You Don't Belong Here

by Elizabeth Becker

  The victories added up. By the end of March 1975, the NVA had captured Ban Me Thout and the Central Highlands, Pleiku City and its airport, and Quang Tri and Da Nang, allowing the North Vietnamese to revise their goal: they would be in Saigon by mid-May.

  President Ford announced that the US Navy would evacuate South Vietnamese from the cities threatened by the North.33

  In Cambodia, the Phnom Penh government was also near collapse. Lon Nol had been sent on a goodwill tour manufactured by the Americans to replace him with better military leaders. It was years too late. The Khmer Rouge had encircled the capital and cut off all supply routes.

  Webb felt a need to report the war’s end. Her editors agreed but did not send her to the war zones; they instead assigned her to Clark Air Base in the Philippines, where she covered the American evacuation from South Vietnam. Webb was at the base when the Marines began the final evacuation of Cambodia on April 12, 1975. Helicopters landed on a playground near the embassy, and heavily armed Marines escorted the waiting diplomats, journalists, and Cambodian officials and families onto the helicopters that flew them to US aircraft carriers in the Gulf of Thailand.

  Alarmed, Webb used the military system to patch through to UPI in Hong Kong to reach the UPI’s remaining Cambodian journalists who had declined the offer to evacuate. Early on April 17, she cabled one of the reporters as he sent a story from the PTT Office on the square. In her imagination, Kate could see him typing the keys as they exchanged jokes over the wires. He said he deserved a pay raise. She was about to answer when he interrupted with what became his last message. The Khmer Rouge were entering the post office. He had to go.

  Webb went straight to the bar on the air base and drank martinis until four in the morning when members of the Filipino band ended their set and carried her to her hotel room.34

  THE NEWS FROM Cambodia was shocking. On the first day of victory, the Khmer Rouge ordered everyone out of Phnom Penh. Immediately. The entire population was herded like cattle out of the capital to the countryside. Soldiers in black pajama uniforms shot any protestors. Men, women, children, students, and patients in hospitals: they were all sent marching down the highways. Government officials, soldiers, and professionals were identified and murdered.

  Ly Eng, the journalist who was Webb’s close friend and sometime lover, was last seen fleeing the Khmer Rouge in his sports car.

  Horror over Cambodia was eclipsed by the coming collapse of South Vietnam. The North Vietnamese were closing in on Saigon. They had taken Xuan Loc, the last line of defense of Saigon. President Thieu resigned on April 21, blaming the United States for signing the Paris Peace Accords and turning its back on his country. Two days later, President Ford rejected any suggestion that the US would launch a last-minute bombing campaign to save Saigon. He announced that the Vietnam War was “finished as far as America was concerned.”

  All that was left was the evacuation of Americans and their Vietnamese allies. Ambassador Graham Martin had resisted repeated assertions from within the embassy, beginning in early March, that the end was near. The initial evacuation plans were drawn up to use the runways at Tan Son Nhut Air Base. That option was destroyed by the communists’ heavy bombardment on the night of April 29.35

  Kate Webb was reassigned from Clark Air Base to the USS Blue Ridge, the navy command ship in charge of the forty-vessel American armada waiting off the coast of Vietnam to receive evacuees and transport them to the Philippines. The ships had been waiting there since the fall of Da Nang one month earlier. She was one of a select few pool reporters on the ship and was responsible for writing stories to be used by all news organizations.

  Ron Moreau, a Newsweek magazine reporter fluent in Vietnamese, was another pool reporter on the USS Blue Ridge. Although he was only two years younger than Webb, Moreau considered her an icon. It was an “honor to be reporting with her. I hoped I could get her to talk about her exploits, but she was all business, interviewing everyone, not seeming to pay attention to me and to the fact that she was the only woman on the ship.”36

  The pace was nonstop. The largest helicopter operation of its kind was thrown together later than anyone wanted. On April 29, President Ford and Secretary of State Kissinger gave the order to evacuate, and the American armed forces radio played the song “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas,” the signal in Saigon to depart. Panic and chaos ensued. Desperate crowds tried to board buses to pickup zones from which helicopters would ferry them to the American ships thirty miles off the coast. Families and friends were divided. Bribes as large as $200,000 were offered to get past Marines guarding the buildings, whose roofs were being used as helicopter landing pads for the evacuation.

