In the early days, she often decamped for days in Just’s comfortable apartment with its well-stocked drinks table, working kitchen, and regular housekeeper who kept it in order. She reported by day and joined Ward on the Caravelle Hotel’s rooftop for drinks—gin and tonics, beer, or coarse Algerian red wine—with other reporters by night. Ward called them “the guys.” They were all men: Jonathan Randall, William Tuohy, and Neil Sheehan, among others. The talk began after their stories were filed at the PTT (post, telegraph, and telephone office), and the tropical sun had dropped below the horizon.
At first, FitzGerald was quiet, almost shy, listening to the men’s back-and-forth. There was little conversation about what was going on in the United States or a new book someone had read. Instead, it was all about war, what the men saw that day in the field and how it compared to yesterday’s fighting, or where the politics were headed. Just had warned her: “War is all we talk about. Anyone mentioning news from Washington, the conversation lasts six seconds.”9
FitzGerald listened carefully to their chatter and braggadocio. Ashtrays filled with stubs of Marlboros, Camels, or British 555s.
Being accepted into this informal men’s club of war correspondents marked FitzGerald as a privileged female outlier. Just was impressed with how quickly she sized up the gatherings and “became increasingly talkative, getting the atmosphere right, and understanding who were the real players.”
She displayed her new savvy in the most pedestrian setting: the daily military briefings. Christened the five o’clock follies by the skeptical press corps, the briefings were held on the rooftop garden of the Rex Hotel, a few blocks from the Caravelle.
The MACV briefer rarely made news, preferring to recite dry statistics or the latest body count from military operations. The body counts mattered to MACV. Since Vietnam wasn’t a war to capture and hold on to territory—it was to evict the communists from territory—one tangible measure of success was the body counts of the enemy versus friendly troops killed in action.
After attending several briefings, FitzGerald noticed that the official kill ratio of friendlies to enemies never ended in five or zero. She investigated further and found this was always the case. It was a statistical impossibility. She pointed out this flaw to the briefer in front of the press corps, in the process confirming what reporters knew from the field—military and civilians made up body counts for their superiors. Her observation infuriated MACV officials.
SLOWLY FITZGERALD UNDERSTOOD that underneath the camaraderie, her acceptance by the press and news sources was tentative at best. Even Frank Wisner did not treat her as the peer she had imagined he would.
When she tried to discuss an earlier halt to the American bombing over North Vietnam with him, Wisner cut her short. Instead of debating the merits of whether it fostered peace, as she had heard him do with Just and other journalists, Wisner grew angry with her. He said the halt allowed North Vietnamese to infiltrate South Vietnam and kill American soldiers. It devolved into a tremendous argument. FitzGerald retreated, regretting that she lacked the confidence to take him on. For his part, Wisner did not take her seriously. Later he admitted: “This was a man’s world—this was a war—in a generation that did not foresee that genders were equal.… We operated in different worlds.”
Wisner brushed her off again when she visited him at the embassy. She wanted to give him her new address, but he just smiled and walked away without even a perfunctory good-bye. As she wrote in her diary: “Frank was odd today. Wouldn’t even ask me the address of my new apartment. Went off ahead of me out of [Edward] Lansdale’s office after kindly telephoning another bureaucrat without saying a word. What is it?”10
She figured out what “it” was. Wisner and Just went out together without her, eating meals and talking about the war. It wasn’t the first time she had been left out of the men’s serious conversations about Vietnam or their occasional jaunts around Saigon, but she felt especially slighted: “I say I am furious at [Just] for not including me—but actually I am jealous of him, of his relations with Frank. I want Frank too and anything else that comes my way.”
Meanwhile, the rest of the Saigon press corps falsely believed FitzGerald had special access to US officials. Instead Wisner treated her like a social peer and family friend but not a serious reporter. The one time he actively sought her was to help him entertain Joseph Alsop, the conservative columnist, when he arrived in Saigon. Alsop was the fiercely pro-war family friend with whom FitzGerald had disagreed in front of her father at a Georgetown dinner. Wisner felt it was natural to expect FitzGerald to act as his hostess. She refused.
