It turned out to be the party of the century—literally. She had been invited with her mother, stepfather, and sister to the lavish Black and White Ball in the Grand Ballroom of the Plaza Hotel hosted by Truman Capote. At that moment he was the most famous author in the country, fêted everywhere for his novel In Cold Blood. Katharine Graham, the new publisher of the Washington Post, was his guest of honor. More than anything, the party was meant to demonstrate Capote’s new wealth and position in society.
He invited over five hundred people, mixing movie stars with artists, high-ranking officials, theater giants, business tycoons, and high-society couples like Marietta and Ronald Tree. The guests wore couture gowns or tuxedos and Venice-style masks, giving the night a twentieth-century version of European decadence. They drank Taittinger champagne and danced to the music of the Peter Duchin Orchestra, breaking for a midnight supper of spaghetti and chicken hash.
The mood was electric. FitzGerald’s sister Penelope Tree was discovered that night by Diana Vreeland, the editor in chief of Vogue, and launched as an international fashion model.
Everyone was entranced except for Frances FitzGerald. Almost as soon as she arrived, she saw Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, mastermind of the war, in the ballroom. She couldn’t cope at all. She was obsessed by the war and couldn’t tolerate a fun-loving atmosphere that seemed callously indifferent to events in Vietnam.
She told her family she wished she had been in a better mood at the party. Yet her mood didn’t improve in the following days. New York felt like alien territory. She holed up in her apartment in the city and could think of little else than Vietnam and war.36
Regular missives from Ward Just kept her up with the Saigon gossip behind the news and included bulletins on his love for her. “You are more important than the war—do you like being more important than the War in Vietnam? I want to write about the war and be in love with you, and do both equally well.”37
They made plans for a long vacation in Ireland where they would stay in a castle of a distant FitzGerald cousin and pick up where they had left off in Saigon—writing about Vietnam.
CHAPTER FIVE
Violence, Madness and Fear and Agony
MAPS ARE THE BACKBONE OF THE STORY OF WAR.
When the French colonized Vietnam, they divided the country into three regions: Tonkin in the north, Annam in the center, and Cochin China in the south. The Geneva Accords of 1954 ended French control and temporarily divided the country in half along the 17th Parallel. Ho Chi Minh and the communists governed North Vietnam, and Ngo Dinh Diem governed South Vietnam, with a promised national election in 1956 that was rejected by Diem and the US.
War replaced elections, and the maps reflected the change. The temporary divide became permanent, and American and South Vietnamese military added an overlay to the map of South Vietnam. They divided the South into four military regions denoted in Roman numerals: I Corps in the north, II Corps in the center, III Corps around Saigon, and IV Corps in the Mekong Delta. That map was used in military briefings. American soldiers knew South Vietnam through that map. They served in I Corps or III Corps, rather than a specific Vietnamese province. This was a break in US military tradition since the word corps normally referred to an organization or unit, not to a specific geographic area.
This pointed to the fact that in Vietnam the front lines never changed. There were no front lines. Battles could be won or lost, but the map didn’t change because the US did not conquer and occupy territory.1 The military regions remained intact, at least on the map. The goal of the war was to protect and win the loyalty of the South Vietnamese people, not territory. How do you represent that victory on a map?
General Westmoreland declared his war of attrition a success. “We’ll just go on bleeding them until Hanoi wakes up to the fact that they have bled their country to the point of national disaster for generations,” he said.2 But on April 24, 1967, a battle broke out in I Corps, near the demilitarized zone, that tested Westmoreland’s confidence.
An advance party of Marines was sent to scout the hills surrounding their base at Khe Sanh where, unbeknownst to them, a North Vietnamese regiment had taken control. The Marines were ambushed. Only one survived.
Two companies of Marines were ordered to take the hill, actually a ridge named Hill 861 for its height. Just as the Marines reached the ridge, the Vietnamese opened fire, wounding and killing many Marines with mortar shells from concealed positions. The Marines answered back with strafing and rockets fired from Huey gunships and with bombs and napalm from fighter jets. Fog and rain hampered visibility; the hillside paths turned into mud. After several days of ferocious fighting, the Vietnamese disappeared, leaving behind impressive fortifications of deep six-foot bunkers built with thick walls of earth layered with bamboo.3
As the Marines would discover, the Vietnamese had withdrawn to the nearby ridges known as Hill 881 North and Hill 881 South.