  Moreau never saw Webb sleep as helicopter after helicopter landed on the small ship, discharged the Americans and Vietnamese from Saigon and then turned around to pick up more. She interviewed the arrivals and then filed nonstop stories through the ship’s communications room.

  One of the last to arrive on board was Tom Polgar, the CIA station chief, who had burned embassy files and sent the last message to Washington. “It has been a long fight and we have lost.… Those who fail to learn from history are forced to repeat it. Let us hope that we will not have another Vietnam experience and that we have learned our lesson. Saigon signing off.”37

  On April 30, 1975, after the US embassy had shut down and all the Americans evacuated, Webb filed this report:

  The 40 American ships involved in the Vietnam evacuation operation moved out to a new holding area today about 50 miles off the coast. Navy spokesmen said that the operation was officially over. More than 6,000 people, including about 900 Americans, were flown out of Saigon in the last phase of the American airlift and landed on the decks of vessels that were waiting 30 miles offshore. Among the last to leave was the American Ambassador, 61-year-old Graham A. Martin. He appeared drawn and weary as he stepped out of a Marine helicopter before dawn onto the deck of the Blue Ridge.38

  And with that, Kate Webb wrote the end of the decades-long American involvement in the Vietnam War.

  ONCE SHE REALIZED the end was near, Catherine Leroy put aside her assignments and projects and flew to Saigon from Paris. She arrived in the middle of April and booked a room at the Continental Hotel with most of the remaining press corps. But she wasn’t chasing the story as she normally did. Adding historic photos to her portfolio was not uppermost in her mind. She had come as a witness.

  When she walked the streets, she dutifully had her camera, but she was in a thoughtful mood, remembering the city nine years earlier when she first arrived and how life had exploded all around her. Since 1969, she had covered Middle East conflicts. Beirut was becoming a second home. But Vietnam always remained very close to her. She felt she owed it to herself, to her profession, and to those who had touched her life deeply, like Vernon Wike, the medic she photographed on Hill 881, to be in Saigon at this moment.

  Seated on the familiar Continental terrace, she watched the growing panic as hundreds, then thousands, fled by the day. They carried bulging suitcases and briefcases of gold bars. Parents searched for children lost in the scrum. Parts of the city were burning. Ambulances raced toward Grall Hospital where she had recovered from her foot injury. That Saigon, her old Saigon, had disappeared. Now it was in the chaos of something new.

  The biggest surprise was on April 29, as the signal to evacuate went out. To her amazement, nearly all the American journalists left the city on helicopters, landing on the USS Blue Ridge.

  Leroy understood their editors had told them to leave, but still, they could have ignored those orders. “That was very interesting that the American media left because this was the end of their story of war… it would have been worthwhile if they had stayed.”39

  European journalists and photographers found themselves filling in for the absent Americans.

  Françoise Demulder had flown into Vietnam from Cambodia and was working with Leroy, her role model. The two teamed up on April 30 as the North Vietnamese m
oved into the city. They photographed the looting of US installations. The American embassy was pillaged. Furniture, office equipment, and supplies were scattered on all floors and into the street. To avoid a battle, the South Vietnamese government had broadcast its surrender over the radio. The sound of cannons ended. Policemen and ARVN soldiers were shedding their uniforms all over the city.

  When North Vietnamese troops entered Saigon, there was no fighting or bloodshed as the soldiers, called bo doi, marched as if in a victory parade. They shouted giai phong, or liberation. The two French women ran ahead of the column of troops and arrived at the Presidential Palace, the seat of power of the South Vietnamese government, in time to record the first NVA tank—Tank 843—crashing through its gate.

