On Their Own: Women Journalists and the American Experience in Vietnam
by Joyce Hoffman. Da Capo Press, 2008, $27.50
Since the end of the Vietnam War, hundreds of books have been written in an attempt to examine, explain, define and even reimagine what that war was really like, and what it was all about. One new book offers unexpectedly fresh insight. Joyce Hoffman’s On Their Own: Women Journalists and the American Experience in Vietnam is a detailed look at the lives and work of 15 of the more than 300 women who served as war correspondents in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos between 1956 and 1975.
Hoffman teaches journalism at Old Dominion University and has done a remarkable job of chronicling the lives and legacy of these female reporters. She highlights the professional interplay between the women and their frequently hostile male colleagues, their censorship battles with Military Advisory Command Vietnam and the rapport they had with ordinary GIs. This was the same ability that David Halberstam ascribed to New York Times reporter Gloria Emerson: “She was marvelous about getting men to talk to her…she became a girlfriend, sister, and mother all wrapped up into one….”
As the assistant public information officer for the 25th Infantry Division in 1967 and 1968, I escorted all accredited reporters during their visits to War Zone C. Our area of operation was less than an hour’s drive, or a 20-minute chopper ride, northwest of Saigon, in and around Cu Chi and Tay Ninh, the Michelin Rubber Plantation, Nui Ba Den Mountain and the heavily forested Iron Triangle. Our proximity to Saigon and the high level of enemy activity in our area resulted in frequent press visits.
My job—in addition to taking photographs and writing stories on behalf of the division—was to look after the safety of reporters, photographers and news film crews, and also to try to prevent them from witnessing or reporting anything that departed from the official military version of the war. This required close attention and nearly constant time in the field. It was dangerous work, as evidenced by the fact that I had replaced a public information officer who had just been killed; I was wounded during Tet; my replacement was killed during his first week in-country (with a Japanese TV reporter he was guiding); and his replacement lost both legs in a land mine explosion.
In September 1967, I escorted NBC’s Liz Trotta into a fierce firefight at Trang Bang. One of the few women reporters who thrived on the excitement of combat, Trotta fit into the school of correspondents that NBC bureau chief Ron Steinman described this way: “There were people who actually got high on battle, and that often skewed their views and their reporting….”
Many reporters showed up at Cu Chi while I was there, and many wanted to go where the “bang bang” was. But women journalists were generally more interested in the human side of the war. Emerson insisted that reporting the war could not be entrusted solely to “boys at heart who got dazzled by guns and uniforms.”
ABC News reporter Marlene Sanders said that just “covering combat tells you absolutely nothing.” Instead she concentrated “on stories about Americans working at a Vietnamese orphanage, civilian casualties, the injured, and sick Montagnards.” Martha Gellhorn, writing for the Ladies Home Journal, described some innocent Vietnamese children so badly wounded and traumatized that they’d been rendered mute, “but their eyes talk for them. I take the anguish, grief, bewilderment in their eyes, rightly, as accusation.”
Women reporters were frequently harassed by their male colleagues and even the American military, and were sometimes accused of being silly, inexperienced, unprofessional “bra-burning feminists.” But these women weren’t in Vietnam to prove any points about their gender; they were firstrate journalists covering the news event of their generation. As Trotta insisted, “journalism transcended gender.”
Dickey Chapelle was killed while covering her beloved U.S. Marines; Catherine Leroy and Jurate Kazickas both suffered war wounds. They, along with Kate Webb, Martha Gellhorn, Liz Trotta, Orianna Fallaci, Gloria Emerson and other women reporters, compiled a distinguished record, producing some of the finest and most revealing stories of the entire war.
On Their Own joins the few good books that deal with women journalists during the war. These include Emerson’s Winners & Losers; Women War Correspondents in the Vietnam War, by Virginia Elwood-Akers; Under Fire, by Catherine Leroy; and The Women Who Wrote the War, by Nancy Sorel. Hoffman adds to the literature with her detailed and human look at an important aspect of America’s longest war, and at how the media and the military managed and manipulated the news of that conflict.
The war’s legacy did not cease with the end of the fighting in 1975, and—like the soldiers and civilians they had written so warmly and eloquently about—many of the war’s women reporters remained haunted by that conflict, including Gloria Emerson, who took her own life in 2004. “After Vietnam,” she wrote to long-time friend Denis Cameron, “I was never really alive again.”
Originally published in the February 2009 issue of Vietnam Magazine. To subscribe, click here.
