Rachel was miserable. She hated the “horrible waiting game, living in limbo. In every article the assumption was that [Kate] wasn’t going to make it.” How much more could Kate suffer?
UPI was in constant touch, reporting all of their search efforts. Foa called Rachel from Phnom Penh to reassure her that Kate’s friends had not given up. Prince Sihanouk announced from Beijing that he had ordered his forces to find Webb and free her. The Khmer Rouge responded that they neither held Webb nor any other foreign correspondent. The Australian embassy in Phnom Penh sent regular reports.
On April 20, thirteen days after her disappearance, the New York Times reported that the corpse of a young woman had been found and was believed to be the twenty-eight-year-old Kate Webb. The news article ended: “The death of Miss Webb brings to at least 10 the number killed in Cambodia since Prince Norodom Sihanouk was ousted in a coup in March 1970. Seventeen are listed as missing.”9
The accompanying obituary described Webb as an intelligent, soft-spoken woman with a “masked toughness.” It thoughtfully captured much of her personality and her accomplishments.10
Not all of the obituaries that followed showed such respect.
Pat Burgess, a well-known Australian war correspondent for the Mirror, wrote the equivalent of “I told her so.” He had recently reported with her in Cambodia and wrote in an obituary that he told her that she was taking too many risks covering Operation Chenla. The world wouldn’t care, he wrote, “no more than three paragraphs in the world press.” He also thought her sorrow over her dead colleagues was out of proportion. His was impressed, however, that “she had remained feminine.”11
An obituary in the Daily Mirror began: “Kate Webb was the most unlikely war correspondent in the world. When I first met her in 1964 she was doing interviews with television stars.”12
The popular A.M. Radio in Singapore broadcast a full-throated eulogy, remembering Webb for “reaching the top in a predominantly male profession without ever losing her femininity. She chose the toughest testing-ground a girl could imagine, the Viet-Nam War… her humanitarianism and her search for truth were uncompromising.”13
Rachel refused to believe Kate was dead even when the news came that a female corpse had been found. She demanded more evidence. “We asked them to send us the photographs of the dead woman’s teeth who was supposed to be Kate. Our dentist looked at them and said ‘no,’ this is not a European woman. But the New York Times had already run an obit.”
As the days went by with no news, the family realized “the odds of her getting out were pretty small.” They held a memorial service for Kate as missing not dead at St. John’s Church, Canberra, where they had held their parents’ funeral.
Jeremy Webb, now a full-fledged journalist in Australia, was so frustrated he volunteered to go to Cambodia. The family forbade it. And they waited.
FOUR THOUSAND MILES away, in the jungles of eastern Cambodia, Kate hadn’t given up either, but she also resisted hope. She had even asked why she hadn’t been handed over to the Khmer Rouge. The North Vietnamese soldier the prisoners had nicknamed Dad firmly shot down that idea. “You would not be so comfortable with them,” he said. “They are not civilized and do not have the facilities.”
He looked at Webb as if she had gone off her head. She backtracked and said, “I wasn’t saying I wanted to be handed over.”14
The journalists were falling apart. Webb had chills, what she called a “cold fever,” and could no longer tell the difference between thunder and a B-52 bomber. Charoon, the shy Cambodian journalist, described his deep depression: “It is raining in my heart.”
On April 27, Gap Tooth, one of the guards, told them new clothes had been brought to camp, which meant they were about to be released. Released. Dad confirmed it. The date would be May 1, 1971, May Day, the biggest communist anniversary. Webb insisted they wear their civilian clothes. If they were released wearing black pajamas, people on the other side could confuse the Cambodian journalists for Khmer Rouge soldiers.
That was also the moment Webb started her monthly period, and the bleeding was heavy. White parachute silk was found to act as sanitary pads. One bit was saved to be used as a flag of neutrality.
At dawn on April 29, the excited guards woke them up and gave them back the clothes they had worn when they were captured as well as green cotton carrier bags. Inside were official papers saying that they had been released. They returned Kate’s necklace with the gold Chinese charm. She had worn it throughout the war, grabbing at it in foxholes and firefights, convinced the charm had kept her alive.
