You Don't Belong Here

by Elizabeth Becker

  The story spread through Saigon. When she went to the Continental Hotel to collect her mail Mr. Le, the manager, said he had received a letter from her father who was worried when she hadn’t written home in weeks. He handed her a second letter from her mother. She read it over a drink at the hotel’s terrace bar and wrote her family back. “My problems were serious, and I wasn’t in the mood to not take it seriously,” she wrote. “Things are going better today.”

  Leroy backed away from much of the press corps. She didn’t know whom to trust and was slightly punch-drunk from the battle to keep her press card. She sought other people to mix with, including men. In the free atmosphere of Saigon, Leroy was beginning to enjoy casual sex as much as her male colleagues did. As she wrote her mother in her usual frank fashion, she would have fun when she wasn’t working and lead a life “without problems of guys and romance. I take [romance] where I can get it. I’m keeping my heart for other things. It’s not egoism. I call it experience.”

  She found ways to mix pleasure with work. Whenever possible, she took an extra day from the field to swim at one of the magnificent but largely empty beaches. She turned an assignment for AP into a short vacation at Vung Tau, the old French beach resort known as Cap St. Jacques, sunbathing on the rocks and swimming in the ocean. In Saigon, she swam in hotel pools. At night, she photographed GIs in bars like the San Francisco, Blue Moon, Number One, and Chez Mimi, ending up across the river on a strip called Soul Alley, where the bars played soul music with a heavy emphasis on Aretha Franklin and James Brown.

  She occasionally sought out the younger English-speaking crowd closer to her age and temperament—like the photographer Tim Page and CBS television journalist John Laurence. She could relax around them because they required no apologies from her and made no judgments about her behavior. When she needed a place to crash, their door was open.

  Page, who became one of the most famous photographers of the war, had a special respect for Leroy. He was amazed at how hard she had to work to prove her talent as the first woman on the scene with a camera, made all the more difficult as a French woman in an American war. “She became a loner in the purest sense, broke the mold, defied odds few others could have faced.”24

  Since Leroy spent so much time in the field, a lot of her socializing with Laurence was at the Marine Corps press center in Da Nang, where the food was reasonably good and the drinks were cheap. He considered the gossip about her being unclean and unkempt as mean-spirited nonsense. “Of course, you look dirty and smell foul after you’ve spent a few days in the field with the troops… to single her out for criticism on that count was wrong.”25

  A few months after Leroy redeemed her accreditation, she was selected as the only accredited journalist to parachute with the troops in Operation Junction City. Finally, she was back, triumphantly wearing her master jump wings.

  Leroy’s photographs of the assault were impressive, dramatically framing the parachutes in the broad sky, illustrating the size and strength of one of the largest US Army offensives of the war. But Operation Junction City itself was a wash, at best.26 Over six weeks, US aircraft bombed villages, and 25,000 American and South Vietnamese troops were sent to find even a trace of the COSVN (Central Office for South Vietnam), the communist headquarters. There was heavy fighting with the Liberation Army of South Vietnam, the official army of the communists of the South known as the Viet Cong. The Americans reported heavy damage to the enemy, bombing communist positions and destroying acres of jungles and fields. During the offensive, nearly 7,000 Vietnamese civilians fled the fighting, becoming part of the refugee exodus filling the slums and suburbs of the cities of the south. Officially, 2,728 enemy soldiers were killed while 282 American soldiers died.

  The US military declared the mission “inconclusive.” The Vietnamese communists had controlled the tempo, choosing when and where to engage with the Americans. After a few months, the American troops withdrew, recalled to other battles, and the Vietnamese communists quietly returned. The US military concluded from Operation Junction City that airborne assaults were not suitable in the guerilla wars of Vietnam. On the ground, they found systems of tunnels under the villages, signaling that the communists had local control if not support and could evade conventional tactics, even from a force with such superior firepower. By year’s end, the military was even questioning the value of big operations.

