She left Bingham behind and teamed up with François Mazure, a reporter for Agence France-Presse whom she trusted. They grabbed seats on a military truck convoy into Hue, and when they were dropped off, they disappeared, failing to show up to be paired with American military escorts as required for journalists during the siege. Instead, they changed out of their press battle gear into civilian clothes and crossed over a wobbly front line to walk into a no-man’s land. It was reckless. The battle of Hue was becoming the bloodiest of the entire war.
Leroy and Mazure rented a bicycle from a French-speaking Vietnamese man on the road and reached Hue riding tandem. At a market on the city’s edge, they were caught in a volley of shooting and realized they had stumbled into communist territory.13
A Vietnamese stranger understood their plight and guided them to a Catholic cathedral that had become a refuge during the fighting. The sanctuary was crowded with hundreds of frightened, hungry Vietnamese. Yet the priest, speaking an elegant old French, welcomed them. The people, though, were wary. Leroy’s photographs show them crowding around the two Europeans, their eyes filled with worry. Another photograph shows a woman off in a corner lying on a single sheet comforting her baby who had been born in the church that day.
The next morning the priest told them they had to go, that their presence was adding to the danger facing the refugees. Leroy and Mazure understood and left immediately. They made a white flag from a priest’s robe and wrote on a large sign: phap bao chi bale (we are French journalists). The priest wrote a letter in Vietnamese verifying they were journalists and asking they be respected as neutrals.
As they stepped outside the door, they were walking into the unknown. No foreign journalist had been captured by the NVA in the war, as far as they knew. They had no idea what would happen to them if they were taken.
Just minutes later they had their answer. They wandered past a graceful villa guarded by three North Vietnamese soldiers carrying AK-47s who stared at them.
In seconds Leroy and Mazure were under arrest. The NVA soldiers confiscated their cameras and tied their wrists behind their backs with parachute cord. “More efficient than brutal,” Leroy thought. To her surprise she was less afraid now that she had met actual communist soldiers. They were no longer monstrous abstractions.
The priest’s letter did no good. The soldiers looked at the paper but did not read it. It was not clear if they were literate. Leroy and Mazure were led inside the compound to the servants’ quarters where a Frenchman and his Vietnamese wife were being held as prisoners in what was once their home. The Frenchman was head of the community’s electric plant and had been treated well by the NVA. A young North Vietnamese officer came to question the foreign intruders, and the Vietnamese wife explained that these were French, not American, journalists. The mood changed immediately.
The officer ordered the cords removed and then returned the cameras. Feeling safe for the first time, Leroy asked to photograph the soldiers in their bunkers around the garden. The officer agreed. “All of the men were well armed and had a great deal of ammunition,” Leroy wrote. “I photographed some of them swarming over a captured American tank. I doubt that they knew how to drive it, but they all grinned at us like soldiers of a victorious army.”
That is what the young NVA officer wanted to convey. They were winning. They were liberating Vietnam.
While that scene unfolded, Horst Faas was in the AP bureau, still hobbling on crutches and worried.
“The day the Tet Offensive was at its height there was a story about a woman photographer being captured by the North Vietnamese. I thought—poor, poor little Cathy. This is her end.”14
In fact, Leroy and Mazure were negotiating their release in a most French fashion. They thanked the officer as if theirs had been a routine interview in a normal day of reporting. Mazure said something to the effect that they had to get back to Paris with their story, so it was time to run along. And then they made their farewells.
Freed, Leroy and Mazure walked into the street and heard constant firefights nearby. They feared they would be encircled and ran back to the cathedral. This time the priest and his refugee flock burst into applause, welcoming them as fellow survivors. They fed them fruits and cake and soup, exclaiming “number one!” in English. Mazure and Leroy were giddy at having survived.
They still had to flee the communist zone, however. Along the way, Leroy photographed a Vietnamese father holding an infant, his wife shepherding their older children: stunned civilians caught in the crossfire with no place to hide. This time they crossed the urban front line successfully, holing up in a South Vietnamese army unit where they helped two wounded American soldiers.