At that moment Catherine Leroy returned to Saigon from a work vacation in Malaysia. She had been recovering from a lingering bout of malaria and a knee deeply scratched by cactus needles from climbing over a paddy dyke.4 Leroy went straight to the AP office and asked Horst Faas to get her up to speed. It was April 30, 1967.
He told her to go immediately to Khe Sanh, to the battle that was now being called the Hill Fights. She cadged a seat on a military flight to Dong Ha base in Quang Tri Province and a few hours later was on a supply helicopter to Khe Sanh. From there, she walked to the base camp opposite Hill 860, arriving in late afternoon. She was the only journalist present; the others were stuck in Da Nang.
A colonel was briefing her on the fighting when a bullet whizzed by them. He glanced at Leroy’s head and yelled: “Good God, take off your headband!” The Vietnamese were using her bright white headband as a target. She tore it off.
At dusk, Marine Captain Shaan and his company moved out, walking in single file toward Hill 881. Leroy followed. They navigated around a thirty-yard-wide bomb crater and then began the climb up the first section. The bombing had defoliated the jungle and plowed up the earth, leaving an empty landscape of dead wood blackened by explosions and muddied by the monsoon rains.
Just as they reached the summit, the Vietnamese opened fire. Leroy saw several Marines fall dead. Two other units of Marines joined the fight. Against the cackle of automatic gunfire, she heard screams for help.
And then she saw the tableau of what would become the iconic image of the conflict.5
The battle had moved on while a lone medic in full battle gear was left behind, crawling up the ridge to reach an injured Marine. Leroy clicked.
The medic, Vernon Wike, a twenty-year-old navy medical corpsman from Phoenix, Arizona, cradled the Marine, took off his helmet, and bent over the body, listening for a heartbeat. He heard nothing. The Marine was dead. The medic’s young face twisted in anguish. Leroy kept clicking. Wike never noticed Leroy the whole time she was taking the photographs.
Anguish turned to anger, and the medic picked up the dead man’s M16, swearing at the top of his voice: “The bastards… the bastards… I’m going to kill them!” He charged a fortified Vietnamese bunker, emptied his magazine at whomever was hiding inside, and dropped the rifle. He returned to the hillside to care for the other wounded soldiers.
The sequence happened in minutes.
Leroy photographed with care, shooting only three rolls of film in the poor light, purposefully not wanting to waste a single frame to avoid having to reload the camera. She kept her focus on the medic, as his heroism and humanity played out on a ridge exploding with gunfire and mortars.
Soon night took over, and the fighting died down.
Leroy returned to Da Nang to ship her photographs by military aircraft to Horst Faas in Saigon. Since she had shot at dusk under abysmal conditions, she wrote precise notes to help process the film.
Faas, who had been photographing the Vietnam War since 1962, was amazed by what he saw: “I realized that these pictures were somethin
g new, their expressions were new.”6
Intimate portraits during battle became Leroy’s hallmark. Few photographers got closer to soldiers than Leroy, who crawled in the mud alongside them if necessary, aiming for the eyes and subtle shifts in expression. She was a silent presence; soldiers were rarely aware of her.
Faas sent out Leroy’s photographs, and they were published around the world. They seemed to capture the war at that moment. The medic’s anguish and the valor of soldiers seizing the hill was a confirmation for many that American soldiers were courageous.
Time magazine ran an article on May 12, 1967, about the impact of Leroy’s photographs, which had appeared in newspapers around the country, saying they were a reminder of the ghosts of Iwo Jima. Entitled “Photographers: Gnat of Hill 881,” the article described the petite photographer as small as a gnat. “But the little French girl is a tough freelance photographer; and for Americans looking at their front pages last week, her A.P. pictures of Marines headed up 881 North evoked ghosts of Iwo Jima and Pork Chop Hill.”
