You Don't Belong Here

by Elizabeth Becker

  Back in the office, Webb read the wire service stories from Vietnam and asked a foreign editor why the newspaper hadn’t sent its own reporter to Saigon since Australia was at war. No need was the answer. The paper could use the wires. So she offered to go herself, to general laughter. In one of her next visits to Sydney, Rachel was surprised when Kate told her she was scheming to go to Vietnam. “Kate felt she needed to see what the fuss was about.”

  Rachel didn’t take her sister seriously, but the next word from Kate was in the form of a letter postmarked from Saigon. She had bought a one-way ticket to Vietnam without telling her family and arrived with her Remington typewriter and no source of income.

  Rachel wondered how an increasingly bloody war would affect her sister who was already so damaged by three sudden deaths.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  We Were Laughing

  KATE WEBB ARRIVED IN SAIGON WITH COTTON SUNDRESSES that she ironed obsessively and sturdy sandals.

  Within a year, she had swapped the dresses for tight white jeans and loose cotton shirts. She cut her dark shoulder-length hair into a full pixie style. She paid for her own combat gear to wear in the field and from a distance looked like a young man. This was no accident. Webb was determined to fit into the male press corps and the soldiers they covered. She had no idea that the transformation had the opposite effect on men: they found her mesmerizing. She was unmistakably voluptuous. The army shirts couldn’t camouflage her breasts, leading the GIs to give her the nickname Highpockets.

  Her primary ambition to cover the Australian deployment was a nonstarter. The Australian military refused to allow her or any other woman anywhere near their forces on the battlefield. No exceptions. The prohibition lasted throughout the entire war.

  Instead, Webb had to compete against the hundreds of reporters to cover the American and South Vietnamese troops.

  When UPI finally hired her in 1968, Webb was allocated the bureau’s junior position—as a gofer for Dan Southerland, a reporter who would eventually become the head of Radio Free Asia. Webb covered beats the American reporters considered second tier, like the baffling political machinations of South Vietnamese leaders and the ARVN, the South Vietnamese military.

  This suited Webb. She yearned to uncover the context for the war. Reporting daily stories on the military situation or about American aid wasn’t enough. Instead, she sought out the historical and political movements that drove the people and armies. She tried to fit what she learned into the worldview she had developed over the years listening to her parents discuss modern Southeast Asia and her own philosophy studies.

  Two things seemed evident to her: the war in Vietnam was an extension of the independence movement to overthrow French colonial rule and the Vietnamese would decide the outcome, not a foreign power.

  Otherwise, she wasn’t sure what to make of it. She tried to fit Vietnam into the mold of the Malayan Emergency of the 1950s and often wondered out loud why the Americans weren’t as successful as the British had been in stamping out a communist insurgency.

  The question driving Webb’s reporting was: Is South Vietnam capable of defending itself and establishing an independent and somewhat democratic government? If the answer was no, then the corollary question was: Why hadn’t the United States used its money and might to build up a competent Saigon government—or was that an oxymoron?

  On the battlefield, she routinely gauged the effectiveness of the South Vietnamese military. ARVN soldiers, she wrote, “are tough. Some of them were taken out of jail with the choice of execution or join the army, and some of those men made extremely good officers.” Since ARVN soldiers were fighting for their country and even had relatives on the other side, she believed they were more committed than American soldiers who were rotated out after one year.

  Covering ARVN required a high tolerance for danger. Southerland sent Webb on night patrols with small units of the ARVN, something he rarely did. Webb knew there was “no back up if you were wounded, no Medevac helicopters, and little chance of a story that would interest American newspapers.”1

  Once she used her ten-day vacation to live with the First Infantry Division of ARVN. Spending all that time with the Vietnamese, she noticed signs other reporters missed, like the significance of garlic. If garlic was suddenly in short supply in a market, Webb wrote, it was likely that a Viet Cong element was nearby. Why? Garlic was the cheapest and most transportable form of vitamin C and essential to Vietnamese cooking. Chinese merchants were happy to sell garlic to the Viet Cong on the black market at a tidy profit.

  In May 1968, another offensive known as a second Tet broke out, and Webb was assigned to cover street fighting, again, one of the most dangerous assignments. She reported: “It is pretty terrifying.… It’s the confusion that is tricky. You haven’t got your normal guerilla pattern or fixed piece battle pattern outside… where you’re looking for ambush sites and mines, the absence of kids or cows, the usual quiet. In street warfare it’s a Chinese kitchen, all confusion. Noise is magnified. You can’t see around a corner. You don’t know who is in a house, whether there is someone above you dropping a grenade. And you can’t react because you don’t know if you’ll be jumping into someone else’s line of fire, the angles are so crazy.”2

  Webb developed a loner’s mystique within the press corps. She got along with everyone but remained aloof. She was friendly with other women—she saw Leroy in the field occasionally—but she had no close female friends other than her Vietnamese landlady.

