You Don't Belong Here

by Elizabeth Becker

  After forty-eight hours in Saigon, Leroy would be back in the field, disciplining her nervous, wild energy on photographing war, the most intense subject any journalist ever faces. Every photograph she took that caught a moment of agony or triumph had the potential of generating a public reaction that might move global politics and make history. Every photograph could be her last if she was hit. Leroy was beginning to understand what every male journalist has known since the Crimean War: there is no assignment more rewarding and exciting or more dangerous. There’s nothing like a war.

  The first months were exhausting, especially for a woman who had trouble bringing her weight up to ninety pounds. Her arms and legs were skinny skeins of muscles and nerves. And she had to learn to manage on her own: she was a freelancer with no health insurance, no company regularly depositing a check in her bank account or funding her for expenses, and no spouse waiting to help her recover in a well-kept home in Saigon.

  Without real friends, the daughter who had rebelled so forcefully against her parents was discovering how much she needed them. Her letters home were a release valve, an antidote to loneliness, and a rich diary.

  She told her mother things she would have never expressed back home in France. “As a woman, it’s tough to be respected in Saigon. You’re either a whore or a bitch: 20,000 guys in town, but virtually no European women. It’s nowhere near as much fun as you’d think,” she wrote.8

  That description proved comically prophetic.

  One evening after returning from the field “dog tired,” Leroy was woken by loud shouting and screaming in Vietnamese. Then a knock on her door.

  “I found myself face to face with three military police—American, Vietnamese and Korean. They look into my room… a desk, a bed, a chair, a few photos on the wall, on the floor a dirty battle jacket, boots and an operations bag.”

  She asked them: “What do you want?”

  After surveying the room and realizing that this French woman was a professional journalist, the American policeman looked down at his boots and said: “We’re sorry, but we’re looking through all the prostitute houses.”

  The other young boarders with angelic smiles she had taken for Vietnamese students were actually sex workers in a brothel. In some ways, life in Saigon often seemed more difficult than in the field.9

  Leroy took a different tack when writing to her father: “You would be proud of your daughter if you saw her shaking hands with [US general] Westmoreland and curse in English just like certain colonels in the Marines with more decorations than General de Gaulle himself. I could write pages and pages about ‘my Marines,’” she wrote him. “The young Marines in particular are very impressive: calm, very relaxed, the tough youths do a real professional job. In these units there are some absolutely crazy heroic acts.”10

  The photojournalist Christian Simonpietri saw her transformation and was concerned that she was too coarse. She was becoming a confident journalist, yes, and gaining in professional stature. United Press International had already written a short story about the French woman war photographer. Among her colleagues, though, she was an oddball. There was, simply, no one like her. Weeks would go by and Simonpietri didn’t see her in Saigon. When she did show up, she had changed, and he told her so. “Her personality, her bad language was really not appreciated among colleagues,” he said. “She was too loud.”11

  Leroy could feel the tension and knew she needed a break. She had earned it in every sense: by July she was bringing in $500 for a single month’s work, a tangible acknowledgment that she had built the beginnings of a career in Vietnam. With plans for guilt-free relaxation, Leroy flew to Hong Kong. There she indulged herself, swimming in a hotel pool and window-shopping for clothes she couldn’t afford. She did buy a Nikon camera with a telephoto lens and a few additions to her wardrobe. But three days away felt too long. “There’s so much going on in Vietnam, I don’t want to start getting involved with events elsewhere.”

  By the time she returned, she discovered some of her “colleagues” were trying to get rid of her.

  WHEN LEROY FIRST arrived in February 1966, there were 184,314 US troops in Vietnam, a vast increase on the initial deployment a year earlier of just 3,500. By the end of 1966, the US military said it needed a total of 429,000 American troops.

  The war was escalating. The word escalation became shorthand for the explosive expansion of the American military role and presence in Vietnam that transformed South Vietnam into the biggest battlefield on the planet. Tens of thousands of American troops arrived with their sophisticated warplanes, weapons, and equipment to be used to attack and bomb at an intensity never seen before. Construction crews built massive bases with airstrips and fuel depots. They carved out roads through remote jungles and rice paddies and threw up military bridges over rivers in a traditional Asian countryside of water buffalo and ox carts. South Vietnam was in the immensely powerful hands of the American military. The social and political costs were enormous but hidden.

  The original war plan of Gen. William Westmoreland, the commander of US forces in Vietnam, was conventional, relying on America’s modern, high-tech firepower as well as US troops. In the first stage, his forces would seal off South Vietnam’s borders from North Vietnam. Then American troops would be deployed along the DMZ, along Vietnam’s long coastline, and at new US bases around Saigon’s defense perimeter to defend against enemy infiltration. Once the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam or Viet Cong were cut off from North Vietnam, Westmoreland would launch massive search-and-destroy operations to find and eliminate the enemy in the South.

  His plan’s biggest vulnerability was Vietnam’s western border. During the war against the French, North Vietnam had created a web of paths and roads along that border, used by its soldiers to travel through southern Laos into northeastern Cambodia and then cross over to South Vietnam. During the American war, the paths became highways and waterways that transported millions of troops and supplies to the communists in the South. Named the Ho Chi Minh Trail by the Americans, this route bedeviled Westmoreland, and destroying it became an obsession.

