War Torn: Stories of War From The Women Reporters Who Covered Vietnam

Journal of Political and Military Sociology, Summer 2003 by Lembcke, Jerry

War Torn: Stories of War From The Women Reporters Who Covered Vietnam, introduced by Gloria Emerson. New York: Random House, 2002. 292pp. $24.95 (cloth).

With an on-going interest in the role of the news media in perpetuating myths and legends of the war in Vietnam, I picked up War Torn thinking it might provide a different angle from which to view the way public memory of the war continues to be constructed. Many of the war's representations such as Rambo, or the image of spat-upon veterans, are, after all, larded with gendered fictions that a collection of essays by women who reported on the war might be expected to set in relief for easier examination.

Alas, the book not only left that expectation unmet but, along the way, raised new and troubling questions about press coverage of the war and the unremitting difficulty that even media veterans have in understanding what the American war in Vietnam was about and what their relationship to it was then and is now.

Introduced by Gloria Emerson who reported from Vietnam for The New York Times and won a 1978 National Book Award for her writing, War Torn is comprised of nine autobiographical chapters written by women who covered the war. At the time, the military and press establishments were more male preserves than they are today, which makes these women's stories a special contribution to the historical record.

The collection spans the years 1966 to 1975, a period when news organizations maintained the patronizing attitude that a war zone was no place for women and routinely denied them the opportunity to broaden their professional resumes with assignments to Vietnam. UPI's Bill Landry told Tracy Wood that "women shouldn't cover wars"; Denby Fawcett's editors at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin "thought I was joking when I asked them to free me from the society pages to cover the war. They said it was out of the question." Tad Bartimus was two years out of college and working for the Associated Press in Miami when one of their reporters, Henri Huet, was killed while covering action in Laos. When Bartimus pressed her boss, Wes Gallagher, to send her as Huet's replacement, Gallagher refused, saying, "If you got killed, what would I tell your mother?" Bartimus' reply: "What did you tell Henri Huet's?" Two years later, in April 1973, when the war was all but over, Bartimus got her ticket to war - but with orders to stay in Saigon.

Bartimus, like the others, found ways to subvert the restrictions put on their movement, and the courage and resourcefulness mustered by these reporters to get the news and get it out make some of the best reading in the book. Unfortunately, some of their accounts read a little too much like the "war stories" of other aging veterans reliving their glory days. Fawcett's memory of "walking point" with a Marine patrol raises the eyebrows as does Jurate Kazickas1 recollection that "young hotshot helicopter pilots did not hesitate to oblige a 'round-eye' American woman with a free ride to some forward firebase, even without official authorization." Such stories exaggerate the freedom of the press in Vietnam, reaching mythic proportions in Emerson's introduction where she writes: "Vietnam was a unique war for all journalists because there was no censorship. The U.S. military provided extraordinary access to combat operations. We could fly on bombing missions, parachute into hostile territory, spend a week with the Special Forces in the jungle ... or be taken prisoner like a soldier."

Ironically, these essays provide amble evidence that, while their time in Vietnam afforded the women reporters valuable opportunities for personal growth, the mission of the news organizations to report on the war might have been better served by others. With the exception of Ann Byron Mariano who went to Vietnam for the anti-war "alternative" paper, Overseas Weekly, the profile cut by these self portraits - Fawcett the "merry explorer with a short attention span and unstoppable curiosity," Kacikas who went knowing "practically nothing about the crisis in Southeast Asia," Edith Lederer, an "adventurer at heart" who went to Vietnam knowing nothing "about weapons, booby traps, and fighter aircraft," and Laura Palmer, just out of college who "hitchhiked" to Vietnam and became a reporter because she needed money - is hardly one of professionalism or even the kind of serious-mindedness that characterized their 60s-generation peers.

Disappointingly, most of the women look back on themselves and the war with no more insight than they had at the time. I read the book hoping to find some critical perspective on journalism, the nature of war, and the masculine culture that surrounds both those enterprises. I especially hoped that with their privileged relationship to the history and literature of the war journalists do write the first drafts of history, or so it is said - they would also dispel some of the politically debilitating mythology that encumbers the American memory ofthat period. Kate Webb, for example, might have used her experience as a twenty-three day captive of the North Vietnamese as a base from which to comment on the history and cultural representations of POWs, a piece of the American 20th Century that is a wellspring of legend. But after recounting her harrowing days as a prisoner, she unabashedly tells us about the ball she attended in San Diego for returned POWs: she wore a blue dress and a stole with the price tag still attached. The war in Vietnam didn't change her, she writes, the biggest difference being she "now appreciates such things as clean, white-tiled bathrooms."