To have any Vietnam photographs compared to the heroic World War II images of Marines struggling to raise the American flag after victory on the island of Iwo Jima was nearly unheard of. It underlined how Leroy’s photographs of Marines sitting on hills made barren by bombs and artillery, caring for their wounded, and holding their positions were seen as ennobling by an American public that still believed in the American cause and a future American victory in Vietnam. Leroy began to understand what this meant when she received countless letters from mothers of American soldiers thanking her for the photographs and asking after their sons.
The New York Times ran one of her photographs on the front page and credited her by name. An issue of Paris Match ran several of the photographs, which her parents proudly displayed. Her biggest splash was in Life magazine, which published six pages of her photographs in a spread called “Up Hill 881 with the Marines.”7
With her camera, Leroy made the battle famous and the Marines who fought it down-to-earth heroes. “These are not portraits of a warrior class but of ordinary, frightened and often bewildered young men trying desperately to stay alive, and relying upon each other to pull off this seemingly impossible feat,” said Peter Howe, author of Shooting Under Fire: The World of the War Photographer.8
In two and a half weeks of the Hill Fights, the Marines pushed back the North Vietnamese and held the ridges above Khe Sanh. The cost was high. Americans suffered 155 dead and 425 wounded—the worst losses for a battle of the Vietnam War at the time. The estimated Vietnamese loss was 764 dead.
The victory was not what it seemed. Americans would learn that the North Vietnamese actions around Khe Sanh were in preparation for a far bigger offensive at the start of the coming year.
Leroy went back to the Marine company to give the men copies of what were now famous photographs and to meet the medic. When she gave Wike his photographs, he just said: “Where were you? I didn’t see you.”
Leroy’s prestige skyrocketed. Rival editors in New York were astonished at her scoop. The CBS bureau in Saigon received a cable from headquarters asking: “If an 84-pound French girl can do this, why can’t we?”9
The Hill 881 photographs demonstrated Leroy’s very personal approach to photography and her attachment and identification with her subjects. “The GIs were like my brothers. We were the same age, and I loved them. Besides, I cannot photograph anybody for whom I don’t have any feelings. I would rather stay at home, smoke a cigarette, and drink a good glass of wine.”10
The photographs from Khe Sanh helped fill her bank account. She upgraded her now badly overused equipment. Life alone paid her $5,000. She ordered two new cameras and a pair of shoes and bought children’s tunics as gifts for friends in France.
She wrote to her mother how much it meant to have taken those photographs on Hill 881: “I am very happy. After all these long months, this time I was lucky.”
Only three months after some of her colleagues had encouraged the military to deny her the right to continue as a war photographer, Leroy had become a hero. General Deane, who tore down official barriers so she could jump, sent her “a charming telegram from the depths of an operational command to congratulate me.”
In quieter moments, Leroy realized something essential was missing from her photographs. “No image that you see can translate the cry of the wounded or translate the smell of the corpses. When you see the photos, it is a frozen moment of eternal silence.”
She thought she knew where that ungodly noise had gone, where it was entombed, along with the stench of the dead. It was inside her, the photographer. “Those images rest inside of you with the violence, madness and fear and agony—all those things rest in you, remain in you.”11
Catherine Leroy’s first expression of the trauma building up in her was poetic.
IN THE MIDDLE of May 1967, Leroy was back in the field to report on Operation Hickory near Con Thien, the first American assault into the demilitarized zone. The United States had considered the DMZ off-limits, a boundary officially delineated in the 1954 Geneva Accords. But General Westmoreland lifted this ban because the North Vietnamese had clearly set up positions inside the DMZ. It was considered another example of the North Vietnamese refusing to play by the rules.
According to the Geneva Accords, the division at the 17th parallel—the DMZ—was “provisional and should not in any way be interpreted as constituting a political or territorial boundary” that would not be necessary after the 1956 elections. South Vietnam and the United States refused to allow the elections, and so the DMZ was still in place in 1967.
