Even though he was partially blind, Mus kept up with news and was impressed by FitzGerald’s work, a compliment that pleased her beyond words. She told him how his book, Sociologie d’une Guerre, had become essential for her understanding of Vietnam and the war. Afterward, she wrote Mus a long note. He responded in his rococo English to her “kind letter.”
“I am not shy to say that its direct personal tones meant much to me. I have much appreciated that kind of harmony, which so naturally establishes itself between… us.”
Then he urged her to get on with her work: “Look at yourself and at what you have written with unprejudiced eyes, and you will understand our prejudice in your favor. Life is too short, especially at my present time of day to allow for excessive circumspection. Even at the risk of appearing too bold, if we are to be friends as I believe we can become—no delay then!”39
From then on, FitzGerald and Mus kept up a correspondence, and she traveled from her apartment in New York to visit him in New Haven when she could.
The Atlantic article also elevated FitzGerald to the status of an expert on Vietnam among opinion makers who were growing more and more concerned about the escalating sacrifices and costs of the war. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace invited her to attend a conference on the war in Bermuda in December 1967. With the Johnson administration openly claiming that victory was at hand, the conference’s intention was to discuss and reassess US policy and make recommendations. She flew down and was happy to see Daniel Ellsberg. Other notables included Gen. Matthew Ridgeway, Hedley Donovan, editor of Time magazine, and a swirl of former senior officials from the Defense and State Departments.40 She and Ellsberg sat next to each other, catching up and discovering they were the rare naysayers. “Frankie and I were the only ones who thought we should be getting out, not just cooling down.”41
They were also the least senior people at the conference and the only two who had lived in the war zone recently. As the conference debated its report, the two argued explicitly for the US to get out of Vietnam. When they read over the final document’s modest goals, which included the “aim of moderating the level of hostilities…[putting] the emphasis not on the military destruction of communist forces in the South but on the protection of the people of South Vietnam,” FitzGerald leaned over to Ellsberg and whispered: “The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace should be renamed the Carnegie Endowment for Limited War.”42
The Johnson administration rejected the tepid Carnegie recommendations as unnecessary.
FitzGerald signed a contract for her book with the Atlantic Monthly Press and sent in her first chapter. Peter Davison, the director of the publishing house, hated it and said he wanted to cancel her contract. “He said it was terrible. It didn’t make any sense.”43
Appalled and shaken, FitzGerald refused to give up.
After she submitted a few more chapters, Davison toned downed his withering critiques in favor of more constructive comments. He wrote her in November 1968: “We do admire many, many things about these drafts: their psychological subtlety, their discrimination among institutions and political forces, their originality. And we are not seriously discouraged about the contents of the book. It is simply that you have jammed too much too closely together. Give us air.”44
Mus was her north star. With his help, FitzGerald felt she was working toward an understanding of what her book might become. “After my father’s death I started looking for a substitute father and I found one in Paul Mus.”
Somehow, through all their intense conversations, FitzGerald did not learn that Mus was in poor health. He had had multiple heart attacks and was following doctor’s orders restricting his diet and controlling his exercise. He left New Haven at the end of the spring 1968 academic year to spend the summer at his home in Southern France. He lectured the next year in Paris, and while visiting his daughter in New York in 1969, Mus suffered a stroke.45 He died a few months later at his home in Murs, France, leaving Frankie bereft of another father figure.
CHAPTER SIX
How She Came Out of That Alive Is a Miracle
CATHY LEROY RETURNED TO SAIGON AT THE END OF JUNE 1967 renewed. “My stay in the hospital was almost just as much a cure for my morale and my nerves,” she wrote her mother. “I can still wear my dresses—you’d think I was twelve. I look youthful which should please you a lot… and I’m going to have a sensational dress made. I’ll send you a photo when it’s finished.”1
The one-time waif was becoming one of the more fashionable women in Saigon, cutting out pictures of new styles from Parisian magazines for her tailor to copy at bargain prices.
In the flush of her happiness, she made an impossible pledge to her mother. “I entirely agree with you. I will go back to work on less dangerous subjects. Believe me, I’ve thought about the problem.”
For a few weeks in August, Leroy was true to her word. It was the “cold and sad” rainy season. She burrowed into her studio apartment one block from the AP and began what became a lifelong attempt to make up for misspent years in school. She read stacks of books, whatever she could find in French shops. She was inured to jibes about her foul language, but she detested any hint that she was ignorant of basic history or literature. She perfected her written and spoken French and went to American movies in Saigon to improve her English.
During this interlude, she initially accepted only soft assignments, safe features: photographing US Special Forces riding elephants on a mission in central Vietnam’s high plateaus and illustrating a story about the French community in Vietnam for Paris Match.