  She liked drinking after hours with colleagues—all men—but then would disappear. In an unpublished novelistic memoir, she wrote about avoiding unwanted sexual advances from the men. One character warns her: “Beware, kid, he letches after you like the rest of us.”3

  By keeping a distance, Webb made no enemies. Even though she was a fiercely competitive reporter, her colleagues looked forward to working on stories with her. She was welcome just about everywhere. Gene Roberts and other reporters at the New York Times enjoyed seeing her appear at the door of the Times office.4 While her exterior affability was genuine, it was also a shield. Underneath, Webb questioned her work and struggled to manage the pain and despair that often consumed her. She tried putting it in verse, in a poem she titled “War Groupie”:

  Beware—it’s not done to care

  Unless, of course, it’s your own child

  War Groupie, adrenaline freak!

  Swallow despair, mask horror,

  Post-operative nausea, lest the metal

  Hooks smash your heart.

  Beware. It’s not done to care.5

  It’s quite possible Webb wrote this while drinking her nightly quota of beer or Scotch. She became a heavy drinker, which made her morose.

  Her news stories from the field were notable for the dimensions she added that were missing from standard-issue wire service reports, often because she was the only person there. She was not afraid to use strong personal narratives.

  In the battle for Saigon in June 1968, Webb assigned herself to the South Vietnamese military command post. She was nearly killed when a US helicopter accidently fired on the post, killing the Saigon police chief and five other high-ranking South Vietnamese Army officers, as well as injuring the mayor. Her account of the day continued in what was becoming Webb’s signature style:

  “I had been sitting on the steps of the command post with Col Phouc and Col Tru and we were laughing about always meeting on the street. We had been there about fifteen minutes and Col. Luan joined us, wearing a new pair of boots.”

  Webb left to check on nearby fighting, when two minutes later the rocket hit. “There was an explosion. Smoke was billowing from the building. I saw the bodies but could not tell the difference between the dead and wounded because they were caked with white plaster dust and blood. Rangers and police loaded them onto Jeeps, shielding them with their own bodies.”6

  She omitted to say she rushed back and aided the wounded before writing her account.7

&nb
sp; In “Life and Death of a Helicopter Crew,” she used the personal backstories of the crew to allow her readers to appreciate the poignancy and significance of their deaths:

  “Tay Ninh, Vietnam—There are times when the Vietnam War makes a reporter’s fingers shake while holding a pencil. My pencil wobbles as I write the story of two young helicopter gunners I knew briefly as Smitty and Mac. I saw them go to war many times. Now I have seen their bodies come back and that is why this is a hard story for me.”

  Webb’s goal, she wrote, was to go beyond “that impersonal language of an Army war report, words saying a chopper crashed and burned, all four crew members killed in action.”8

  She had spent days with the two men, traveling with them into action on their assault helicopter, riding high above the jungle where “wind tears at your clothes and flattens your face.”

  As the sole woman covering the military story full-time, Webb stood out. She was profiled with Catherine Leroy and four other women in a 1968 Women’s Wear Daily article called “Women Cover the News, Too.”

  “There is a new breed of newspaper woman covering this war,” wrote J. W. Cohn. “These girls in Vietnam ask no favors and want none. They cover the same assignments as the men reporters. They face the same dangers.… They write and they think like men. In the field they even dress like men. The last thing they want to do is write the ‘woman’s angle.’… Yet back in Saigon over a martini at the Caravelle Hotel bar, dressed in a simple cotton dress, these girls are just as feminine as any girl ‘back home.’”

  Cohn called these six women the “news hens” who had joined the “news hawks” in the Saigon press corps. His piece demonstrated the wide chasm in 1968 between traditional expectations of women and the new expectations women had for themselves.9

  They all put on their game face for the world: they had all found their way to Vietnam, showed they were as good as the men and still found time to remain attractive.

  One woman said she retained her femininity by only wearing blouses—not military gear—in the field. Another said it was a very good ego boost to be one of a few women among hundreds of men, and one said she was leaving Vietnam to get married because “you can’t be a wife and a journalist and do both well.”

  Leroy and Webb, however, didn’t play along with this scenario. Leroy used her voice to denounce the effect of the war. “This is a great calamity for everyone and especially the Vietnamese. The whites, including the French, have a great responsibility for this war.… As far as politics are concerned, men are mad and I am living in a man’s world.”

