If there will be war, women do belong there

(June 2021) You Don’t Belong Here. How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War, by Elizabeth Becker (Public Affairs, 2021), is an important book, a signpost along the road to gender equality. Becker shows the reader how journalists Frances FitzGerald, Catherine Leroy and Kate Webb experienced the American war in Viet Nam, riding on their own initiative, against mighty pressure, and with amazing courage. Becker’s writing is tight, her descriptions of combat and its emotional fallout are cool and terse. She has been there.

Her riveting take on the three journalists’ time in Viet Nam led me to dig deeper. I watched two videotaped conferences, one at The National Press Club in Washington DC in 2002, with nine women journalists who covered the war. The reporters were promoting their book War Torn. Stories of War from the Women Reporters who Covered Vietnam (Random House, 2002). Kate Webb spoke in her famously husky whisper about her seven years in southeast Asia. An Australian, she said getting credentials as a non-American was almost more of a problem than being female. The second conference was at The American Newseum in 2015 with four women journalists, each of whom had contributed a chapter to War Torn. (Webb died in 2007.)

It is not as though women have never been to war. Women journalists covered the First and Second World Wars and encountered many of the same attitudes as the Viet Nam crew. We don’t want women here, women will cause trouble, we can’t take care of you, and on and on, from the male perspective. Yet even Anne Harriman Vanderbilt reported on the Great War in August 1916 for Harper’s Magazine (My Trip to the Front, by Mrs. W. K. Vanderbilt) and Martha Gellhorn covered the Spanish Civil War and WWII, coming ashore on D-Day with the nurse corps in order to get around an interdiction on women reporters. By the time Viet Nam was the ground of conflict, you might think the U.S. Army would be used to it.

The traditional interchange of women and war, with its ostensibly polar binaries of femininity and masculinity, is no longer valid. The spectrums of both masculinity and femininity have widened to encompass experiences previously walled off by gender expectations, and women correspondents reporting a war was part of bringing down those walls. At the same time, reporting is observing, not participating. A stronger element of change was integrating women into military units, rather than keeping them apart as auxiliairies.

There, the Rochambeau Group of women ambulance drivers played a pioneering role. Integrated into the Free French Second Armored Division in 1943, they served from Normandy to Berchtesgaden in the same rough and dangerous conditions as the soldiers. Nicknamed the Rochambelles, the women ambulance drivers picked up wounded soldiers in the midst of combat, drove on mined roads, dove into cellars to avoid shelling. They were noncombatants, but they suffered the same grief of loss, and rose to the same joy in liberating France, as their male comrades.

I first met three Rochambelles at a talk in Paris in the late 1990s. Soviets aside, I had never heard of women in a WWII armored division and was astounded by their stories. I was even more surprised that no one had written a book on them; there was only a memoir published by their lieutenant, Suzanne Torrès Massu, entitled Quand j’étais Rochambelle (When I was a Rochambelle). I paused work on a PhD in colonial history to interview the dozen or so Rochambelles who were then available, and finally published Women of Valor: the Rochambelles on the WWII Front in 2006 (Palgrave Macmillan). A new edition has just been published this year by McFarland & Company, with a fine foreword by Lt. Gen. Kathleen Gainey (US Army, ret.) recounting some of her own experiences.

When I read Becker’s book about the women journalists, it closed a circle for me, on a personal level, in considering how stories come to be told. I was a child during the Viet Nam war, but my father, a career Air Force officer, served there until his plane was shot down at Khe Sanh in 1968. What had been a remote struggle was suddenly intensely personal. Years later, I became a journalist, and after local news and police beats in Miami, went looking into war. Central America had a few going in the mid-1980s, though nothing on the scale of WWII or Viet Nam. As correspondent for Cox Newspapers, I mostly reported on guerrilla wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador and turmoil in Panama and Haiti. By the 1980s, women journalists were not unusual. Some of the best and most intrepid photographers and reporters were women.

But life in a war zone has some commonalities, and my meager experience helped guide my questions and understand their answers in interviewing the Rochambelles. Fear and courage, friendship and love, dirt and hunger are eternal themes of conflict. Individually, the Rochambelles talked about finding their own character in the intensity of the experience, that having survived the worst of war gave them the confidence to face challenges in the future. Listening to the correspondents of Viet Nam, you hear the same quiet assurance.

The women reporters in Viet Nam were breaking out of the professional “4F” corral of food, fashion, furniture and family, Elizabeth Becker noted in a recent Press the Button podcast. The women journalists also viewed the war differently than the men, writing about its effect on both soldiers and civilians, and countering official assertions of success. Frances FitzGerald’s Fire in the Lake, published in 1972, won the Pulitzer and Bancroft prizes and drove a major stake in the heart of U.S. policy on Viet Nam.

Journalists in that war had unique access to the field of action. Despite notable opposition to the women’s presence, they were able to report on combat and military operations by persuading unit commanders to let them do so. They hitched rides on helicopters to bear witness to the war, a lapse of army control of the media that has not happened since. Post-Viet Nam, conflict reporters have been “embedded” with troops, so that the story they see is tightly focused on the army’s point of view.

In Nicaragua, journalists walked into the jungle with the Sandinista infantry and walked back out, no helicopter rides available. I once joined two photographer friends on reconnaissance with a BLI (Batallon de Lucha Irregular) in the heart of Matagalpa province, hiking in a hilly stretch of jungle. I was vaguely insulted when the soldiers shook their heads at my oh-so-chic Banana Republic pull-on boots. After wading across the Tuma River, we walked for three hours in wet socks and boots, and then, ordered to return immediately to base, hiked for another four hours, with me now limping along on badly blistered feet. It was a deep lesson in the importance of footwear. So when the Rochambelles mentioned the poor quality of GI-issued boots in the winter snow, I listened hard. Never mind Napoleon, an army marches on its feet.

Becker’s book stirred up memories of those days. Women served in the Sandinista Army, women fought with the contras, gender was no longer remarkable. But as in Viet Nam, there was freedom, adventure, discovery of new worlds both external and internal – as both the Rochambelles and the Viet Nam journalists attested. Looking back now, I can see the path. Because of Viet Nam, I was interested in war and went to Nicaragua. There, I found my husband and moved with him to France. When I met the Rochambelles in France, I understood how significant their experience was, because of Nicaragua and Viet Nam. It is decidedly circular, but I hear that’s how life works.

Becker has brought together the stories of three remarkable women – one American, one French, one Australian – and has not shied away from recounting their personal struggles in dealing with their war experiences. It was the men who didn’t understand that they didn’t belong there, any of them. The women were there to tell them why.