  Instead, Vietnam became the first helicopter war. Army air cavalry units used helicopter formations in combat for the first time to find and attack enemy forces and transport US forces to battle. Helicopters also carried out the wounded and supplied troops in the field, as they had in the Korean War.

  The disappointing military results of Operation Junction City did not dampen Leroy’s pride. She wrote to her father: “I’ve always thought I should succeed because I never gave in.” She signed it with “warm kisses, and to Mommy, too, C. Leroy.”

  After that near career-ending episode, she was even more driven to prove her worth. She won awards never before given to women and changed the look of war photography.

  LEROY’S PRESS CREDENTIALS were soon jeopardized again. In 1967, all female journalists were put on notice that the US military was planning to reimpose a lighter version of the World War II regulations prohibiting them from reporting on the front lines—the military still didn’t believe women belonged in a war zone.

  This ban was triggered by a fluke encounter in April 1967 between Denby Fawcett, a former women’s page reporter for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin newspaper, and Gen. William Westmoreland. Fawcett, who had a degree from Columbia University, had left the society pages, paid her own way to Saigon, and become the Honolulu Advertiser newspaper’s stringer in Vietnam.27 A careful journalist with the looks of the actress Sally Field, Fawcett had had to convince unit commanders that she was sturdy enough to report from combat areas. At the beginning, many refused her, some saying she reminded them of their daughters and they didn’t want to see her in harm’s way. Finally, the Marines gave her permission, and she accompanied a unit in I Corps (pronounced “eye core”), proving her mettle. Then she ran into Westmoreland.

  Fawcett was in the Central Highlands reporting with a unit from Hawaii—the First Battalion, Eighth Infantry of the Fourth Infantry Division—when General Westmoreland made an unannounced visit. After pep talks to improve troop morale after heavy fighting, Westmoreland continued with inspections and was surprised to see Fawcett with the troops.

  He knew her as the daughter of friends in Honolulu, where the two families were neighbors. His wife played tennis with her mother. After pleasantries, the general asked Fawcett how long she had been at the forward base. “Several days,” she answered, believing it was part of a friendly exchange.

  It was nothing of the sort. Back in Saigon, Westmoreland was furious that any woman would stay days and nights on a forward base. His concern wasn’t cloaked in a denunciation of her character, as it had been with Leroy. He framed it simply as a question of gender. The commander of US forces in Vietnam did not believe women belonged near the fighting.

  As explained to Fawcett, Westmoreland feared women “might inconvenience or endanger soldiers who would rush to protect us.” He also worried that women correspondents would collapse emotionally when “faced with the horrors of war.” Westmoreland proposed a compromise edict that would prohibit women journalists from spending nights with troops in the field. It wasn’t a complete imposition of the World War II ban, but it might as well have been.28

  By requiring a commander to guarantee that any woman journalist would travel to and from a battle in a single day, Westmoreland was asking the impossible.

  The handful of women journalists in Saigon recognized that their “livelihoods are being destroyed.” Five American women, largely strangers to one another, set up an ad hoc committee to fight the ban. With her gritty reputation and recent run-in with MACV, Leroy was asked to be one of the ten women who signed a letter asking that the edict be nullified.


  The American women then petitioned the Pentagon to drop the proposed Westmoreland ban since the MACV accreditation was under its auspices. Ann Bryan, editor of Overseas Weekly, an alternative newspaper for GIs, wrote a history of women war correspondents to buttress their position that women were as qualified as men to cover battles and were no more likely to cause problems than their male counterparts. They sent their request to Defense Secretary McNamara and invited him to meet them on his next trip to Saigon.

  McNamara said he would listen to their argument. On a visit to Saigon, he sent Phil G. Goulding, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, to meet with the women. They included Jurate Kazickas, a freelance reporter who went on a quiz game program to win her airfare to Saigon, and Anne Morrissy, a young but seasoned field producer who had convinced ABC News to send her on a three-month assignment to Vietnam. (She extended her tour to nine months.)