But the unprecedented battle around the DMZ pulled her back in. The artillery and mortar fire were so intense and the muddy hills and bunkers so foul that comparisons were being made with the Battle of Verdun in World War I. Four months after she was wounded there, Leroy was back at Con Thien to photograph Americans fighting the North Vietnamese. This time, though, she was with trusted colleagues: John Laurence and Keith Kay, the CBS reporter and cameraman.2
The McNamara Line, the barrier across the DMZ ordered by McNamara, was supposed to hinder the North Vietnamese and protect the Marines defending Con Thien. But the North Vietnamese were not deterred by the 2,000-foot-wide line with its minefields and sensors. Instead, they pounded the Marines with artillery. For their part, the Marines answered back in kind and called in B-52 airstrikes. The North Vietnamese were relentless, and the Marines were ordered to hold the line against an NVA breakthrough. That battle, under various names, lasted from 1967 through 1968, leaving 1,419 Marines dead and 9,265 wounded.3
Leroy arrived in the last days of September 1967 during a short lull. Waiting in the bunkers with Laurence and Kay, she discovered they were under assault by a different enemy—rats. Lots of rats, rats “as big as hideous cats, with red eyes and snot dripping from their noses.” She saw them squeeze through mosquito nets to bite Marines.
Inevitably, the shelling soon resumed, and Leroy photographed the Marines who were targeted at times like sitting ducks. “Bodies and wounded men pile up night and day in the [medics’] bunker,” Leroy wrote, noting how difficult it was to evacuate the wounded by helicopter without drawing enemy fire.
And then there are the dead. They are the last to be evacuated in special green plastic body bags with handles. When there is a shortage of body bags, the bodies are simply put into [mail] bags.”4
Stuck in the bunkers with her, Laurence was struck by Leroy’s maturity. Even as she shook involuntarily during the shelling, as she always did, Leroy “was poised, alert and professional.” Strikingly, she also trusted Laurence to make the call about when to leave and go back to the base. Leroy was a better colleague after her injury. Their bond would tighten early in the next year.
After fending off her parents’ repeated requests to visit them and convince them she had recovered from her injuries, Leroy gave in. She dug into her savings and in October 1967 boarded a plane for Paris, stopping for a few days in Bangkok to decompress. She spent
much of the month at home with Jean and Denise Leroy in the still boring Parisian suburb of Enghien-les-Bains. Her return trip took her around the world, stopping in New York and Washington where newspapers were filled with stories about an enormous antiwar demonstration in Washington that month, including two days when protestors had surrounded the Pentagon. Those demonstrations raised questions Leroy hadn’t heard before; for instance, was the war racist, as Martin Luther King Jr. insisted and as President Johnson implied when calling Vietnam a “raggedy-assed little fourth-rate country.”
Leroy knew she was not pro-war but didn’t consider herself antiwar. That would be unfair to the soldiers she covered. She loved them. Yet in her first trip to the United States, she couldn’t avoid the intensity of the American division over Vietnam.
In New York she was all business, groomed and dressed as a proper Parisian. She signed a contract with the Black Star photo agency, a major step in a freelancer’s life. There was a gaping disequilibrium between the power of the corporate media and the support given to freelancers. Leroy was part of the first generation of photographers who had a chance of earning a decent living, as the agencies were designed to secure assignments for them and ensure they were well paid for their work. Leroy was relieved to be asked to join Black Star.
She also met with Wes Gallagher of the Associated Press. She asked him if he would give back her negatives for an upcoming book. He also lent her money for her airplane ticket. She returned to Saigon from San Francisco—the only American city that reminded her of Europe.
The warm glow from her break in that affluent world disappeared within days of her return to Vietnam.
As soon as she arrived in Saigon, Leroy was admitted to Grail Hospital with a nagging pain in her foot. A surgeon operated on her and removed a large ball of pus and cleaned a serious infection.5 Worse, while recovering in the hospital, Leroy learned that Horst Faas had been badly injured by a rocket-propelled grenade while he was covering a battle at Bu Dop in South Vietnam’s Central Highlands.
A fragment from the rocket tore through Faas’s legs so badly he couldn’t move. An American medic pulled him away from the fighting, and an armored vehicle driver took him to a clearing where a helicopter flew him away to safety. Surgeons initially feared they would have to amputate one or both legs but patched him up instead. Faas refused AP’s offer to fly him to Honolulu or New York for further care, saying he “had total trust in the military surgeons who were dealing with these problems day in and day out.”6
Faas’s serious injury saddened Leroy and gave her pause. Her mentor and patron, the great Horst Faas, was vulnerable. Leroy appreciated her inclusion in his “army” of photographers and had memorized his instructions to get close but not behave stupidly, to be honest and show the innocent victims as well as the dirty war, and to always bring back good photographs. Implicit in those instructions was the belief that a photographer could be smart enough to avoid injury. Lying in the hospital and thinking of Faas, Leroy knew in her bones that was not true.
Leroy celebrated New Year, January 1, 1968, in Da Nang on assignment, at a moment when the official rhetoric about the war was especially disconnected to the reality on the ground.
Publicly, the Johnson administration was optimistic. In late November 1967, General Westmoreland announced the war was entering its final phase “when the end begins to come into view… and success lies within our grasp.”7 In December, the US military handed over the defense of Saigon to the South Vietnamese, redeploying American troops away from the city. And in January 1968, Brig. Gen. William R. Desobry said the South Vietnamese military now “has the upper hand completely in the Mekong Delta.” Yet at the same time, some of the most influential senators from Johnson’s own party disagreed and said the military strategy wasn’t working.