Just stepped into the breach: “Miss Fitz,” Just wrote in a conciliatory note, “Mr. Wisner stopped by. Your Uncle [Alsop] arrives tomorrow at 12:30 and he asked that you and I meet him. I told Frank that I was going off with the first division. Frank then said for me to tell you to meet him, in a government car that would be provided. I said I’ll tell her, but she won’t do it.
“Well, she must do it.
“I’ll tell her, I said, but I bet she won’t.
“She must, he said.
“I’ll deliver the message, I said.
“He is a visiting dignitary, he said.
“And must be met with all protocol, I said.
“Right, he said.
“I said we would have him to dinner tomorrow night. We’ll defrost the lamb chops. W”
The two of them hosted Alsop at Ward’s apartment. Nonetheless, Frankie refused to greet Alsop at the airport.11
FitzGerald learned through painful trial and error that Wisner would be useless for her, so she turned to Ellsberg, the Defense Department intellectual and aide to Lansdale. He sat with her for the five-hour discussions she craved to explain the war. Ellsberg was a hawk, like every other government official, and he tried to convince her of the underlying value of the war but with the honesty and openness of the brilliant systems analyst he was. He admitted when the “situation was unpromising.” He didn’t pretend that South Vietnam was a struggling democracy the United States was trying to preserve. He knew full well the flaws in US and South Vietnamese military tactics and even strategy. But he argued that American interests and America’s commitments were at stake.12
When she was trying to sort out a story, he listened. He weighed her evidence behind every thesis, paying attention to the details. He enjoyed their conversations as much as she did. (She wasn’t surprised five years later when he was the official who leaked the Pentagon Papers.)
His was the only apartment she visited that contained books, even poetry; it made her comfortable.
She sought other experts, including Gerald Hickey, an anthropologist who gave her memorably unhelpful advice. “He told me I must wear dresses when traveling to villages. So, I wore a sleeveless dress, and it was dreadful. Vietnamese women dressed modestly.”13
FitzGerald rarely ventured outside the small social circle of senior reporters who were Just’s friends. But once she accepted an invitation to the crash pad of journalists her own age that was ironically known as Frankie’s house.14
Frankie was the nickname of Tran Ky, the owner of the nondescript villa in a sketchy part of Saigon where they met. Tim Page, John Laurence, and Michael Herr were part of an elastic band of English-speaking photographers and reporters who enjoyed the 1960s life of rock and roll and dope while making names for themselves in Vietnam. Precisely because Page and Laurence were easygoing nonconformists, Cathy Leroy often sought refuge at Frankie’s house after she was ostracized.
The night FitzGerald visited, Page had mounted his latest photographs on the wall, and assorted friends were appraising his work to the accompaniment of rock music on tape—the Rolling Stones, Aretha Franklin, Smokey Robinson, the Supremes, Stevie Wonder—and smoking marijuana. Someone got the munchies, and food was delivered. The conversation grew livelier and weirder. FitzGerald was mesmerized by her peers who were anything but—but she never returned. She was definitely more of the white
wine type.
FITZGERALD BEGAN SPENDING much of her time away from Saigon but not on the battlefield with US soldiers. She traveled south to My Tho in the Mekong Delta to track the American campaign to win over the hearts and minds of rural Vietnamese. It would result in her last article for the Village Voice.
Most of Vietnam is a long, narrow littoral bordering the South China Sea. At either end, the country fans out with wide river deltas. In the north, the Red River Delta creates a lush agricultural plain. In the south, the Mekong River empties into the sea, creating an even more spectacular delta that is so fertile it is known as the rice basket of the country.
My Tho is roughly in the center of the utterly flat southern plain. The United States wanted to secure it for the Saigon government. Besides pushing out the Viet Cong through military campaigns, the US brought aid to the hamlets to try to win back the loyalty of the region.
FitzGerald went on one of the USAID missions, traveling in two jeeps with American and South Vietnamese officials down Highway 1 from Saigon.