In what Webb considered a Mad Hatter’s tea party, once more feeling like Alice in Wonderland, they munched on candies and bananas while a soldier took photographs. Webb asked for the last time for information about the other missing journalists: especially Gilles Caron, Dana Stone, and Sean Flynn. Dad said he had no knowledge of journalists captured in the area and gave her this message: “Journalists should not travel with Lon Nol troops; anything can happen in battle.”
Their final meal was chicken. The soldiers lowered their guns and encouraged the reporters to eat their fill. They had to be strong for their journey home.
The sun was setting, and Webb’s feet were bleeding as they began a two-day walk to the other side, led by several guards. On the second night’s walk, Webb felt doom-laden: “We’ve been too lucky; something’s going to go wrong; it doesn’t feel right: we’re going to get bombed or shot.”
The next morning, May 1, the journalists shook hands with Dad and Mr. Lib, who told Kate he would miss her and her soft voice. They were let go close to Highway 4, where they had been originally captured, near the village of Trappeang Kralaing. They were in no-man’s land, crossing to the other side and hoping to be treated as friendlies. When they found that cursed highway, they saw soldiers marching over the crest toward them, so small they looked like little lead soldiers. “Lon Nol soldiers!” they shouted and ran into the highway calling out that they were press: “Neak kasset—press!”
The officer in charge knew Webb; she had covered his unit. His eyes widened when he saw her. “Miss Webb, you’re supposed to be dead! It is Miss Webb, isn’t it?”
Kate couldn’t talk; she was afraid she would cry.15
FRANK SLUSSER WAS the general desk editor on the 4:00 p.m. to midnight shift at UPI headquarters in New York on May 1, 1971. He heard someone shout over to Jack Brannan, who was running the foreign desk: “Jack, Jack! Look at the Asia wire.” Slusser ran over to join him as he picked up the wire copy, smiling.
“What is it, Jack?”
“Kate’s alive.”
Kate was alive.
Jerry Ballestrari, the teletype operator, ran the news bulletin on the AAA wire—the most urgent. He was so excited he used the old style of double-spacing the bulletin. Slusser could barely keep up with the reactions. “The walking-out-of-the-jungle news was electrifying… soon, the phones through the office were ringing, even some from AP guys who had met her and were happy she was alive.”16
Kate was free and suddenly for the first time everyone loved her.
In Canberra, Rachel wept with relief.
The next morning, she and Geoff woke to a national celebration. They reached Kate by telephone in Phnom Penh and couldn’t stop laughing and crying. She was Australia’s biggest news story of that day and for many days to come.
The most extravagant was the Sun-Herald, which left its large tabloid-sized front page blank except for one enormous headline:
REDS FREE SYDNEY GIRL
BACK FROM DEAD
The other newspapers stripped the headlines across their front pages as if a war had ended:
The Sunday News:
FREED NEWSGAL ON CONG: TOUGH MEN, HIGH MORALE
The Sunday Mirror:
OUR GIRL KATE IS ALIVE AND WELL
The Sydney Morning Herald:
VIETCONG ARE HUMAN BEINGS—AND TOUGH
The Age of Melbourne:
‘DEAD’ REPORTER
TELLS OF VIET CONG KINDNESS17
The family was overwhelmed. His friends took Jeremy to the Journalists’ Club in Sydney to drink to Kate’s health. “From then on, I was Kate Webb’s brother.”18
THE CAMBODIAN MILITARY sent a helicopter to fly the journalists to Phnom Penh, giving the press corps time to assemble.
At the airport, Webb could barely walk, held on one arm by a beefy journalist and the other by Mr. Khauv, the UPI office manager who had become her closest colleague. She held a truncated news conference that led to headlines like: “Communists are human, too.” Afterward, she motioned Foa over and whispered: “I’m desperate for tampax.” Foa obliged.19
After hugs, flowers, brandy, and more tears, Webb stopped at her bungalow to pick up her suitcase. She stared at the solid tree in the side yard. She was home, she realized, and free. “There was a stillness inside me I had never felt before or since.”