  The other problem with the plan was the American inability to find the enemy. It was close to impossible for Americans to discern the loyalty of rural South Vietnamese. Militarily, Westmoreland’s conventional strategy underestimated the guerilla nature of much of the war. The Viet Cong had mastered the hit-and-run tactics of the insurgent, hiding in tunnels or blending into villages, waiting for night to mount operations before disappearing again.

  “There is no front line,” Leroy wrote to her father, trying to explain how the Vietnam War wasn’t like World War II. In Vietnam, you couldn’t plot a march toward victory on a map. Westmoreland’s strategy did not include front lines in part because US troops were not charged with capturing and then holding territory. They were trying to capture and kill the illusive enemy. Leroy hopped from helicopter to helicopter to keep up with these moveable battlefields.

  In Vietnam, the war eventually became known as the American war.

  Leroy’s photographs told this story better than words. Stunned villagers huddled near their empty huts, ordered out by the towering American soldiers in a search-and-destroy mission. Their faces resigned, the villagers were rounded up and banished from their homes, leaving behind their ancestor altars and pig stys. They cradled bedrolls and cooking pots; they were displaced to refugee camps.

  Elsewhere, B-52 bombers dropped 500-pound bombs on rice paddies where water buffalo pulled plows. Warplanes dropped deadly chemical defoliants and herbicidal agents that overnight destroyed jungles and any animal or person in its path. Vietnam became the battlefield where the United States used the most sophisticated and lethal arsenal in modern history.

  In the village of Co Luu in Quang Ngai Province, Leroy photographed Marines moving several hundred villagers into tents surrounded by barbed wire. Leroy took images of an interrogation, which she later described in a diary. A South Vietnamese officer is asking stand
ard questions to an old man who is wrinkled and trembling: “‘How old are you?’ ‘Where are your sons?’… The soldiers are professional, their faces serious, the background of destruction is menacing.”12

  The buildup of journalists paralleled the military buildup. In one year, the number of accredited correspondents in Vietnam ballooned from less than one hundred to over six hundred.13 Leroy scrambled, wanting to take advantage of her newfound success. She was making a name for herself and believed her colleagues should treat her as a legitimate member of the press corps. She wanted respect. Instead, she was ostracized.

  The reasons given were couched in personal terms. Leroy was pushy, ambitious, shoving to get on a helicopter to the battlefield or back to Saigon with her film. She had no manners. In the field, she could be a hothead. When she didn’t get her way, she would flare up, sometimes using profanity. She swore.

  It made no difference that male reporters and photographers also had tempers, also swore, also threw their weight around to get what they wanted, and also were ambitious. Leroy was expected to be ladylike. She was an interloper who had become an affront to the profession. It came down to her gender: she didn’t belong because she wasn’t a guy.

  Alain Taieb, a French photographer, had briefly befriended her, seeing her as a lost soul until he realized she was serious and was actually becoming a real war photographer. For him, this was impossible. She was strange and small; she tied her Leica camera around her neck with a shoelace. He told her that being a photographer in Vietnam was a boy’s job, not a girl’s job. In no time, he and other French journalists refused to work with her. “We would tell her—you can’t come with us—you are bothering us—this is for boys.”

  And they insisted that she wasn’t qualified: “She had no money, no job, no manners, no nothing.” This was also absurd. Taieb had arrived in Vietnam with no experience, no money, and no job—exactly like Leroy.

  Leroy was astounded that her colleagues had betrayed her. She wrote her mother that Taieb and another French photographer were acting like “real bastards.”14

  Decades later, Taieb apologized to her and said he was “not very proud of the way we treated her.”15

  The worst was yet to come. Some reporters decided to lobby the US military for Leroy’s official exclusion. On October 1, 1966, François Pelou, bureau chief of Agence France-Presse—the equivalent of the dean of the French press corps—went behind Leroy’s back and denounced her in a complaint to the US military press office. He said her behavior “cast reflections upon the whole press corps to the extent that others are having difficulty winning the cooperation of troops after she leaves an area.”16

  Once Pelou broke the ice, others followed.

  Leroy became a target. Peter Arnett, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his Vietnam coverage for the Associated Press, wrote in his memoir that he saw Leroy swear at an aircraft commander at Dang Ha when she was told there was no room for her in his helicopter. Another reporter wrote an anonymous complaint about that incident in Dang Ha to MACV, and it became a second strike against her. A male reporter engaging in such behavior would have generated no protest whatsoever.

  Filed alongside that complaint was a handwritten note from a local American commander at Dang Ha, warning an official in Da Nang that “the unwashed one” was heading his way.17

  That “unwashed” slur is a classic and grotesque insult against women as old as the Bible. Unclean and unwashed referred to women who were impure because they were menstruating or were women of loose morals. Unwashed women were isolated and denigrated. Taken literally, the accusation against Leroy didn’t make sense. All journalists covering the battlefield stunk until they got home to Saigon and a hot shower. But it made for an easy insult against her that resonated. It stayed in her file permanently.