Eventually, they worked their way back to the Marines. Leroy saw her friends John Laurence and Keith Kay of CBS, as well as the photographer Dana Stone, who were covering the unit. She ran up to them, kissing them and shouting: “I am so happy to be alive.”
Laurence never forgot Leroy’s extraordinary feat. “Cathy’s daring bicycle ride into occupied Hue at the start of the Tet Offensive in 1968 and the still pictures she took while there was one of the most courageous acts of any journalist at any time in the war.”15
The next morning the Marines took up position and began firing at the cathedral in which Leroy and Mazure had taken refuge. Leroy was alarmed. “I ran up to the platoon leader shouting: ‘there are 4,000 refugees in there. They aren’t VC. They’re just people.’ And those huge warriors in their flak jackets grinned at me and stopped shooting.”16
Finally, Leroy and Mazure got back to Saigon and sent their story and photographs to Paris and New York.
Her photographs of the North Vietnamese—the first ever taken of the NVA in South Vietnam—made her famous. They were the cover story of Life magazine and featured in Paris Match. Her name became known worldwide.
Faas wasn’t easily impressed with stories of courage in war, but Leroy’s was different: “How she came out of that alive is a miracle. She must have run into the one North Vietnamese who ran a humane and considerate outfit. I myself later saw they really did slaughter thousands [in Hue]—executing teachers, shopkeepers and anybody who had any connection to the South Vietnamese war effort.”17
Twelve days after her release from Hue, Leroy went back to the now-ruined city to photograph the rest of the siege and its atrocities. The city stank of putrid flesh.
The Marines approved her return even though “she had been hanging out with the enemy so to speak,” said Don McCullin, whose own photographs of the battle of Hue were among the best. “The mere fact that she was allowed to stay after being captured was a huge coup in itself.”18
In war, journalists crossing enemy lines are routinely considered spies.
Leroy was unaware that she was breaking new ground in Hue by photographing soldiers on both sides of a battle. In fact, it was a first in Vietnam and rare in any war. Among the most famous and still unmatched example was Matthew Brady’s extensive photography of both sides of the American Civil War. For Leroy, what mattered was capturing as full a view of the war as she could.
Her photographs showed bodies strewn on streets; refugees fleeing to the American side across the Perfume River, impassively filing past cadavers; and newly homeless families carrying what she called the “incredible bric-a-brac of poverty.” And they showed a still divided city. The Viet Cong flag flew over the citadel. One kilometer from the Marine base, she met Vietnamese civilians whose faces seemed full of hate, mumbling “American go home—kill me, kill me.”19
The press contingent in Hue included Brigitte Friang, a veteran French television correspondent who impressed Leroy with her composure and professionalism, “making quite a change from the highly-strung excitement of the other journalists.”
The two women arrived together at the command post of the First Battalion of the Fifth Marine Regiment. Leroy photographed the Marines attempting the final assault on the citadel as the sticky rain of the monsoon fell relentlessly on their ponchos.
At one point the Marines asked Leroy to translate for them. A family that spoke only French wanted to tell them something. An older woman picked up an English dictionary and said: “They killed my son-in-law because of this dictionary.… He was learning English… they killed him in front of us at close range.… Then they dug a tomb in the garden and buried him.… He wasn’t dead yet.”20
Her son was one of some two thousand civilians executed by the NVA and VC.
One month later, in March 1968, American troops would massacre more than five hundred Vietnamese civilians in the hamlet of My Lai, an atrocity discovered by reporter Seymour Hersh one year later.
Throughout the siege, journalists were injured. Bingham, the young freelancer, lost his right eye. Nearly two weeks later, H. D. S. Greenway, then of Time magazine, Charles Mohr of the New York Times, and Al Webb of UPI were wounded trying to rescue a wounded Marine. Years later they each received a bronze star with a V for valor.