  As the group’s unofficial leader, Morrissy spent an afternoon and an evening of martinis with Goulding, keeping him on topic. Before long, it became clear to her that the ban was unsustainable and that Goulding knew it.

  Goulding told Morrissy that Westmoreland’s proposed ban “would be lifted and we could go back out in the field.”29

  MACV officials added one stipulation to demonstrate to Westmoreland that they took his concerns seriously. The ten women journalists in Saigon—either resident or visiting—had to sign a letter addressed to any new female journalist working in Vietnam “asking them not to place the burden on the field commanders on whether it is safe for the girls to stay overnight in battle areas.” In other words, the women had to promise not to ask for special treatment or protection not given to male journalists. In fact, the women had made no such requests in the first place.30

  All ten women, including Leroy, signed the letter. Women were still on a leash, even though the ban was effectively shelved.

  No one publicized the near expulsion. The women never wrote stories about it or told their male colleagues. Fawcett found it embarrassing. She had been blocked from the field so many times in her early days she knew better than to bring up the subject. The other women agreed. Too many in the military still felt women didn’t belong there.31

  They waited thirty-five years to tell that story.

  Nonetheless, the impact of their pushback was profound. They had removed the American military’s biggest impediment to women war correspondents. The United States military never again attempted to prohibit women reporters en masse from the battlefield.

  This was the only time the women journalists banded together, let alone as sisters or even friends. Afterward, they went their separate ways, cut off by their work, by the stress of proving their professionalism, and by the pace of war. Kazickas called it a “very, very lonely time” without the company of other women.32

  For Cathy Leroy, her career saved from a second near collapse, the next step was simple: she informed her parents that despite her promises to come home she was staying on.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Fortunate Female

  THE NEWS QUIETLY CIRCULATED THROUGH THE US EMBASSY in Saigon: Frances “Frankie” FitzGerald, daughter of Desmond FitzGerald, the powerful CIA deputy director of plans, was coming to Vietnam. She arrived in February 1966, the same time as Leroy. FitzGerald was also a freelance reporter, part of the surge of hundreds of new journalists coming to the war in 1966, although her VIP status was stronger than her journalism credentials. Wanting a break from writing New York personality profiles, FitzGerald had packed a single suitcase and headed for Southeast Asia.

  Her first stop had been Vientiane, Laos, where she was a guest of US ambassador William H. Sullivan. Laos, a poor landlocked nation of largely subsistence farmers, had become an extension of the war in Vietnam. The US officially considered Laos an important domino and supported the government in Vientiane against the communist Pathet Lao, aligned with the far more powerful North Vietnamese.

  Unofficially, the CIA had launched a “secret war,” underwriting the Hmong, an ethnic minority in Laos, to fight as a counterinsurgency force against the North Vietnamese communists in their northern and central Laos sanctuaries near the Vietnamese border. Desmond FitzGerald inaugurated this secret war, the first war in US history led by the CIA, not the US military. The secret war also included American bombing of communist-held enclaves near the Vietnamese border. At the time of Frankie’s visit, her father had successfully lobbied to expand the Hmong forces and dramatically increase American bombing.1

  Ambassador Sullivan, FitzGerald’s host, had taken a proprietary role in approving the secret US bombing, setting the pace for a campaign that eventually set the record for the most bombs per capita ever dropped on a country—more than all the bombs dropped in World War II.

  FitzGerald knew nothing of this or of her father’s pivotal role.2 She enjoyed her short stay at the ambassador’s residence in the sleepy Laotian capital as well as a visit to the hinterlands, writing an article in the Village Voice that was both awkward and tongue-in-cheek. “Of course,” she wrote, “there is a sort of war going on in Laos. In fact the Enemy occupy one-half to two-thirds of the country—take your pick of estimates. But it’s not something one talks about a lot. Involved as it is with the neighboring war in Vietnam, vast distances separate the action from its effect. Families of refugees drift down from the sparsely populated highlands, a few of the wounded come to Vientiane for treatment.”3

  It was banal, but the embassy so liked her writing, officials posted it on the common bulletin board.

