You Don't Belong Here

by Elizabeth Becker

  Writing to her mother, Leroy said she was worried about “getting a big head” someday but put all the blame for her blunder on AP. “Everything would have been better if I hadn’t had some unpleasant surprises with AP. They lost a good many of the negatives of one year of my work. And after a speech I gave at the Overseas Press Club where I described their lackadaisical attitude towards photographers like me (they were there, so was all the New York business community) now they don’t want to give me back the others.… This episode completely drained my morale. I am feeling really depressed.”26

  Leroy knew how to be gracious, so what was she thinking? Seemingly, after her encounter at the AP offices, she convinced herself that AP was cheating her out of her own photographs. (AP eventually gave her the negatives, as Buell had said it would.) So she had allowed herself to give in to her stubborn, sullen side—the implacable teenager who bridled at authority and had dropped out of school and then for the rest of her life was embarrassed at her poor education; the young woman who became a chain smoker even though she had suffered debilitating asthma as a child; the young photographer with a granite-hard chip on her shoulder.

  Although she was loath to admit it, Leroy was punch-drunk from recurring nightmares and depressions. She was eating poorly and smoking too much. In another era, she would have been diagnosed with acute post-traumatic stress.

  LEROY HAD ONE more major magazine spread on Vietnam, one where she pushed her distinctive style to the limit and anticipated the future of war photography.

  This Is That War” was published in Look magazine on May 14, 1968. It was a dramatic ten-page spread that used five of Leroy’s color photographs. Each image either filled an entire single page or was spread across double pages. The photographs commanded attention. The magazine was trying to make a statement and chose Leroy’s photographs to underscore the message.

  When sending her proofs of the initial layout of her “excellent” photographs, Look went further. The editor asked her to write 140 to 200 words about the Vietnam War in general, captions that told a story.

  The text Leroy wrote to accompany those pictures was as unusual as the pictures. “We all belong to the same war. We all have the same God. We’re all in the same adventure. This is that war.”

  For the image of a distraught mother holding her toddler son whose head is half-covered in bandages, she wrote: “The town was destroyed. I saw thousands of new refugees with no food, no home, hate in their hearts.”

  It was titled “The Ravaged.”

  Under a photograph of an injured American soldier dripping blood, his face drawn in agony, she wrote: “‘I lose men,’ the commander said. ‘I lose so many men.’”

  Her commentary had the undertone of a farewell: “The Americans here are boys of 20, with the idealism of their age, but they are fighting a war without glory. They all look the same from the 1st Cav to the Marines, and they are united without discrimination by life and death. The Vietnamese are not united. I believe about 20 percent are Viet Cong—20 percent are strongly anti-Communists—the rest are being crucified in a land of steel and fire, with their only political feeling a hope to survive. Who can blame them? The wounded and dead in dirt and debris—the villages and towns ravaged, destroyed. Thousands of refugees with no food, no home and hate in their hearts. This is that war.”

  The Look editors followed Leroy’s spread with an unexpected announcement. The essentially right-of-center editorial board had decided it was time for the United States to leave Vietnam “quickly and honorably.”27

  “The Vietnam War has been a mistake, destroying something precious in the word ‘America.’”

  Coming from a magazine that printed Norman Rockwell illustrations, the antiwar editorial complementing the photo-essay was revelatory.

  Susan D. Moeller, the author of a classic history of war photography, put it this way: “Leroy grabbed the images in a way that not only brought the viewers up close and personal but she is interacting with what she is seeing rather than standing outside as a dispassionate observer. She is engaged.

  “It was arguably the most impressive photo-essay to date in the war because of the angle of Leroy’s vision and the range of what she included in it.”28

  Moeller said Leroy had the advantage of a small woman able to take photos without getting in the way. “She interacted and engaged with her subjects,” said Moeller. “She was doing things you weren’t taught to do and others weren’t doing.”29

  Future photographers followed Leroy’s distinctive style—intimate and seemingly spontaneous, catching a moment in a war that eschewed classic heroics. Her portraits were of soldiers in all moods, of a pilot giving orders one minute and crying the next, of the stoic faces of Viet Cong prisoners beaten in front of her, and of a dog on the front line, his paws over his ears: “She saw everything. She went everywhere. She had the eye.”

  RETURNING TO VIETNAM in May after New York, Leroy failed to recapture the momentum she had built. Look gave her several big commissions, including a feature on ARVN paratrooper operations. She slowed down enough to begin dating an American military adviser to the paratroopers.

  Yesterday I was with the principal commissioner of Saigon, the general chief of staff of the paras, my boyfriend the American para advisor… and we drank like only the Vietnamese can do. I hit the bottle of Cognac with disconcerting speed (I who couldn’t drink before),” she told her mother.30

  That affair did not last. Leroy stuck to her decision to relax, renting an expensive apartment on Tu Do Street between the river and the Continental Hotel. She bought lamps, rattan bookcases, and potted plants. She added to her wardrobe and swam in pools. But she wasn’t meant for an easy life in the middle of a war zone.