A French planter sent his car to take her to his empty apartment where she drank glasses of iced orange juice, slaking the thirst for oranges that had preoccupied her during her jungle trek, and took multiple baths until the water was clear.20 The next day, Webb flew to Hong Kong to be put under a doctor’s care while she wrote a multipart series on her twenty-three-day captivity. And she was treated for malaria.
She wrote like a demon. Within two weeks, the articles were printed in newspapers around the world. The headlines were more dramatic than the articles: “Return of the Dead.” “Back from the Dead.” “Day of Terror, Night of Flight.”
Webb’s series was a sharply observed and nuanced diary of her captivity that reflected both sides. Her ordeal was horrendous: a miserable diet, illness, and foot injuries from marches that nearly killed her. But there was nothing sensational: she had not been raped or tortured. She had not uncovered a secret Pentagon-like headquarters.
Even her suffering was tempered by North Vietnamese jungle hospitality. Her daily gruel of tea and rice with fatty pork was the same that the North Vietnamese ate. When she fell ill, they called for their medic, however poorly trained. She did feel mistreated during the hours of interrogation. The daylong sessions were “tough and worrying” because she had to listen and respond to strident communist ideologies not knowing if her answers would put her or the others in jeopardy.
She wrote as a storyteller, without a hint of self-pity, turning her captivity into something like a political fable with North Vietnamese guards who became characters, some of whom she liked and some she didn’t. She told of evenings with the guards telling jokes and swapping cigarettes; of days watching them perform their drab duties in primitive conditions with discipline. They never appeared as caricatures of the evil enemy.21
With her doctors’ blessing, after twenty days Webb flew home to Australia for rest with her family and discovered she had become a national figure.
As soon as she got off the airplane, reporters surrounded her. Her brother Jeremy had to steer her through the crowd like a bodyguard. At an impromptu airport press conference, she seemed taken aback, speaking slowly, hesitantly, searching for words. She made mistakes and called the North Vietnamese the Cong, something she never did in her reports.
Jeremy warned his sister that she had become “a media tart everyone wanted.” Despite her apparent fatigue, Webb appeared on television and sat for newspaper and radio interviews. She had fun crashing the men-only bar at the Sydney Press Club, organized by a columnist who wrote up the adventure. She sat on a stool, legs akimbo, wearing white jeans and a short-sleeved white pullover, a glass of wine in one hand, cigarette in the other, surrounded by five grinning men in suits. No one dared turn away Kate Webb.22
But in two long personality profiles, Webb allowed the stress to show. In an interview with Australia’s Woman’s Day, Webb broke her own strict rule and agreed to talk about her broken engagement. Without mentioning Bob Stockton by name, she transformed his humiliating treatment of her into “a beautiful thing… a war-time style engagement after meeting in a fire base mortar bunker… it fell through, and it fell through hard. But it fell through honestly—it’s a good thing we realized beforehand—before we married.”23
She also chastised the interviewer for asking if she had female colleagues. “It’s only in Australia that it’s unusual for women to be in Indochina.” This was an outrageous statement. Kate knew that, in fact, Americans and Europeans were at least as surprised as Australians that women were reporters of the war.24
Kate was in such perpetual motion in Australia that Rachel missed the signs that all was not right with her sister. Before she could react, Kate was gone, flying to Washington, DC, for more press conferences and interviews and then to New York for UPI. There she arranged to have an evening with friends at Gough’s Chop House, a newspaper bar near the New York Times.
Gene Roberts and Doug Robinson, two Times reporters she admired from her Saigon days, met her along with other friends. Roberts was taken aback when he saw Webb. “She was in such bad shape it was kind of a marvel she managed to make it to New York. It really was appalling. I remember walking into the restaurant and she looked jaundiced. I was surprised she could pick up a glass.”
He and Robinson went back to the Times office and made a phone call to the newspaper’s medical department, and soon Webb was in New York’s best medical facility for tropical medicine.25 She was diagnosed with cerebral malaria, put in a coma, and placed in an ice bath. Webb later said, dryly, she became a “living martini” in the coma. She did not tell her family until she recovered and was released weeks later.