The elegant city of Hue and its Purple Forbbiden City, which had inspired Frankie FitzGerald during her first weeks in Vietnam, were in ruins; 80 percent of Hue had been destroyed. The tower of the citadel had been bombed by the United States in the grinding battle to capture it from the North Vietnamese. The Marines and ARVN eventually pushed through the citadel’s gates and found priceless blue and white porcelains crushed on the floor. The citadel’s dismembered galleries resembled scenes from Berlin at the end of World War II. The promenades and villas along the Perfume River had been shooting galleries, their gardens dug up for bunkers.
The Tet Offensive changed the war. The US casualties during Tet set a Vietnam wartime record. In one week, ending on February 17, there were 543 Americans killed and 2,547 wounded in action. By the end of Tet in September 1968, the total US combat deaths in the Vietnam War had reached 20,096.
The North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong casualties were vastly greater. At least 35,000 were killed in Tet and up to 60,000 wounded. It was their worst military defeat of the war.21
Caught in the middle were Vietnamese civilians: nearly 165,000 died in the fighting and another million were left homeless.
In a moment of wishful thinking, General Westmoreland compared Tet to the Battle of the Bulge, the last battle before the Nazi defeat in World War II. He genuinely believed that North Vietnam was near its end and about to surrender.
Westmoreland could not have been more off the mark, and influential Americans were worried.
THE WAR WAS at a stalemate.
For some of the smartest minds in the Pentagon, this was proof that American leaders, beginning with those in the administration of President Harry S. Truman, had misjudged Vietnam entirely.
“They were ignorant,” said Leslie H. Gelb, Pentagon’s director of policy planning who shepherded the secret Pentagon report on the war that became known as the Pentagon Papers. The United States had gotten into Vietnam without knowing “a damn thing about the country, culture, history, the politics… a war that depended on knowledge of who the people are, what the culture is like.”22
The Tet Offensive intensified the divide in the Pentagon between military and civilian leaders. The military had claimed to have killed so many Vietnamese that there shouldn’t have been enough Southern communists left to fight. After Tet, the US government realized North Vietnam was going to fight to the finish, and that it would exhaust the United States. The Americans began to seriously consider turning the war over to the Vietnamese.
At the start of the Tet Offensive, the American public was behind President Johnson, but as the full dimensions of the communist incursions sank in, the support slipped. A Gallup poll reported “a new wave of pessimism” about the war, with at least half of Americans disapproving of the administration’s handling of it. More and more, the public was asking: What is the United States doing in Vietnam?
BY THE END of the siege of Hue, Leroy was tired and sad. Bravo Company, with whom she had spent so much time, had been reduced from 197 to 85 Marines. Leroy wrote her mother: “Within one week 400 Marines were injured or killed. Poor guys.”
Life magazine’s cover of February 16, 1968, featured one of Leroy’s photographs of NVA soldiers in their heavily guarded post in Hue. Inside, she wrote a three-page article to accompany her remarkable coverage of the NVA. The Life editor’s note was a profile of Leroy, describing her extraordinary success covering the war. Its headline “A Tiny Girl with Paratrooper’s Wings” would have made her wince—she insisted on being referred to as a photographer, not a girl photographer. But the exposure was priceless.
Marcel Gugliaris, a French writer and Asia specialist, interviewed Leroy in Saigon a few weeks later, asking how she felt during her capture. “Very calm during it but afterwards I was afraid. I panicked. Sometimes it’s the next day or one week later—generally it’s the next day when I am safe and have nothing to worry about that I panic.”
After discussing the risks she took as a photographer and her injuries, Gugliaris asked her why she had chosen this career. “I follow this profession out of love,” Leroy replied. “My life in Vietnam is so fantastic. In war I have found something I never had anywhere else—a kind of fraternity, camaraderie, pure friendship of soldiers. The soldiers are my friends.… I love them because I march with them, because we have memories in common, because when we meet again three months later we remember the operations—1004, 852 or 881—where so much went on, the most incredible, the saddest, but memories that have become wondrous. We remember the good side, the heroics.”23
CATHERINE LEROY’S WORK in 1967 brought her multiple awards, lifting her to the ranks of the well-regarded professionals. Among her prizes were the National Press Photographer Association’s top award for news photographs; the Sigma Delta Chi Award for photography; an honorable mention for an Overseas Press Club Award in news photography; and, most importantly, the 1967 George Polk Award for Outstanding News Photography.