“We hurtle along,” she wrote. “It’s safer to drive fast as the mines tend to blow up behind you and cause the snipers to miss.”15
They sped past endless rice fields and hamlets with Buddhist pagodas, arriving at an outlier village of “seedy looking shacks dominated by a capacious concrete Catholic church.” The Vietnamese priest welcomed them, walking along a dusty lane where men were digging an irrigation ditch. Children in rags swarmed to their side to grab free provisions the officials had brought as gifts for the village: bags of wheat, cans of oil, and boxes of old clothes donated by the American Catholic Relief Service.
Across the field was a Cao Dai village that was so orderly it seemed to belong to another country. In fact, Cao Dai is a homegrown Vietnamese religion: the syncretic faith blends aspects of Catholicism, Buddhism, and mysticism and matches them to secular saints as disparate as the writer Victor Hugo and the US president Thomas Jefferson.
Together, the group crossed a wooden bridge over “a stream thick with water lilies and the delicate outlines of fishing nets” and moved through the village that was a stark contrast to the Catholics. “Row upon row of palm-thatched houses interspersed with disciplined onion beds. It is clean and orderly enough to be the work of a single landscape gardener.”
Two Cao Dai priests in white robes welcomed the aid mission and ushered it toward their temple, distinguished by a silk flag with a huge eye in the center of a red heart. The priests had bad news for the group. The day before, the Viet Cong had killed the hamlet chief. Members of the Popular Forces, the Saigon government’s guard organization, who were supposed to protect the hamlet, had, instead, run away, disappearing with the deputy hamlet chief. The hearts and minds campaign was at a standstill.
With FitzGerald taking notes, the Americans reassured the Cao Dai that the guards would return and protect the hamlet. Before the Cao Dai could ask any more questions, the group climbed into their jeeps and returned to Saigon.
FitzGerald was intrigued. Who were these Vietnamese of all faiths and who were the Viet Cong and how did they fit into a story of the whole country including North Vietnam? More than a few American officials viewed the mass of Vietnamese as bit players in the war: the anonymous farmer, the anonymous communist, the anonymous widow, the anonymous monk, and the anonymous corpse. Journalists often weren’t much better. Since the US had taken the lead fighting the war, reporters writing about the war focused on the American troops—the private from Omaha, the staff sergeant from Georgia—and American officials.
FitzGerald followed a different perspective. As a critical intellectual, she finally had a complicated and compelling subject in the Vietnam war that would require all of her talents and commitment. She approached the war by trying to understand the Vietnamese on their own terms and from there examining what the Americans were doing with their ideology of the Cold War, the domino theory, and the strategy of overwhelming firepower against a poor agricultural nation—pretty much the exact opposite of her boosterish male colleagues.
Ward Just remembers when FitzGerald took a turn down a road no one else saw. “She was looking at things in a completely different optic, like she was from a different country—a whole new meaning to the phrase foreign correspondent.”16
When she went to war zones, she stuck with the military adviser and the survivors, far from the frontline reporters and photographers who covered the artillery, the mortars, or the airstrikes. She wrote about the difficulty in the Delta of getting food from one place to another and aid missions that didn’t work. Just and his colleagues had little interest in those subjects, especially not the Viet Cong and their blatant propaganda. He saw how “the job she undertook for herself was difficult, very, very difficult. Much more difficult than battle coverage.”
To do so, FitzGerald needed a magazine’s larger canvas. She felt the same urgency as other reporters as the war escalated with half a million US soldiers slated to arrive in 1967. She had no trouble selling her stories. Every article she sent was published: in the Daily Telegraph Magazine, Vogue, the New York Times Magazine, and the Atlantic Monthly.
AS IN ALL war zones, difficulties, small and large, dogged her. On a reporting trip to Da Nang, FitzGerald and photographer Philip Jones Griffith decided to swim off China Beach. It was the end of a hot working day, and she needed to relax. But as she entered the water, at least six Marines further down the strand plunged in the ocean after her. They were laughing—chasing her as a prank to amuse themselves. But she was frightened instinctively, as any woman would be, and managed to outswim them. She never forgot that episode.