Over UPI’s better judgment, Webb returned to Phnom Penh in mid-1971. They wanted her based away from war zones in countries where she could fully recover. But Webb insisted.
Foa noticed a change immediately. “It was a mistake. The rockets freaked her out, and we had lots of rockets every night. One night we were hanging out in her suite and we got a lot of incoming. I said I was going out to see what was happening, and she threw herself on the floor and held on to my ankles until I agreed to stay. I guess she knew then that she should not have come back so soon. A few days later, she asked me to cover for her as she needed to go to Singapore for a few days.”26
They often covered for each other, but this time Webb more or less disappeared for weeks, completely incommunicado. Foa kept up the pretense that Webb was hard at work, putting her initials “kw” at the bottom of copy and putting Webb’s byline on an article if it was good.
When she returned to Cambodia, Webb became obsessed with missing journalists. She was still working hard, still went to the field, all the while writing a book about her captivity. UPI knew about her absences and her shattered nerves, and finally decided they had no choice but to transfer her out of Cambodia. She was posted to Hong Kong in early 1972 with the promise that she could occasionally report from Vietnam and Cambodia. Foa replaced her in Phnom Penh.
That same year her book, On the Other Side: 23 Days with the Viet Cong, was published. She was horrified that the subtitle referred to the North Vietnamese as the Viet Cong and disappointed by the sales. But that mattered little. The reviews were often reverential. Kate Webb was now a legend, a woman combat reporter who survived more near-death experiences than many soldiers. And she told the story intelligently and in unexpected ways that altered how the war was seen.
WILLIAM SHAWN, THE legendary editor of the New Yorker, received an advance copy of Frankie FitzGerald’s book. He knew her journalism and read Fire in the Lake carefully. When he was finished, he considered it of such profound importance that he bought first serial rights and planned to publish an unusual five-part series from the book. Such a series would make an unmistakable statement. Not since the magazine devoted an entire issue to Hiroshima, John Hersey’s account of the devastation following American use of atomic bombs, had the New Yorker given so much space to one reporter’s story of an American war. The “Hiroshima” issue had sold out within hours. It was reprinted and read by millions and became the subject of countless articl
es and commentaries.
Now Shawn was giving the privilege to substantially reappraise another American war to a woman war correspondent. Moreover, her reappraisal differed significantly from the reporting by Robert Shaplen, the magazine’s Asia correspondent who had covered the Vietnam War from the start. Shawn even created a new category or rubric for the series, “Annals of War,” which is still in use decades later.
In July 1972, the New Yorker published the first of five parts of Fire in the Lake by Frances FitzGerald, giving Americans a wholly new view of the war. With each successive installment—“Fire in the Lake,” “Sovereign of Discord,” “Cave on Karl Marx Mountain,” “Johnson’s Dilemma,” and “Survivors”—FitzGerald centered the war on Vietnam, its history and culture. The role of the Americans in the war came into a new focus, viewed as dangerous outsiders by the Vietnamese in the countryside, even colonialists. The Americans’ answer of using unprecedented force and ham-fisted policies was not creating a new democratic-leaning society in the South; it was having the reverse effect of undermining the legitimacy and any durability of the South Vietnamese government.27
Her key thesis was there was no moral, political, or practical reason for the United States to have waged the Vietnam War when the US had no chance of victory.
The New Yorker series ended one week before the book’s August publication, generating so much respectful publicity it was an instant best seller.
The reviews were uniformly excellent. The New York Times Book Review called it “an extraordinary book… by its very depth and by its admirable style—cool empathy, restrained indignation, quiet irony, devastating vignettes—help us realize the monumental scope of what went wrong and what we did wrong.”28
Even the academic press applauded. Writing in the Journal of Asian Studies, David G. Marr, a historian of Vietnam, called it a “thoughtful book written in quality prose” that while written for a general audience “touches on subjects likely to concern specialists of Vietnam for years to come.” He praised her treatment of the weakness of the Diem regime and rise of the National Liberation Front, although he found her description of the Vietnamese national character “disastrous.”
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