  James Fenton was there as well, riding on the back of that tank. He had flagged it down on its way to the palace. “The tank speeded up and rammed the left side of the palace gate. Wrought iron flew into the air, but the whole structure refused to give. I nearly fell off. The tank backed again, and I observed a man with a nervous smile opening the center portion of the gate. We drove into the grounds of the palace and fired a salute.”40

  Fenton had been named acting bureau chief of the Washington Post one day earlier, after the departure of the American staff. His was the only front-page article from Saigon in that paper the day the war ended.

  Demulder photographed the exact moment of the tank crashing into the Presidential Palace. Her image was reproduced around the world and became one of the memorable shots of the war’s end.

  Leroy followed the troops as they marched through the palace gardens to accept the surrender of the South Vietnamese government. She photographed them at an impromptu press conference on the palace balcony and as they raised their flag, officially taking power in the South.

  “I wanted to be there, to see it happen.”41

  EACH OF THE three women who had redefined the role of women in war reporting, and who, individually, had won extraordinary accolades and suffered for their work, was there as the war in Vietnam finally ended. Frankie FitzGerald witnessed the final assault from the North from bomb-scarred Hanoi; Kate Webb watched each shattered US evacuee arrive aboard the USS Blue Ridge; and Cathy Leroy was there, an almost silent observer, as the gates of the old regime were torn from their posts and years of death and ruin for the idea of a US-sponsored state of South Vietnam were finally brought to an end. It was over.

  Epilogue

  AFTER 1975, THE UNITED STATES WANTED TO ERASE THE memory of Vietnam and the first war America had lost. Once it had helped Vietnamese, Lao, and Cambodian refugees settle in America, the US largely turned its back on the countries of Indochina. At the State Department, the diplomats overseeing Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia gave their group the nickname Very Lost Causes.

  The American veterans of the war felt they were left adrift. When Jan Scruggs, a veteran, established the fund that built the memorial to their fallen comrades in Washington, DC—the striking black granite wall of names designed by Maya Lin1—the opening in November 1982 began with a parade of often-weeping veterans, grateful for the welcome home parade they had never previously received. Gen. John W. Vessey Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, attended. President Ronald Reagan did not.2

  Bobby Mueller, another veteran, helped establish Vietnam Veterans of America in 1978 because traditional veteran groups did next to nothing to lobby for the specific care and support Vietnam veterans needed. The group initiated informal relations with Vietnamese veterans in Vietnam and, as a nonprofit fund, shared the 1997 Nobel Prize for Peace for the campaign to ban land mines.3

  The US finally established normal diplomatic relations with Vietnam in 1995 and ended its severe sanctions against the country.

  CATHERINE LEROY, KATE Webb, and Frances FitzGerald did not forget Vietnam. During the first years after the Vietnam War, Catherine Leroy was on fire. She won the 1976 Robert Capa Gold Medal Award honoring courage as well as artistry for her coverage of street fighting in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war—the first woman to win that award. She also fell in love in Beirut with Bernard Estrade, a French reporter for Agence France-Presse. Estrade was the physical and emotional opposite of Leroy—large, solid, and a stabilizer in the relationship. They were partners for most of the war.4

  Estrade was posted to Hanoi, and Leroy spent two months in Vietnam in 1980. She traveled around the country, photographing the changes to mark the fifth anniversary of the end of the war. She moved about in relative freedom compared to her last days in the South in 1975.

  From 1977 to 1986, she was under contract with Time magazine and covered conflicts in Northern Ireland, Cyprus, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Angola, China, Pakistan, and Libya.5 In 1983, she coauthored God Cried with Tony Clifton, a Newsweek correspondent.6 In the midst of this hectic transient working life, her relationship with Estrade unsurprisingly fell apart. He was the only partner she ever had.

  Leroy’s assignments dried up not long after she left war coverage in the early 1990s. She was never good at business and found herself with little money. She lived in Los Angeles where she drove around in a 1968 black Mustang and eventually ran a website called Piece Unique, where she sold used haute couture apparel as well as her war photographs.

