You Don't Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War

Elizabeth Becker has written a definitive, rich-in-detail account of three in-country journalists of the Vietnam/Cambodia wars. A former war correspondent herself, who witnessed the rise of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, Becker profiles two print journalists, Frances Fitzgerald and Kate Webb, and daredevil photojournalist Catherine Leroy. As a bonus, Becker slips episodes of her own story into the Kate Webb narrative.They were young—the oldest of the four was 25—and they paid their own way to Saigon or (in Becker’s case) Phnom Penh. Without credentials, they hoped to find jobs monopolized by men. Becker doesn’t limit her narrative to what these women accomplished professionally. She highlights the challenges they faced growing up and uncovers the relationships they experienced in a male-dominated, wartime environment where expected or rumored romances tracked their careers. Rather than divide her account into three biographical sections, the author blends chronologies to show how the journalists covered overlapping events. This allows Becker to portray the uncensored press and the war’s decision-makers side-by-side.It is impossible to convey to potential readers how good this book is without saying something about each of the women.Catherine Leroy. With her Leica camera and a pocketful of francs she hoped would cover her for a month, 21-year-old Catherine Leroy arrived in Vietnam from Paris in February 1966. Once she obtained press credentials, she accompanied troops from the Mekong Delta to the DMZ. No more than five feet tall and less than a hundred pounds, she carried her own pack, ate C-rations, and slept in the field alongside the troops. One soldier told Leroy that no one at home would believe him when he wrote that he had slept in a tent next to a French woman. For two years she was the only female combat photographer in Vietnam. “She was so short, she could move among the tall Americans without being noticed and aim her camera at unusual angles,” Becker explains. “She started to lie on the ground to be close enough to zero in on a soldier’s face…focusing on the eyes.”Because Leroy was a licensed skydiver, the 173rd Airborne Brigade allowed her to jump with American paratroopers in Operation Junction City (the only airborne operation of the war). As she floated to the ground, she grabbed her “cameras around her neck and photographed the hundreds of parachutes as they opened.” She shot images from above, below, and sideways. “Even in their helmets and heavy boots,” Becker writes, “the soldiers reminded her of flowers opening their petals.” The next morning the brigade commander arrived at the press tent and pinned the gold star master-jump wings onto her shirt, a badge she proudly displayed throughout the war. She was later wounded and recovered on the USS Sanctuary.Catherine Leroy’s undersized figure contrasted with her oversized temperament. She berated American commanders if they tried to limit her access. Because of her behavior, she lost her press credentials but eventually won them back. She landed at Khe Sanh and captured defining images of the Marines under siege. During the early days of the Tet Offensive, the North Vietnamese captured her in Hue when she left the safety of the Marines and entered neighborhoods looking for subjects to photograph. But hours later she talked her way to freedom, bringing back pictures of huddled, terrified civilians and the enemy swarming over an American tank—one of the rare moments in warfare when a photojournalist captured images of opposing sides during the same battle.Kate Webb. Australians were fighting in Vietnam, and 23-year-old Kate Webb had the lowly task of finding relevant wire copy for a Sydney newspaper. She decided to go to Vietnam herself when her newspaper declined to have its own correspondent in place. Since Australian troops would not allow her or any other woman to accompany them near a battlefield, Webb embedded herself with ARVN troops which required a “high tolerance for danger.” She obtained a major scoop during the opening hours of the Tet Offensive. She was the only wire service reporter to witness the attack on the American embassy. Her account landed on the front pages of newspapers worldwide. Soon “the inevitable happened.” She fell in love with a U.S. Army Special Forces officer and agreed to marry him. But when the two arrived in the United States, she discovered that her fiancé already had a wife. Miserable, penniless, and abandoned, she moved to Pittsburgh where a UPI friend found a slot for her. From there, she covered the Kent State shootings. She returned to Indochina in July 1970, but this time to Cambodia where a pro-American military regime had recently replaced the ousted Prince Norodom Sihanouk. In the ensuing months, some of her colleagues went missing or were killed. Her supervisor’s death vaulted her to UPI’s bureau chief in Phnom Penn.In early April 1971, Webb drove her Datsun down Highway 4 from Phnom Penn to observe government fighting. North Vietnamese troops captured her and five of her colleagues. When her car was found abandoned, everyone expected the worst. Thirteen days passed, and The New York Times reported that a female corpse was discovered, believed to be Webb’s. Obituaries appeared. Back in Australia, her family held a memorial service. But on the first of May, she and her colleagues walked out of the jungle. Webb wrote about her ordeal in On the Other Side: 23 Days with the Viet Cong.Frances Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald was an American heiress, a child of high society, overshadowed by a beautiful mother who had affairs with famous men, including Adlai Stevenson. She rarely saw her father, a senior CIA official. She arrived in Vietnam at the same time as Catherine Leroy. Through her embassy connections, she met and spent time with Daniel Ellsberg, a former Marine, who was stationed in Vietnam as a Pentagon aide and intelligence officer. Rather than accompany American troops or attend briefings at MACV headquarters, she spent most of her time interviewing villagers and refugees in camps and hospitals. Her freelanced magazine articles explained the war from the perspective of the Vietnamese, thereby exposing American misconceptions. Fitzgerald’s political connections at home enabled her to correspond with Henry Kissinger. Her observations and research provided the groundwork for her award-winning 1972 work on Vietnamese history, culture, and politics, titled Fire in the Lake.You Don’t Belong Here complements Elizabeth Becker’s earlier, more comprehensive work, When The War Was Over, Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution, published in 1986 and revised in 1998. While reporting from Cambodia in her early days, Becker was the first to identify Solath Sar as the Khmer Rouge leader (known to the world as the infamous Pol Pot). She was also one of only two Western journalists to interview him. In 2015, she testified at the genocide trial of two surviving Khmer Rouge officials.Especially valuable is Becker’s account of what these women accomplished, post-Vietnam—a noteworthy period for all three. Leroy died in 2006; Webb in 2007; both of cancer. Finally, Becker’s book reminds the reader of an often overlooked fact. There were two Indochina wars, Vietnam and Cambodia, both tragic, one more so than the other. —Stephen P. Learned, Author, The Girl To His Left