In the eyes of North Vietnam, the United States and South Vietnam had refused to respect the Geneva Accords, not them. The North Vietnamese army buildup along the 17th parallel was a strategic preparation for a counteroffensive in the south.
In Operation Hickory, begun on May 18, the Marines came up against the powerful presence of regular North Vietnamese units in the demilitarized zone. According to the official Marine history, the North Vietnamese “directed heavy mortar, rocket and artillery attacks against all Marine positions along the DMZ.”12
The lieutenant colonel leading the Second Battalion of the Twenty-sixth Marines was wounded in that lethal barrage. Leroy arrived on a supply helicopter with his replacement, landing at the Marine’s operational command center in Dong Ha. That night she barely slept. Rockets streaking overhead lit up the sky. Marine artillery flew over her head. Shells burst near the lines. A military photographer jumped into the hole where she was trying to sleep and crushed her.
Early on the next morning, May 19, she was with troops headed toward the front line when a volley of mortar fire ripped through their position. Leroy was wounded, badly.
“I was hit by the first mortar. In my head it was a big sound… like a gong. I knew I was hit but was still on my feet. I felt nothing but noticed my right pigtail was all bloody. My three cameras were also bloody… they had been hit and probably saved my life.
“It seemed like five minutes before anyone saw me. I was pretty groggy and in bad shape. I couldn’t breathe and was bleeding all over. I thought I was going to die.”13
Leroy had thirty-five holes in her from the shrapnel. A medic cut off her battle shirt and bra—she protested, and he told her this was no time for modesty.14 For the next hour, she and the other wounded were transported by armored vehicle over a very rough road to Con Tien, where she was laid on the ground beside a Marine.15 They shared a cigarette and held hands to keep up each other’s spirits. With the little strength she had left, Leroy opened her camera and handed over her film to the nearest information officer, asking him to get it to Saigon and Horst Faas. Then she passed out.
When Leroy woke up, she was conscious of motion, a pitching motion. She was lying on a stretcher in the reception area of the USS Sanctuary, a floating navy hospital. She remembered only the one moment when a medic lifted the sheet over her and shouted, “My God—a woman—a blond.”
After that she lost consciousness again, anesthetized for a three-hour operation. Her wounds were mended; her fractured jaws were wired shut. For the better part of three days and nights, a medic she knew from a previous assignment stayed by her bedside to be sure that she was out of danger.16
In Saigon, Faas was relieved. He suffered every time a photographer died in the war. They were all his friends. This time he was able to send the good news of her survival, albeit traumatized, to her family and the AP offices.
Then the perfectionist in him took over. Faas sent Leroy’s German Leica camera to Woody Edwards in AP’s Hong Kong bureau with instructions to take it to Schmidt and Company for cleaning.17 He sent the two Japanese Nikons to Sam Jones in Tokyo with a request to take the cameras and lens to Nikon itself for repair and cleaning.18 More letters asked for payments for her work. In respectful French, he wrote a reassuring letter to Leroy’s parents.19 And in a big brotherly tone, he wrote to Cathy congratulating her on the requests for her work, signing it “hurry back fast and in one piece—love, Horst.”20
Crucially, Faas also wrote to Wes Gallagher, the general manager of the Associated Press, to suggest that the company pay for all of Leroy’s medical costs. He agreed.21
The Sanctuary was anchored at Da Nang Bay for one week when Leroy received an important visitor. Over the loudspeaker, it was announced that Gen. Lewis Walt, commander of the 73,000 Marines in I Corps, was boarding. He came to Leroy’s bedside with a gift. “I can’t give you a purple heart,” he said. With some awkward hesitation, he gave her a manicure set. “You might find some use for this.”22
Leroy thanked him.
With that, the ship sailed to the US Naval Hospital at Subic Bay in the Philippines, where patients could convalesce. One month after she was injured, Leroy was released and cabled Faas from Da Nang saying she was coming home—to Saigon.23 One week later, the Marines concluded Operation Hickory and their assault on the North Vietnamese in the southern portion of the DMZ. The Marines had driven the North Vietnamese out of their refuge and turned the area into a free-fire zone. They had also removed all the civilians from their homes and farms.
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