Up Close and Personal

War is an equal opportunity abuser. It wounds or kills whomever it wants, whenever it wants, regardless of age or gender. But for women wanting to cover the war in Vietnam, the news media in the 1960s were not equal opportunity employers. Women covering the war were confronted with more than one adversary. Besides the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong, women had to deal with discouraging attitudes from their employers and American military brass.

Wes Gallagher, managing editor of Associated Press, told reporter Tad Bartimus, “I will never send a woman to Vietnam,” and United Press International foreign editor Bill Landry told reporter Tracy Wood, “I don’t believe women should cover wars.” AP’s foreign editor, Ben Bassett wouldn’t even allow women to work on the foreign desk in New York. But these women persevered, eventually changing these men’s minds.

Foreign desk editors thought women in war zones would be too sensitive. They were right, but not in the way they expected. That sensitivity produced some of the most moving reports. Thanks to the determination and professionalism of a small group of female correspondents in the Vietnam War, women today have opportunities in journalism that were formally denied.

Denby Fawcett of the Honolulu Advertiser quit her job at the higher-paying Honolulu Star-Bulletin when that paper refused to send her to Vietnam. Fawcett had to pay her own way to Vietnam to freelance for the Advertiser. Of the nine contributors to “War Torn,” five had to pay their own way over. The most novel was Jurate Kazickas’ winning $500 on the TV game show “Password” to fund her one-way ticket to Vietnam in 1967. Laura Palmer followed a boyfriend doctor to Vietnam and got a job with ABC radio in 1972. Edith Lederer went to Vietnam first as a tourist in 1972, and AP bureau chief Richard Pyle later became instrumental in convincing Gallagher to assign Lederer there. When she showed up in Saigon for her first day, Lederer was wearing blue bedroom slippers because she broke a heel on one of her shoes boarding her flight to Saigon. “Not the image I had in mind,” she reflected.

When Gen. William Westmoreland ran into Fawcett in the field, he was shocked to see the daughter of his Honolulu neighbors putting herself at such risk, and he promptly banned female correspondents from field operations by prohibiting them from staying overnight. It wasn’t a matter of censorship but of safety both for the women and for the soldiers who would risk their lives to protect them.

But these young women, most in their 20s, threw political correctness and chauvinism out the door of a Huey chopper and banded together to change the directive. Anne Morrissy Merick, a producer for ABC News, and Ann Bryan Mariano of he Overseas Weekly successfully lobbied the Pentagon to retain women’s right to battlefield access. Despite the lifting of the ban, the Marines--as before--continued to provide female correspondents with Marine escorts in an otherwise open and uncensored war. The last we would see.

I first met Ann Mariano in 1966 when I was working as a staff writer for the Overseas Weekly in Frankfurt, Germany. Reading her chapter, “Vietnam Is Where I Found My Family,” in “War Torn” brought a rush of personal memories as she recalled, with poetic grace, the joys of meeting her future husband, Army officer and future ABC News correspondent Frank Mariano, and the adoption of their two Vietnamese daughters, Katey and Mai. Most moving, however, was the post-Vietnam tragedies that fell upon her family. Now she is struggling with Alzheimer’s disease, which she describes as “blowing through my memory like wind through a Buddhist sand painting.”

War is the most extreme of human experiences, and women confront their emotions differently than men. They may be more vulnerable and sensitive to human suffering around them, but they have the inherent discipline and courage to confront and deal with their own emotions. “War Torn” is honest, heart-wrenching and laced with self-deprecating humor. In “These Hills Called Khe Sanh,” Kazickas writes: “I watched as Withers held his dying buddy in his arms. The moment was so intimate, so raw, so tender, it took my breath away. It was not the first time I had seen unabashed love the men showed one another on the battlefield. Soldiers in Vietnam were not afraid to express their deepest emotions. They hugged each other and sobbed openly in the aftermath of a firefight.”

When Kazickas was wounded at Khe Sanh, she was brought into the bunker aid station where Marines went into a stir to provide her a bit of privacy with hung blankets.

Waiting in the bunker for further medical aid for her face, Kazickas wrote how, “In spite of myself, I began to cry--for the first time since I had come to Vietnam more than a year ago ... Even during the months of covering battles and witnessing the carnage of war, I had avoided tears. I had convinced myself that if I broke down, it would prove that women didn’t belong in war.... The repressed sadness and weariness that had filled my soul for the last year in Vietnam suddenly surfaced in a painful flow of memories. I thought of all the men I had seen die the loneliest and ugliest of deaths in muddy trenches or putrid jungles. It was all such a terrible waste.”

Kate Webb of UPI wrote how “[m]ost of the wounded had their feet blown off by peanut-butter mines [small anti-personnel mine about the size of a C-ration can of peanut butter]. Gray faced, in shock, in morphine-blocked pain, they would yell for us to find their feet before they boarded [the medevac helicopter]--clinging to the grisly, severed boots and the hope that the surgeons could sew their feet back on again. This is a place where marines wear dogtags on their boots.” Webb was captured, held by North Vietnamese for 23 days and mistakenly reported as dead before her release, which she also writes about in “War Torn.”

But there is also humor here, and it surfaces at the most unexpected moments, just as it did in the war. Webb recalls: “Not that we didn’t have our embarrassing times. As I marched out into leech-infested paddies one day, my turn came to pass a top sergeant handing out condoms. (Soldiers would use the powdered condoms to shield their genitals from the intruding leeches.) ‘Jesus, Katie, I don’t have a cork!’ he said.”

In the chain of essays, there is only one weak link that reads like a production schedule report, “My Love Affair With Vietnam,” written by Morrissy Merick, who was, in fairness, not a writer. But the others reach up from the page and grab you by the heart, pulling you down into the experience and emotions of those days ... and the aftermath, which would affect all of these remarkable women in the years to come.

The only disappointment for me in the book was the little reference to Vietnamese women. It is ironic, considering that Gloria Emerson’s introduction describes an American student who upset her at a college lecture: “ ... A young woman came up to me and solemnly said: ‘I’m so glad a woman was there to see it.’ Her remark so shocked me that I turned my back on her. It was as if she was dismissing all the Vietnamese women whose lives were deformed by the war, the many Vietnamese women in the South who risked torture and death in opposing the Americans and their Vietnamese allies; and the American nurses who cared for the wrecked soldiers.”

Vietnamese women are among the strongest because of the generations of war they have survived. I saw these same qualities in the American women who came to Vietnam as nurses, Red Cross workers and as correspondents. But despite their obvious professionalism and courage under fire, they were still looked after by seasoned correspondents and military men. It’s something men need to do.

The women in “War Torn” also write about their involvement with the people around them, from their love affairs to the children of the streets. Palmer wrote, “I never loved the way I did in Vietnam.... Like a jealous lover, Vietnam could be relentlessly demanding. But the mystery is like the heart of love itself, Vietnam gave back far more than it ever took from me.”

Bartimus, who still suffers from “acute onset autoimmune disease” she suspects she got from defoliant exposure in the war, recalled a little street girl in Saigon who sold leis of jasmine blossoms: “In the beginning, I bought as many leis as she had left in the red dishpan at curfew. But soon she claimed me as a friend, lying in wait to leap out of the shadows and grab my arm. To her there were two kinds of people, customers and friends. By and by, friends didn’t have to pay. One night, when I reached for my wallet out of reflex, her oval face crumpled and her doe eyes dulled. ‘For you, from me,’ she said touching her heart, then mine. ‘Please.’ ”