  Once in Saigon, FitzGerald came down to earth.

  She landed at Tan Son Nhut airport, as militarized as a civilian airport could be. During the ride into town, she inhaled dust and fumes from decrepit buses and military jeeps and was jarred by the sight of the once beautiful city—the Paris of the East—defiled by the demands of war.

  Frank Wisner, an ambitious young diplomat at the embassy, was her informal liaison. They were old friends whose families were part of the same world of privilege and influence that extended from Wall Street to high-level Washington policy makers, many from the Ivy League upper crust, often supported by old money.

  From her first day in Saigon, FitzGerald moved in different directions and more rarified circles than Leroy. While Frankie FitzGerald may have arrived in Vietnam with only a cursory knowledge of the country and an outsized reputation as an overprivileged dilettante, she brought with her a sophisticated understanding of how Washington worked at the highest levels, an understanding few other reporters could match. She had also embraced the early critiques of the war, matching wits with her father, among others.

  Her father was uneasy about Frankie’s trip to Vietnam, even though she insisted it would just be a short visit. In a lengthy letter to her about his recent tour of Africa for the CIA, Desmond consciously played down his concern for her safety in a war zone. He simply asked her for more news after reading her first letter from “chez Sullivan.”

  “Am up to date with you to Laos only,” Desmond wrote on Pan Am stationery while flying across the Atlantic. “Am dying to hear how Saigon goes for thee and hope to find word waiting at home. Please be careful. Love, Daddy.”4

  When Frankie had graduated from Radcliffe in 1962, Desmond deposited $100,000 in her bank account, the equivalent of $830,000 in 2019.5 Without his extraordinary generosity, she could not have become a reporter headed toward Saigon. Magazines would not hire her. When she applied for a reporter’s job at Newsweek magazine, she was told women could only be researchers there, never writers. She walked away thinking “if Newsweek won’t hire me to hell with them. I’ll write for someone.”

  In January 1966, she bought a $1,314 round-trip ticket on Qantas Airways, using money from her father’s gift. After a stop in Vientiane, she planned to write a few articles from Vietnam and then complete her monthlong trip in Singapore.

  She was counting on young Wisner to smooth her way. In letters, he had described the boredom
of the war. Promoted to staff aide to William Porter, the deputy ambassador, Wisner was locked in an office all day, where he had to “read cables, listen to phone conversations, dial [the telephone] constantly.”

  He told her that as a woman “this is not your world—the guns, tanks and brutality all seem so pointless save in the very obvious point of it all, and the obvious is alive here.”

  He was so busy he was late answering her practical concerns about how she would manage once in Saigon. With effusive, apologetic language, he promised he would take care of everything: “Your letter was of great beauty—read and reread,” he wrote. “You ask how it is in Saigon. Hot, dusty, hurried, impossible, overcrowded, rumor filled, exuberant and morose, choking, ugly and… charming. I can’t wait for you to see it—and more—to see something of Viet Nam.”6

  He said he would arrange her press credentials and find her a place to stay. “Done—have no worries about lodging. We’ll work out something.”

  He ended with: “I yearn to reach out and touch you. You save me from forgetting. Much love, Frank.”

  However, when FitzGerald arrived in Saigon in early 1966, Wisner had done next to nothing for her. He apologized and said his work had been overwhelming. Besides, in his rare spare time, he was engaged with “beguiling Vietnamese females.”

  Wisner was being honest. FitzGerald arrived in a moment of crisis in South Vietnam and disappointment in Washington, creating insurmountable problems for the US embassy in Saigon. American combat troops had been in Vietnam for nearly one year without making significant progress. President Johnson wasn’t pleased.

  The Johnson administration had lost faith in the South Vietnamese government’s ability to lead the military fight to defeat communism by early 1966 and instead went all in with US troops. The president told Gen. William Westmoreland to “assume no limitation on funds, equipment, or personnel.”7