cheers of the troops, some of whom tried to dance along.17 The mood in 1966 was optimistic. It was the first full year that American troops were actively engaged in combat in Vietnam. President Johnson had ended years of US vacillation between sending in American combat troops or searching for a peace settlement that would allow them to withdraw. Vietnam was now an American war, with the South Vietnamese in a secondary role. The Marines were gung-ho.
THE NEXT DAY, Leroy followed Ann-Margret to the Da Nang hospital where she greeted soldiers with smiles and close-ups. For a French woman who had never been to the United States, knew few Americans, and had never been close to the military, it was a heady initiation.
Leroy came away from the assignment impressed by the American military, especially by the traffic of warplanes steadily taking off from the base on bombing missions over North Vietnam, raids begun by President Johnson in 1964 that signaled his decision to jump into the war.
The heat on the bases was overwhelming. It felt like a sauna. Sweat coated her scalp and collected around her neck. She took the next day off to swim in the waters of the South China Sea before hopping on a military flight back to Saigon. A Swiss magazine bought two of her color photos of Ann-Margret. Her career had begun.
Buddhist demonstrations broke out one month later in April. They appeared to be a resumption of the huge 1963 Buddhist crisis symbolized by a Buddhist monk who burned himself to death on a busy Saigon street in protest of the corrosive policies of President Diem, protests that helped lead to the president’s downfall.
Now in 1966, the Buddhists were agitating against the escalating American military role, which they saw as a foreign power taking over their country. President Nguyen Van Thieu feared the Buddhists were becoming effective rivals and struck back. He fired a popular Buddhist general and claimed the Buddhist clergy was under the influence of communists.
Most of the recent South Vietnamese history was lost on Leroy. When she went back to Da Nang to photograph the growing protests, she wrote in a letter home that they had been “skillfully led by the Buddhists, who in turn are manipulated by the communists.”18 She was parroting the South Vietnamese government’s basel
ess charges.
Da Nang itself was off-limits when she arrived. A military jeep dropped her off at the press center outside the city. From there, she walked toward the fighting in Da Nang on “a deserted avenue lined with wooden shacks, in the crossfire of automatic weapons.”
Her first time under fire, she instinctively ran for cover and joined a group of Vietnamese who had been chased from their homes. They gave her a bowl of soup and chopsticks. “This is delicious,” she said in French, and then ran further to avoid the fighting as it closed in.
I ended up near a shop making headstones, I was not the only one. I took a photograph of a man. Woman? Terrified and taking cover behind a headstone.”19
She took more pictures of Vietnamese civilians—children as well as adults “huddled under sniper fire behind gravestones in the stone mason’s yard.” It was a chaotic insurrection with no sign of communist propagandists or communist provocation.
Faas bought two of her photographs, haunting images of Vietnamese civilians hiding behind headstones as they were fired on by their own government. When he sent Leroy’s first photos over the wire to New York for sale around the world, her excitement matched only her determination to continue photographing for Faas.
From that moment, the AP Saigon bureau became a second home to Leroy. Returning from the field, she walked up four flights of stairs because the elevator rarely worked. The familiar walls of the office were crowded with framed articles and photographs of reporters who had died covering the war; the floors were strewn with flak jackets, boots, and the gadgets photographers required, and the hallway permanently smelled of nuoc mam, the ubiquitous Vietnamese fish sauce, and urine. She slumped into an armchair, wrote her captions, and handed the negatives to Faas.
Just as familiar was her routine after leaving the AP office. She would return to her small rented room, shower off the dirt from working days in the field, and then crawl into bed, sleeping eighteen hours at a stretch, sometimes a whole day: “I slept as if I had no desire to ever wake up.”20
CHAPTER TWO
As Dirty and Tired as They Are
NO ONE HAD TOLD LEROY THAT THE US MILITARY HAD A long-standing but now dormant rule that prohibited women from reporting on the battlefield. The ban was rigidly enforced during World War II and specified that women journalists stay behind with military nurses. Among the thousands of male reporters covering the American military, very few women managed to make it anywhere near actual battlefields; most were caught and told to leave.
Vietnam was wildly different. Military rules for media were not applied there. President Johnson had refused to declare the US at war in Vietnam and instead relied on open-ended powers granted him by Congress under the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. And without a declaration of war, there was no censorship. Vietnam was the first and last uncensored American war. American journalists were not required to submit their reports or film for review. Nor were they embedded as they are today, where access to the front is under tight control and allowed at the discretion of the unit commander “whenever possible.”1
Amazingly, the military even provided transport for the press. Reporters were free to come and go wherever troops were deployed, albeit always with permission from the unit commander. All that was required to board the transport—often a helicopter—was official press credentials.2
Jonathan Schell, journalist and author of The Village of Ben Suc, arrived the same year as Leroy and, as an American, understood how rare the freedom was that journalists had in Vietnam. “That press pass turned out to be magical—sort of like an all Europe rail pass except you could go on the planes, you could go on the tanks, live on the bases. You could hitchhike with helicopters from one place to the next,” he said. “It was wide open. You could go out and see that war.”3
For women, this uncensored, unrestricted entry to the battlefield was an incomparable gift: a door to a profession that was closed to them at home. Without a declaration of war, the military also left dormant the ban on women journalists on the battlefield.
