Women at the wars

It's hard to imagine a more appropriate book to be reading while the U.S. war in Afghanistan staggered to its conclusion. Elizabeth Becker, a war correspondent in 1970s Cambodia and later with NPR and the NY Times, provided You Don't Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War. Her subjects are French photojournalist, Catherine Leroy; the inquisitive Frances Fitzgerald, a privileged daughter of an American diplomatic muckety-muck who cut loose from the expectations of her surroundings; and the Australian reporter Kate Webb who endured capture by enemy fighters. Their war was the sprawling conflict that spread across Indochina between 1955 and 1975. Here in the U.S., we usually call it just "Vietnam." And, as women journalists, they weren't supposed to be there at all -- reporting a war was exclusively a man's job and they were interlopers.

Because they weren't supposed to be there at all, they all arrived pretty much the same way: they paid for their own one-way tickets to Saigon and started working at whatever presented itself. Civilians could simply fly into South Vietnam and try to make a way, a notion that seems quaint today. (Though there was a moment in Afghanistan, say 2005 or so, when that might have been possible if you were bold enough.) Against long odds, they found outlets that would pay for what they saw, enough to get by on. And they followed their instincts, inventing new ways to escape military media handlers and cover a war.

Catherine Leroy spent most of her time on the battlefield taking striking photographs of war in the moment, stripped of patriotic poses. Frances Fitzgerald, the American magazine writer, filled a huge void by showing the war from the Vietnamese point of view [Fire in the Lake, 1972] and winning more honors than any other author of a book about the war. Kate Webb, the Australian combat reporter, burrowed inside the Vietnamese and Cambodian armies and society with such determination that a top journalism prize for Asian journalists is named in her honor.

These women were professionals, of necessity also adventurers, sometimes fragile, and usually remarkably courageous. Becker is a lively story teller and their stories make good tales.

But I value this book almost as much for Becker's accompanying account of the complicated, multifaceted course of the long Vietnam war. I grew to adulthood consuming reportage of this war, trying to keep track of self-immolating Buddhists and corrupt Catholics; of Communists who were building a nation and other Vietnamese who were dependents of or revolting against French and then U.S. imperialists. The boys of my generation might be drafted into the maelstrom and thousands were. Along with at least 3 million Vietnamese, 50,000 of those American boys died; many who came home were broken in body and spirit. And somehow the war spread into Cambodia and Laos. Sentient members of my generation knew it was wrong somehow, but keeping track of exactly how in real time was very confusing. On the home front, the war broke trust in the U.S. government and in both political parties.

Becker weaves the stories of these three women into a simple and readable narrative of the "Vietnam War." That's a huge accomplishment.

These women changed what was possible for women journalists in war zones. Sarah Chayes in Kandahar and Carlotta Gall from Kabul and Pakistan; Anne Garrels from Baghdad; and Lynsey Addario in Libya built upon their legacy during our unlamented "War on Terror."

That entire project has been irredeemable, but I'm grateful for its women chroniclers. Every one makes the human cost more imaginable.