Elizabeth Becker - You Dont Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War

Will the Vietnam conflict be the first war recorded better by women than men? The story of war is not the same as the story of men at war.

R ICHARD E DER, Los Angeles Times, 1986

The Vietnam press corps was a male bastion that women entered only at the risk of being humiliated and patronized; the prevailing view was that the war was being fought by men against men and women had no place there.

P ETER A RNETT, Pulitzer Prizewinning war correspondent

W HEN I ENCOUNTERED HER AT THE H ONG K ONG AIRPORT, A cigarette dangling from her free hand, I had never met anyone like Kate Webb. It was January 1973, and I was on the penultimate leg of my flight from Seattle to Cambodia to become a war correspondent.

She was immediately recognizable from the news photographs: the thick-cropped brown hair, shy smile, and intense brown eyes. After I waved to her, she steered me through arrival formalities and into a dim sum restaurant with a view of the harbor. Our mutual friend, Sylvana Foa, had arranged for Webb to host me overnight and make sure I caught the morning flight to Phnom Penh.

Webb had been in the news for surviving capture by the North Vietnamese and then writing a book about the experience. Soft spoken and to the point, she asked, Why had I crossed the ocean to cover a war?

The short answer was a nightmare I was all too keen to leave behind. My masters adviser had rejected my thesis on the Bangladesh War of Independence after I refused to sleep with him. He said the one was not related to the other.

I had worked my way through college, petitioned to create a degree program in South Asian studies, and won a fellowship to graduate school. The professor essentially kneecapped my academic future. So, determined that he would not control the rest of my life, I found another dream: I would use my education to become a journalist. I filed a complaint against him with the campus Womens Commission, a meaningless but important act for me, cashed my fellowship check, and bought a one-way ticket to Cambodia.

Thats where Foa came in. For a year she had been urging me to join her in Phnom Penh and become a reporter, as she had done. Wed met by chance in India when we were both traveling students in 1970. She left graduate school and went on to Vietnam and Cambodia. She sent me heart-stopping letters that were anything but tempting:

War has broken out in the southeast with a ferocity I have never seen in Cambodiatanks, B-52s, everything and despite the fact that the major battleground is 40 miles from here, the smell reaches Phnom Penh, she wrote in 1972. Take care of yourself and think again about coming to live here. Its more important than graduate school.

As a member of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars that used historical and political research to oppose the war, I had never wanted to go within a hundred miles of a B-52 raid. But once I was pushed out of graduate school, Foas invitation suddenly looked like a lifeline.

I justified the decision to Webb by pointing out that Cambodia was integral to my studies of India and the countries influenced by India.

Webb looked at me, a flicker of a smile in her eyes. She had been through so much more than my sad tale. Then she laughed out loud. She had done the self-same thingbought a one-way ticket from Sydney to Saigon with no idea whether she would find a job in the war zone. Youll do fine, she said. And that was that: I left the next day.

Foa was waiting for me at Phnom Penhs Pochentong Airport, from where she drove me into the city. I was dazzled by the citys beautythe golden spire of the Buddhist temples and the shaded sidewalk cafsbut mostly by Foas self-confidence. The friend who had shared dosa and thick chai with me in Delhi was now a war correspondent with an office, interpreters, a managerand a desk for me.

That day I was under the wildly mistaken impression that it was normal for young women to show up in Indochina and become battlefield reporters. In my backpack I carried a careful selection of paperback books on the war and one hardcover: Fire in the Lake by Frances FitzGerald, the American woman who had made her name as a reporter in Vietnam. I thought I was ready. I was twenty-five years old and had no idea what I had gotten myself into.

F OA WAS EXPELLED from Cambodia three months later at the beginning of April. In the middle of a massive American bombing campaign, she published her investigation revealing that the United States embassy was illegally directing the pilots. Washington was furious. The US ambassador Emory Swank told her boss that Miss Foa distorted the US role and activities in Cambodia and it would be best if she stays out of Cambodia.