On the battlefield, the NVA made a new push toward Khe Sanh and Hill 881. Westmoreland suggested the North Vietnamese were attempting to turn Khe Sanh into a second Dien Bien Phu. Leroy and many other journalists were persuaded by Westmoreland’s theory. She told her colleagues about her father’s tears when he listened to the radio report of the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu. Inevitably, she felt she had to return to Khe Sanh, where the fighting had turned into a fierce stalemate. The Americans held the high ground and used their formidable air power to prevent a North Vietnamese breakthrough. Leroy stayed there until the traditional cease-fire was declared for Tet, the Lunar New Year, when she returned to Saigon, happy to mix with friends at a party on Tu Do Street.
Sam Bingham, an American freelancer in Vietnam who occasionally worked for Newsweek, met Leroy there.8 He brought his bagpipes to the festivities and an American friend visiting from Hong Kong. With fireworks exploding in the night, the group moved outside to dance, snaking up and down the street to the squawk of Bingham’s bagpipes. Everyone was drinking, flirting, and laughing. Romance sparked between Leroy and Bingham’s friend. It was that kind of evening. Fireworks continued throughout the night, drowning out sounds of distant explosions that the journalists otherwise would have heard. Because the war had come to find them.
FIGHTING HAD BROKEN out all across South Vietnam. The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong had launched a massive Tet Offensive on a scale never before attempted. Some seventy thousand troops were attacking posts from the ravaged DMZ in the north to the rice fields of the Mekong Delta.
In the middle of this audacious offensive, one minor skirmish of little military significance caught the world’s attention. A dozen Viet Cong soldiers fought their way into the United States embassy compound in Saigon and held it for six hours. It was a brilliant piece of political theater: it had no military value, but at a stroke it changed the perception of the war because something had happened that should have been impossible, completely impossible.9
The American public had been told the end of the war was in sight, that the US had the upper hand. Yet Nguyen Van Sau, an illiterate leader from the Viet Cong C-10 Battalion, was able to organize the assault from an automobile garage near the embassy. In the dark hours before dawn on January 31, Nguyen Van Sau and his men drove a taxi and a battered Peugeot truck to the newly built embassy compound. At 3:00 a.m., the men blasted a hole through the wall, killed the two US military police guarding the entrance, and then held the garden and first floor of the main chancery. When the Americans telephoned South Vietnamese police at a nearby post, they refused to help. The communists managed to fend off the Americans for six hours until the American 716th Military Police Battalion cleared the compound.
General Westmoreland inspected the embassy as soon as it was secured, telling reporters: “The enemy’s well-laid plans went afoul. Some superficial damage was done to the building. All of the enemy that entered the compound so far as I can determine were killed.” But that was not the point.
The rest of the world saw that the US embassy, the physical representation of the American government in Vietnam and considered American territory, had been attacked and held for hours. And all Westmoreland had to say was the North Vietnamese “plans went afoul.”
The American public and officials in Washington were stunned by the news alerts of the offensive. Tet showed that South Vietnam was marbled with Viet Cong and their sympathizers and that the American and ARVN military had failed to pick up advance intelligence on the plans much less stop it. The three American television networks broadcast special reports on the Tet Offensive, and newspapers published long, detailed articles with banner headlines reporting the attack on the embassy.
For the normally risk-averse North Vietnamese, Tet represented a huge gamble: a bold and foolhardy campaign with the nearly impossible goal of sparking a national uprising throughout the South with attacks on five cities and multiple US military bases and villages.10
It was the brainchild of Le Duan, the severe, pro-Soviet, hard-line general secretary of the Vietnamese Communist Party, who had argued it was time to go all out for a clear victory against the southern forces no matter how many Vietnamese wer
e killed.
His strategy was to pin down US troops around their bases while the communists made a full attack to “decimate” ARVN troops, all to be accomplished by some 85,000 soldiers from the NVA and Viet Cong (VC). Pamphlets were printed calling for an insurrection against the South Vietnamese “puppet” government.
General Vo Nguyen Giap, the leader of the 1954 victory at Dien Bien Phu, opposed the offensive in the belief shared with Ho Chi Minh that the best approach was to wait until the Americans inevitably gave up and left. But Ho was sidelined with illness, and younger leaders considered Giap too timid—Le Duan essentially outflanked them.
Within the first week it was clear that the offensive would neither spark an insurrection nor decimate ARVN. But it was making a mockery of American claims of victory in the coming year. In the United States, the revelations that Vietnamese communists were able to invade cities and military outposts was challenging official American optimism.11
The longest and most costly fight of the offensive was in Hue. Over ten thousand communist soldiers, including two battalions of the NVA, had captured the imperial city on the first day of Tet. They encountered little resistence.
Leroy felt she had to cover Hue. She headed to Da Nang where she found a seat on a military flight to Phu Bai and discovered she was sitting near Bingham, the journalist she’d met a few days earlier playing bagpipes as the Tet Offensive began. They chatted in French. He was struck by what he considered her “macho” personality, as she explained how she would break away from the journalist pack to explore how to best cover the story.12
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