  After her trip to the United States, she had come to the conclusion that the war would continue indefinitely. She had no confidence in either Richard Nixon, the Republican candidate for president, or Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic candidate. “I’m really afraid the war won’t draw to a close for a long time yet,” she wrote. “Whether it’s Nixon or Humphrey doesn’t make any difference, in my opinion.”

  Leroy continued to make business decisions that undercut her independence. Without understanding her contractual obligations to Black Star, she signed on with another agent who promised to help her make a film about Vietnam.

  Her contract with Black Star was up in December 1968 with no sign that the agency wanted to renew her unless she clarified her commitments to the two separate agents.

  “It led to a big confusion,” said Dominique Deschavanne of Contact Press Images who later curated her work. “She didn’t listen to advice.”31

  She jumped from project to project in Saigon. She earned $900 photographing a Vietnamese priest but felt “embarrassed to make so much money taking so little risk.”

  She spent one week in October on an aircraft carrier. She negotiated with a French television news program to make a Vietnam documentary. It was scattershot and not especially rewarding artistically or financially.

  “I am very tired and I still haven’t taken a vacation,” she wrote her mother in one of her last letters from Saigon. She was losing her appetite for going out in the field. “In Vietnam, most of the time it was extremely boring: exhausting and boring. You walked for miles through rice paddies or jungles, walking, crawling in the most unbearable circumstances and nothing happening. And then suddenly all hell would break loose.”32

  In Saigon she was again surrounded by gossip about her love life, which seemed to fascinate and intimidate her male colleagues and competitors. Dirck Halstead, another photographer, typified the male view of Leroy at the time: “She had a formidable libido. To Catherine, a rifle platoon translated into a smorgasbord.”33

  Men were dashing war correspondents; women were whores.

  By December 1968, after nearly three years in Vietnam, Leroy was worn out. In the final months, she worked until late at night and woke up exhausted. She came to the conclusion that “after all life i
n Saigon is not much fun.”

  Leroy moved back to France, telling herself it was time to be close to the decision makers in Paris and New York who could listen to her pitches and give her assignments.

  Her parents paid for part of her airplane ticket. She arrived in time to celebrate Christmas 1968 with them.

  IN PARIS, SHE was restless. She had trouble focusing. She had trouble crossing the city’s boulevards without risking being run over. She had trouble sleeping. “In fact I couldn’t sleep for many months when I came back to Europe. I had nightmares of impending assaults by North Vietnamese soldiers.”

  She made new friends, but her mind was elsewhere. The war back in Vietnam was escalating, but Cathy couldn’t bear to look at her war photographs, and she hated discussions about the war with Parisians no matter what their opinions. Her left-bank liberal friends sounded self-righteous and parochial. “There was a lunch that was given in my honor upon my return, and they all started to have this big political discourse [on Vietnam] and I felt that I was being attacked. I was in such a fragile mental state that I started to cry, stood up, and left. I took it very personally.”34

  Marijuana became her best friend.

  It wasn’t until the summer of 1969 that Leroy felt able to move forward, to get on with her life. She allowed herself to remember some of the better parts of Vietnam as well as the nightmares. “I was so frightened sometimes, so frightened. I really never thought I was going to get out of this alive. But when it was all over, and when I was alive… the release of fear gives you a rush, high of just being alive. You’re alive like you’ve never been alive before.”

  IN AUGUST SHE accepted an assignment and flew from Paris to New York to photograph a music festival in Bethel Woods, New York.

  Leroy put aside her camera the first day of the Woodstock Festival. She looked out at the thousands of her peers in the open fields of a New York dairy farm and decided this was for her. “I dropped it,” she said. “I blew off the [Look magazine] assignment.”

  She was not going to be a voyeur at the 1969 festival of “peace and love.” She danced and laughed in the mud and the mayhem, feeling unfettered for the first time since leaving Vietnam. Onstage was Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Sly and the Family Stone, Jefferson Airplane. Grace Slick singing, “Don’t you want somebody to love? Don’t you need somebody to love? Wouldn’t you love somebody to love? You better find somebody to love.”

  In the masses, Leroy found dozens of Vietnam veterans, her people. They looked nothing like the fresh-faced young men she had photographed just a few months earlier. Former Marines wore their hair down to their shoulders. They smoked pot in the open and seemed adrift, happily adrift and lost. Leroy shared war stories with them. They said they felt cornered, uneasy. There had been no parades to welcome them home. Old-style veteran groups denounced them as hippies and losers and had little to do with them. The antiwar crowd was usually welcoming. But at a few peace rallies, the veterans were called killers. And the military—the military was maybe the worst at not understanding what the Vietnam veterans needed, why they felt so “fucked up.”35

  Leroy dropped out and traveled with the veterans for several months after the festival, “substituting the lack of adrenaline from war by taking drugs and drifting.” By year’s end, she had bounced back and returned to Paris and photography. She directed a film about the destruction of the city’s beloved Les Halles fresh food market. After the 1970 Black September attack, she flew to Jordan and photographed fighting between Palestinians and Jordanians. She was trapped after one battle and walked thirty miles in the desert with Palestinian fighters, searching for safety.