This is a must read book for women reporters, any woman facing male resistance at work and for all men who want to be better humm beings. These were all brave women in every sense of the word who blazed a trail for so many who followed.

Contrary to an earlier review, Ms Chapelle is recognized both as the first female photographer in Vietnam and for her groundbreaking work in WW II (see pp 4 & 5). Further on page 20 her vocabulary is compared with Ms Leroy’s. Don’t submit reviews if you haven’t read the book!This is a great and enjoyable book. It tells the story of FOUR strong women succeeding in a male dominated environment.

Ms. Becker covered the war in Vietnam (and Cambodia) and experienced much of what her subjects did. The book works on every level: the beautifully drawn biography of three very different, very remarkable women; the story of what even relatively privileged women faced in the 1960's and 1970's; the account of the war itself and how the male-dominated American establishment treated the Vietnamese as statistics in a geo-political game, even as these women tried to convey the human toll of the war. It is striking that we can have such a fresh, new, beautifully written account of this war from someone who was there nearly half a century ago, but who is still, clearly, in her prime as a writer.

The story of three courageous and groundbreaking female journalists told by a fourth who did as much or more than they did. Extremely well written. Highly recommended for people interested in military history, journalism, or well-told stories of people who overcome daunting challenges.

I read it because I was ready to learn more. I was born during WW2 and still have vague memories of sailors walking the neighborhood streets near the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Vietnam horrified me, never really recovering from the trauma of watching the murders of Vietnamese children, our troops and medics on daily TV. I have not owned a TV since. This book brought me somewhere else, and moved me greatly. Growing up as a women then in this country was not easy, still is not easy. These young women made it happen for themselves.

Outstanding look at the lives and work of three of the hundreds of women journalists who covered the wars in Southeast Asia. Catherine Leroy, all 87 pounds of her, jumped into combat with the 173rd in Operation Junction City. Francis Fitzgerald used her privileged class and educational background to advantage as a reporter and eventually author of Fire in the Lake. And Kiwi/Ozzie Kate Webb was a reporter and eventually UPI bureau chief in Phnom Penh, captured by PAVN troops in 1971. Years later, covering the war in Afghanistan, she was take prisoner by and escaped from an Afghan war lord.A well-told account of the largely unknown but important reporting of these women. The author, Elizabeth Becker, was herself a correspondent in Cambodia during the war, and a particular value of the book is its inclusion of more details of that conflict than usual in books about the “Vietnam War.”

I loved this book. I was a teenager during the Vietnam War and remember pictures on the news from the conflict. But I've never heard the story of the women who covered the war and the challenges they faced. It is well-written and the story just pulls you in. I recommend that every woman try to read this book, every reporter who has faced challenges breaking into the business, and most of all, the Veterans who had their stories told by these brave women.

A marvelous book. Well written, fast paced, lots of great stories and we get to know these three women well and admire them. Same about the author Becker. How incredibly brave they were, how strong to keep going back to war and writing it so we back home can understand better. Brava.

It was pretty well researched and well written. As a very minor point, as a school mate of Kate Webb, I found a couple of discrepancies. She was called Cathy at school and didn’t become Kate until afterwards. The magistrate who dismissed the murder charge against her said the case should never have been bought. And she went to Vietnam at least in part because of the extremely strong anti Vietnam war movement in Australia

I enjoyed this perspective on our history