Not only is the Polk among the most coveted prizes, Leroy was the first woman to ever win it for photography. She was also the first freelance photographer to win. It would be twenty-one years before another woman won the Polk, when it was awarded to Mary Ellen Marks.
A few years later Leroy would become the first woman to win the Robert Capa Gold Medal Award for exceptional courage and enterprise—the highest prize for any photographer of conflict.
During the war in Vietnam, as many as six hundred photographers trekked to Southeast Asia to make their mark. None of them accomplished what Leroy achieved as a freelancer. For a woman—the sole woman combat photographer in Vietnam—to do so was unprecedented, historic.
Leroy went to New York to accept the awards.
She arrived in the city on April 2, 1968, two days after President Johnson shocked the nation and announced he would not run for reelection. The Vietnam War had worn him down. When she visited the city’s news bureau, they were talking of little else and what it meant for the United States and for the Vietnam War. The antiwar movement had never been stronger.
Two days later, while she was meeting with editors at Look magazine, news came over the wire that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated in Memphis. Immediately, anger and sorrow ripped through the country. Riots broke out in some cities. Curfews were imposed. Look asked Leroy to go to Harlem to photograph the crowds of African Americans grieving over the loss of their extraordinary leader, the thirty-nine-year-old winner of the Nobel Peace Prize who had just been savagely murdered by a white racist.
She agreed, of course, and found her way to Harlem. And the people of Harlem soon found her—a stranger taking their photographs, possibly even a foreigner. She was surrounded. Someone asked for her cameras. She felt the hostility. Somewhere in that crowd, a deep voice yelled: “Cathy, what are you doing here?”
An African American soldier who had jumped with Leroy in Operation Junction City recognized her and made his way through the people. Smiling, he invited her to dinner at his mother’s home. She had no trouble after that.
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p; Succinctly, Leroy wrote to her mother: “Two days in Harlem. It’s war there, too. No need to go to Vietnam.”24
The day of the awards ceremony, Leroy went to the AP office to retrieve her Vietnam photographs. Hal Buell, the new head of photography, met her and told her he would do what he could to find the negatives. Impatient, Leroy went up to the seventh floor looking for the head of AP. Buell was called and asked to escort Leroy out of the building.
Buell said he was polite at the beginning of their conversation. “This film she was talking about—I said I would do what I could to find it. I remember the set of pictures were very good: the assault on a hill. But she got nastier and nastier, and there’s no sense in dealing with someone like that.”25
By the time of the award dinner that evening, Leroy was in a foul mood. She had packed two evening dresses: a white silk gown studded with pearls and a softer, green silk one, both tailored for her in Hong Kong. She wore the green dress for the dinner.
Early in the evening, Leroy was called to accept her George Polk Award for her AP photographs of Hill 881. One of the few women celebrated that night, her blond hair gleaming, Leroy walked to the stage, her diminutive figure in the fitted dress contrasted with the men who had picked up the other awards. There was applause until she opened her mouth.
Instead of expressing gratitude to the Associated Press, the company that had nurtured her career when others would not, the company that had seen her through battlefield injuries and nominated her for multiple awards, she went on a small rant. The crowd cringed.
In front of the leaders of American news companies, she complained that AP had a lackadaisical attitude toward freelancers and had lost some of her photographs. At her moment of triumph, Leroy managed to insult her best patron and ally.
That charming French accent sounded sour and petty.
She walked back to her seat, oblivious to the icy reception her remarks received. When the ceremony ended, she sauntered over to the post award dinner hosted by AP only to find herself barred from the table, a petty reaction to match her petty speech. She was told that the head of AP did not want to see her. Her relationship with Horst Faas never fully recovered.
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