  But she did not forget the veterans from Woodstock.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Three Deaths

  KATE WEBB AVOIDED THE 1968 TET PARTIES IN SAIGON. A young Australian freelance reporter, Webb was something of a loner. She was frugal, living in a single room, lodging above a Vietnamese shoe shop in the central working-class district of Saigon. Dining with well-known newspaper reporters who were friends of Frances FitzGerald was not her style or in her budget. She similarly shied away from the outrageous parties of photographers like Tim Page or Catherine Leroy. She did like to drink beer, though, especially with wire service reporters while listening to their war stories. She read books by Bertrand Russell to relax.

  On the morning after the Tet parties, she woke long before dawn and dressed in her reporter’s uniform and boots to catch a 4:00 a.m. flight to Pleiku in the Central Highlands on temporary assignment for United Press International. She went outside to hail a taxi and was unhappy to find the streets empty. She did not own a radio or a telephone and had no idea that the Tet Offensive was underway.

  To her surprise, an American military jeep sped by. Instinctively, she yelled out to the driver, asking where he was headed. Urgently, he yelled: “the American embassy.”

  Realizing that something was happening, Webb threw her pack over her shoulder, forgetting her helmet, and ran along the uneven paving, past the wooden houses and homely storefronts toward the usually serene enclave of the US embassy. She ran toward a noise that was now unmistakably gunfire and not New Year’s fireworks as she had first thought. By the time the embassy was in sight, Webb was crawling on her knees to stay under the tracer bullets that were crisscrossing the sky over the nearby Presidential Palace. An antitank rocket had torn open the front door of the chancery. The Tet Offensive of 1968—the year of the Monkey—was at its height.1

  Webb was the first wire service reporter on the scene, but she had no way to send a story to the UPI office, far away on Ngo Duc Ke Street near Saigon Port. The AP had beat her by an hour. Its first report was on the wire at 3:15 a.m., based on telephone interviews from the bureau chief, who never left his home six blocks away.

  Webb, just one block from the embassy, watched as a small arms battle played out inside the compound. Journalists joined her, some lying in the gutter, all stunned that the communists could be attacking the US embassy. Webb took notes, careful and thoughtful notes. She was a twenty-four-year-old New Zealand–born Australian who carried a British passport and had never been to North America. She had traveled through Europe and Southeast Asia with her family, but the United States was foreign to her. In the six months she had been in Vietnam, she had studied the Americans and the American way of war and politics with the same curious intensity she applied to the Vietnamese and their country.

  A military policeman gestured to her to move back against a wall; she had gotten too close. He pointed to the military snipers firing M16 rifles from behind the trees and neighboring buildings.2

  “Their rifles were pointing in all directions,” she noted.

  Then she watched as another US military policeman ran back after throwing a grenade at the compound.

  “He went behind a jeep—not to dodge—but to cry,” she wrote. His commanding officer told Webb that the policeman had already lost three men from his platoon in the fighting and was limping because of a grenade fragment that had torn into his leg.

  Webb spotted Marine guards attached to the embassy. “I moved behind a Marine closer to the embassy gates. I wanted to get the Marine’s name, and hometown. It seemed ridiculous to ask for it at this time.”

  She monitored their movements, listening to their walkie-talkies.

  “They called out, ‘there’s a Marine dead on the roof up there.’

  “Another voice said: ‘get help over to that jeep.’

  “Another replied: ‘it’s no good I tell you, they’re dead… there’s one guy sitting there, he’s alive.’”

  When the attack was over and the communists killed, she and the other reporters were allowed to enter the embassy compound: “It was like a butcher shop in Eden, beautiful but ghastly… the green lawns and white ornamental fountains were strewn with bodies. The teak door was blasted.”3

  Just as Catherine Leroy’s photographs of Khe Sanh became the defining image of that battle, Webb found
the words that would be the durable epitaph for the Tet Offensive. The phrase a butcher’s shop in Eden captured the shock.4 The meticulously landscaped new embassy of the greatest power on earth had been invaded, however briefly, by communist soldiers of a preindustrial nation and defiled at the moment that the United States was declaring victory.

  Webb’s article was printed in newspapers around the world and the phrase repeated and reprinted countless times in articles and books.5

  For Webb, her scoop was a godsend. UPI finally agreed to hire her as a member of the local staff. When she had applied months earlier, Bryce Miller, the Saigon bureau chief, had rejected her summarily, saying, “What the hell would I want a girl for?”—loudly, in the middle of the office.6

  Hearing Miller’s curt dismissal, Paul Vogel, a Vietnamese-speaking reporter in the bureau, decided to help Webb find work. He introduced her to Vietnamese newspaper editors who happily accepted her articles, paying her no more than they paid Vietnamese in the local currency. Webb dove into her assignments, covering Vietnamese politics and maneuvers, assembling a web of Vietnamese sources who trusted her. All the while, she begged foreign editors for better paying assignments.

  But Webb discovered she was ineligible for those freelance gigs because she lacked official accreditation to cover US soldiers on the battlefield. At MACV, she was told she couldn’t apply for accreditation without certification from a foreign media outlet that she was either an employee or was on assignment. It was a perfect catch-22. Webb was literally hungry for work. She was eating mystery rice dishes and soup from sketchy street stalls.