For Leroy, the press pass was also a temporary answer to her abysmal finances. She was running out of money. After paying for meals, professional expenses, and rent on a tiny room in a Vietnamese boarding house, she was broke. Her press pass allowed her to live in the field with the soldiers where she ate rations, slept rough, and spent no money. It was a godsend. A newcomer with no training in photojournalism or familiarity with the military, she didn’t know the rules so she made up her own. She would go from base camp to base camp, take in-depth photographs, fly back on a military chopper to Saigon to sell the photos, and then return to the field.
She set a record for the number of military operations covered by a journalist in 1966. She had followed US troops from the demilitarized zone (DMZ) on the northern border to the Mekong Delta in the south and back again several times.
One of her first operations was on the Chu Pong Massif near the Cambodian border and the DMZ at the base camp of the Second Battalion of the Twelfth Cavalry of the army’s First Cavalry Division.
“A helicopter has just put me down in the middle of the jungle at the same time as boxes of C-rations, munitions and mail,” she wrote. “I stayed there for a few seconds, lost among all these men staring at me.”
She was wearing combat fatigues she had tailored to her size in Saigon and size 5 combat boots she bought on the black market, after an extensive search for the smallest pair available. The overall effect was of an adolescent boy going to a costume party.
The commander had approved her visit and welcomed her, not knowing how long she would stay or how she would adapt. Leroy wasn’t sure herself. Hesitantly, she established what became her distinctive modus operandi. She accepted no help whatsoever. She carried her own pack, and she crossed streams and climbed hills unassisted. She was determined: “The terrain is extremely difficult. I have to learn to hold on tight, to not sink, looking where to place my foot.”
“I walk around dressed like them (not a pretty sight), eat like them, twice a day I tell them I’m fed up of seeing your faces, I go behind a tree when it’s time to pee.”4
She slept under her poncho or in a tent with several soldiers. There was no sex with the troops. That was a given, or Leroy would have been shipped out immediately for causing disruption among the ranks.
At the same time, she was French and understood the magic of presentation. Using dreary military C-rations, she made the troops hot chocolate, calling it “French cocoa,” convincing them it was delicious because of a special French ingredient. At night, she proudly offered cans of vin ordinaire that tasted like champagne in the field.
After a few weeks, she became used to the military, from the throbbing whirl of the helicopter blades to the rattle of machine guns or the slicing sound of machetes cutting pathways through the head-high elephant grass as the troops reconnoitered. She got used to the body bags too. And the army got used to her and her camera. They started talking to her, teaching her English with their questions: Where do you come from? What are you doing here? Her answers were delivered in a Parisian accent they adored and tried to mimic. Soon, they barely noticed as she photographed their arduous and tedious marching, their anxious moments running to the mail drop to see if someone had written them a letter, their exhaustion at the end of the day as night fell in the jungle. In her photographs, she caught the offhand nobility, the anxiety and loneliness in their faces, the fear as they marched past villages where smoke billowed from burned-out houses.
When Captain Bobby C. Allen, a Protestant chaplain, arrived and the soldiers gathered in the inhospitable jungle, backs to a tree, legs bent, helmet-less heads bowed with eyes on the ground, Leroy captured the moment in a tableau as composed as a Vatican painting, the soldiers caught in a moment of reflection, listening as the chaplain addressed them, lifting them out of the moment where the sound of battle couldn’t reach them.5
In a letter to her father she described the rite of passage when she went out with a
new unit. “I’ve got one day to prove myself. They expect me to break my neck every 100 meters. There would be 10 guys to help me up, but all would be lost.
“In the morning I’m just as dirty and tired as they are, so our relations are very friendly. They forget I’m a gal, I’ve been adopted.”6
One soldier, knocked over by the novelty of her at the camp, told her: “When I write to my pals that I slept in a tent with a French woman in the Vietnamese jungle, no one will believe me.”
All the time spent with troops bred a ruggedness in her that was considered anything but feminine. She learned the English lexicon of war: how many wounded or dead, incoming and outgoing, mortars and machine guns—what she called her “language of violence.”
She learned to swear with the soldiers and Marines. She matched their “fuck you” and “fuck this,” always pronounced with her strong French accent as “fuck zees.” She called this language colorful, but others called it foul. Dickey Chapelle had taken on the same habits. After she died, she was remembered by Vietnamese troops as a foul-mouthed woman.7 In the 1960s women were not expected to curse aloud.
And Leroy smoked as much as any soldier. She was rarely without a cigarette dangling in her hand. The woman whose parents spent most of her childhood worried she would succumb to asthma without special care always carried a pack, which she shared casually with the soldiers as they did with her.
Spending inordinate amounts of time in the field allowed her to experiment. She was so short, she could move among the tall Americans without being noticed and aim her camera at unusual angles. She started to lie on the ground to be close enough to zero in on a soldier’s face. She focused on the eyes.
As the war escalated in the summer of 1966, and the rhythm of the deployments intensified, Leroy sold enough photographs to earn real money. The Associated Press was still her best client. She would go directly from the field to the office of Horst Faas “ill at ease in my filthy battle dress” but determined not to miss a news cycle. With a professional eye as discerning as a diamond cutter, Faas would review her film, choosing the few he would buy and paying the $15 a photograph he had promised her from the beginning. Paris Match gave her assignments and paid much more handsomely. She worked for CBS. United Press International bought a few photographs left over by AP.
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