  Other military spokesmen piled on. One wrote an unsigned note: “Why can’t we remove one ugly Caucasian from the Far Eastern scene? Isn’t the evidence sufficient to lift accreditation?”18

  That became the goal: create a thick secret file, nicknamed “the black book,” that would justify taking away Leroy’s press credentials so she couldn’t work.

  Another poison dart read: “An [unnamed] American correspondent reported… that Miss Leroy seems to be doing all she can to discredit the efforts that American troops are making to win the war. She criticizes their work, food, efforts to help her get her material and twists facts to suit her purpose of discrediting their actions.”

  That accusation against Leroy was outrageous. Her politics were more conservative than most of her colleagues, and she was one of the biggest boosters of the military. She told anyone who would listen: “I love the Marines.” And she did.

  One of the most serious charges in the secret file came from the Marine media liaison officer who wrote on October 20, 1966, that Leroy was “not welcome” aboard the USS Repose hospital ship because she used “coarse and profane language” and acted in an “arrogant and obnoxious” manner when making demands. T. M. Fields, deputy of information in the Information Office of MACV, wrote: “This continues to damage the otherwise excellent relations in the I Corps area between the military units and members of the press… and is unfair to the many sincere and responsible reporters who deport themselves in a proper manner.”

  Her colleagues did not stand up for her. As Arnett wrote: “The Vietnam press corps was a male bastion that women entered only at the risk of being humiliated and patronized; the prevailing view was that the war was being fought by men against men and women had no place there.”19

  Instead, Arnett said, the men actively worked against the women. “We reporters tended to disparage the abilities of women and gossip about them and their relationships and were uninterested in helping them out with the authorities.”

  But when the military moved to take away her press credentials, they had a problem. Leroy had obeyed the basic rules. She had not violated security considerations, endangered troops, written bad checks, assaulted military spokesmen, or fabricated journalistic credentials. They had to make up an offense, and in a wicked twist, the military said she was being suspended because her obnoxious behavior hurt her fellow journalists. “Her actions were such as to alienate working relationships with military personnel to such an extent as to make it difficult for newsmen to function effectively.”

  On October 24, 1966, Col. Rodger R. Bankson, chief of information at MACV, officially suspended her press credentials:

  “Miss Le Roy,” he wrote, “Since my last letter to you, we have received additional reports concerning your conduct while associated with military units in the capacity of a correspondent. These incidents are of such a serious nature that a decision has been made not to renew your MACV accreditation. You are requested to turn in your present accreditation card to the Special Projects Division on 30 October. Sincerely yours.”20

  Without her press credentials, her photojournalism career in Vietnam would be over. The military even sent letters to Leroy’s outlets in Paris to tell them that her behavior had led them to suspend her credentials. No stone was unturned to ruin her career just weeks after it had finally blossomed.

  Leroy panicked. She “felt like jumping in the Mekong.” She had been shoved out the door by the military with the assistance of some of her colleagues. She was furious. If the ban was not lifted, she would be forced to return to Paris and work in a dreary “insurance office.” She was so humiliated that for weeks she couldn’t write her parents or anyone else. For the first time in her young life, Leroy couldn’t resolve her difficulties by simply running away.

  Instead, she had to learn to stand her ground and fight back, quickly. She was told the most serious charge of bad behavior was made by officials from the hospital ship Repose. She got in touch with her host on the ship, and three days after MACV revoked Leroy’s press credentials, Lt. Paul E. Pedisich of the navy’s Seventh Fleet’s information office sent a short, unequivocal message to MACV that rebutted the charge against Leroy. It read in full:<
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  “Miss Leroy conducted herself in a complete, charming and ladylike manner while on board the REPOSE. Left with warm invitation to return whenever she could.”21

  With this courtly description of Leroy, the top officials of the USS Repose hospital ship denied that she had been a nasty, foul-mouthed woman or that she was no longer welcome on his ship.22

  While some friends in the press were less sympathetic, her strongest supporter was the man whose opinion counted the most: Horst Faas, at AP. He wrote a letter attesting to her professional standing and dispelling any hint that she was an unwelcome colleague or a fraud. Writing on the Associated Press letterhead, Faas used the clear, commercial language of success: Leroy’s photographs were good enough to be published in the highly competitive world market. She had sold spot photographs and photograph series she took of combat operations in all of the US military corps areas in Vietnam, earning at least $1,000 (which was the equivalent of $7,900 in 2019) after only seven months in Vietnam.23

  In other words, Leroy was not the uncouth amateur undermining her colleagues as portrayed in that black book of complaints nor was she a vagabond who should be dismissed as a frivolous woman seeking adventure, as her male colleagues called women freelancers.

  Bryce Miller, bureau manager of United Press International, followed Faas with a more perfunctory note “to certify” that UPI had purchased photographs from Leroy and “will consider any pictures in the future she may have to submit.”

  Leroy’s reputation, though, would never recover. From then on, she was branded a spitfire and a troublemaker, an uncouth, foul-mouthed woman.