FitzGerald suffered from emotional and physical stress, inadequate sleep, and skipped meals. Finally, the lurking germs and diseases accumulated, and her body reached a breaking point. In late April 1966, she awoke feeling weak, almost dizzy. Her menstrual period seemed interminable, lasting for weeks. By May, she had high fevers. She went to a Vietnamese doctor, a man who knew little gynecology. He gave her generic medicine and sent her home. She grew weaker, and her mind started wandering. Was this bleeding a reaction to all of the misery she’d witnessed, to the gore and blood she saw at hospitals, to the injured carried off the battlefield, the body bags? At one point, she hallucinated. “Three bonzes [monks] appeared to me in the room. They were so real. They didn’t do anything. They seemed to be looking around in my desk.”17
For the first time, she turned to the US embassy for help. The CIA found her a top-flight Catholic Vietnamese doctor from the old Diem regime who diagnosed her problem and recommended a dilation and curettage. The operation was performed at a modern private clinic. Even so, FitzGerald was terrified when she was put under general anesthetic. What if something went wrong so far from home?
The CIA anticipated FitzGerald’s concerns and sent a nurse to care for her in the clinic and during recovery. Her mother was beside herself when she received the news. “My Darling Frankie, You must have had a horrible last few weeks,” Marietta wrote in a June 4, 1966, letter. “Thank God everything went as easily as predicted and that it’s all over. What a huge relief! When I got your cable, I felt dizzy and nauseated until I heard from your doctor.”18
Her mother was already scheduled to visit Saigon on June 15 as the head of a United Nations delegation. She asked Frankie to rest and “spend a great deal of the intervening time taking it easy.”
That proved impossible when, in the late afternoon of June 8, Ward Just was seriously wounded covering a battle in the remote jungle of Kon Tum in the Central Highlands, near the border with Laos. He was with a forty-two-man patrol, Tiger Force of the army’s 101st Airborne Division, following a trail north through thick jungle searching for the North Vietnamese. On the second day, the patrol was attacked from three sides. A dozen American soldiers were killed, and the command post filled up with wounded. The North Vietnamese were lobbing grenades at them, and all they could do was hunker down and wait for reinforcements. Finally, a grenade exploded one yard
from Just, tearing into his back and hurling him to the ground. At that moment, reinforcements arrived and held back the NVA who then retreated. Medics gave Just morphine and bandaged his wounds. At nightfall, a helicopter hovered over the encampment to pick up the wounded. Only then did Just allow himself to believe he would make it.19
FitzGerald and Wisner received news that Just had been seriously injured but no information on where he was being treated. The two scrambled until FitzGerald found him upcountry in a mobile field hospital. Wisner pulled strings to have him transported by helicopter to Saigon, where he was admitted to Grall Hospital. He recuperated under the shade trees in the private gardens of the venerable French hospital, grumbling that he would have preferred to stay with the wounded soldiers.
A few weeks later, Marietta Tree arrived in Saigon in a blaze of white: beautiful white dresses and stunning white hats. She took her daughter in hand, trying to cheer her up with an invitation to a formal dinner dance in Tree’s honor hosted by the United States Agency for International Development. FitzGerald demurred but allowed her mother to pack her bags and guide her onto an airplane at Tan Son Nhut to flee the war and recuperate in nearby Singapore.
For once, Tree pampered her daughter to the exclusion of nearly everything else. She booked them into a luxury hotel and took Frankie to checkups with a gynecologist. FitzGerald was found to be anemic and gave herself up to her mother’s care, resting and eating and falling asleep in crisp linens. Then, over her mother’s protestations, she flew back to Saigon. She missed being immersed in the war.20
Just had already left for the United States when FitzGerald returned to Saigon. He had flown to Hawaii for a reunion with his parents and his two daughters, and then on to Washington for full rehabilitation.21
THAT SUMMER AMBASSADOR Lodge needed to convince Congress and the American public that it was the wrong time to negotiate for peace with North Vietnam. The stirrings of youthful protest were growing into an antiwar movement, especially as the number of Americans killed in action in 1966 rose threefold, from 1,863 to 6,143. Death was touching families and communities across the country; Americans were beginning to understand the sacrifice required to fight in Vietnam.
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