  Fred Ritchin, dean of the school at the International Center of Photography and a close friend of Leroy’s, spoke to her every Friday during those years. “She never really recovered from what she suffered in Vietnam. She felt left out—others had gone on to a certain amount of prestige and financial success. She felt marginalized, cast aside, not appreciated. She was broke.7

  For the thirtieth anniversary of the war’s end in 2005, she published the book Under Fire: Great Photographers and Writers in Vietnam, giving credit to her colleagues for what she considered model war coverage.8 She managed to mount a few exhibits of her Vietnam work, but by then she had largely disappeared from public view, unknown to the photographers—female and male—making their names in newer wars in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.

  Her last assignment was that same year. Paris Match sent Leroy to Arizona for a reunion and report on Vernon Wike, the medic she had photographed on Hill 881. Wike was a wreck. He had married four times and no longer spoke to his daughters. In her photographs, he looks lost, his arms tattooed with the names of his dead comrades. “Vernon is haunted,” Leroy wrote.9

  So was Leroy. She died in 2006, one week after she was diagnosed with cancer. Shortly before she died, she told Fred Ritchin that she was proud of what she had done in Vietnam—that she had climbed the summit.

  Her friends, led by Robert Pledge, founder and head of Contact Press Images, did not allow her accomplishment to disappear. Pledge, along with Ritchin, the editor Dominique Deschavanne, and other photographers, collected all of her photographs and papers for the first time and created the nonprofit French foundation, or dotation, to preserve her work. From Paris and New York, they painstakingly translated all of her letters, carefully stored her photographs, and created a sophisticated website called Dotation Catherine Leroy that features her work and her story.

  More broadly, the number of women war photographers and photo editors today are her legacy, of the woman who broke through at great cost, winning unprecedented honors and creating a new way of seeing war.

  KATE WEBB QUIT journalism not long after the war’s end. UPI had her sent to Singapore, but her boss in Hong Kong visited regularly and insisted she have an affair with him. She refused. She told her sister Rachel, “That’s not part of my job description.”10 But the boss complained to New York headquarters that Webb was not performing well. She demanded that New York remove his complaints from her file. When UPI refused, she quit and moved to Indonesia. She became a public relations director for a hotel in Jakarta.

  She was sufficiently angry that she stayed out of daily journalism for ten years. Webb did try to keep her hand in as a freelancer, but without the structure of a staff job she flailed, missing deadlines and disappointing e
ditors. Her drinking did not help. In Jakarta, she began a lifelong, off-and-on relationship with John Stearman, a down-home American engineer working for oil companies in the region. She moved in with him and his two young daughters until they returned to the United States and he accepted jobs around the world.

  After that lost decade, Webb returned to full-time journalism, joining Agence France-Presse in 1985. In her second career, Webb covered much of Asia, living in Seoul, Delhi, Kabul, and finally in Jakarta again. She covered major stories: the ongoing Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the 1991 Gulf War, the assassination of Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, Hong Kong’s handover in 1997, and the United Nations intervention in East Timor. She endured a kidnap attempt in Kabul when an assassin dragged her out of her hotel room by the hair (she was rescued by colleagues) and a motorcycle accident in Delhi that badly injured her right shoulder. She never changed. She always championed her local staff—once threatening to quit if they weren’t treated better by the wire service—and generosity was second nature to her. She invited an Afghan family to live with her in Delhi after they escaped the war and sent money for life-saving medicine to the daughter of a friend of a friend whom she had never met.

  Through it all she remained a stellar wire service reporter. She was the pool reporter in August 1997 when the isolated communist country of North Korea briefly opened its doors. Peter Mackler, her Agence France-Presse boss in Washington, sent out a company-wide note praising her reporting: “Her pool copy really sparkled. It was abundant, timely, well-written and full of good color detail and quotes that pool members eat up.” Among those pool members who Mackler said appreciated her work were future Pulitzer Prize winners Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times and Kevin Sullivan and Mary Jordan of the Washington Post.11