  She conceded she loved fashion—she was French—and said that with her miniskirts and tight trousers, she had become Saigon’s Twiggy, the posh British model of the go-go era.

  Webb refused to answer any question whatsoever about being a woman. Instead, she warned about the underlying problems of the South Vietnamese. She complained about how loose regulation of US aid and supplies had encouraged corruption. “Everyone is taking part in it—Americans, Filipinos, not just the Vietnamese.” She lamented that the United States was so late “to give M-16 rifles to Vietnamese troops. How long could you expect them to stand up to the Communists’ AK 47s with the M-1 popgun.”

  The readers of Women’s Wear Daily probably didn’t know what to make of Webb’s analysis of military hardware.

  Webb hated being called a girl reporter; she felt it was a way to dismiss her accomplishments. Men were never described as boy correspondents, she would say; they were simply correspondents. She deflected attempts to draw distinctions between men and women. Whatever hardships and barriers she had faced and continued to face as a woman, she never referred to them.

  She knew that if she alluded to any such issues, she would be greeted with taunts that women needed special favors to make it in a man’s world. She did not want to be accused of using women’s liberation as a crutch, which was how her male colleagues viewed feminism. To be called a women’s libber was an insult: women’s liberation was for those who couldn’t make it unassisted. David Halberstam said admiringly of a woman reporter in Vietnam that she made it on her own, that she “didn’t get her job through Gloria Steinem.”10 Webb pushed back against any suggestion that she relied on anything other than her own talent and work. She wrote she did not want to be known as “a six-foot, fat, pistol-whipping women’s libber.” Whenever she was asked, Webb replied: “I don’t believe in women’s liberation.”11

  She suffered the humiliations and biases of women of her era privately, until she finally had enough in 1976, one year after the war ended, when a new boss at UPI demanded repeatedly that she have an affair with him. When she refused, he made her life difficult. She complained to bosses in New York, but she only said she couldn’t get along with him, reluctant to explain why.12

  ON MAY 13, 1968, at the start of the American summer from hell, President Johnson ordered the beginning of tentative Vietnam peace talks as he had promised when he refused to run for reelection. Diplomats met at the imposing conference center on Avenue Kleber in Paris. Slowly, a deal took shape. By the middle of October, Johnson had agreed to halt all bombing of North Vietnam in exchange for Hanoi’s pledge to engage in true peace talks with the South.

  The press corps in Saigon knew that a breakthrough in peace talks could put Humphrey, the Democrat candidate, in the lead in the US presidential election scheduled for November and possibly end the war.

  On October 30, 1968, six days before the election, the talks mysteriously halted. The South Vietnamese diplomats abruptly walked out. Secret files revealed many years later that Richard Nixon, the Republican presidential candidate, had convinced South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu to hold off on peace and wait for his election. In return, Nixon promised Thieu a better deal than the one offered by Johnson.13 Nixon won the election.

  It would take another seven years and more than twenty thousand additional American deaths before the war ended—with a victory for Hanoi. By then, the Vietnam War had divided the United States as no conflict had since the Civil War. Nixon’s eventual peace agreement in 1975 was nearly identical to the one proposed by Johnson.

  SOON AFTER NIXON’S election, when the war was at a stalemate, Jeremy Webb arrived in Saigon for an extended stay with his sister. Kate’s younger brother had flown from India after following the hippie trail from London to New Delhi. He wanted to test his skills as a novice reporter. Kate was happy to help him, essentially giving him the run of her apartment while she spent much of her time with Bob Stockton (not his real name), a handsome American soldier and Green Beret.

  Jeremy could not believe his sister was in love, swooning along the boulevards of Saigon with Stockton, who seemed equally in love with her. They made a striking couple huddled in cafés, she with her deep brown eyes laughing at his tales of war.

  Jeremy followed Kate on her journalist rounds, and soon UPI issued him press credentials. For all of Kate’s talk about fitting in, it was clear to her brother that she still wasn’t part of the pack. “She’d have a beer with them, she always likes a beer, but she wasn’t socializing with them. She had intense conversations with her colleagues, but she had closer friendships with Vietnamese.”

  In her mind, Kate told Jeremy, she was covering the underreported story of the South Vietnamese. She went to the hospitals regularly to measure the ramifications of battle in Vietnamese life. She kept pushing UPI to cover the ARVN. She wrote about American soldiers losing their moral reference points, pointing to the practice of fragging, or attacks on a commanding officer. Jeremy was impressed that questionable characters showed up at her apartment and admitted to corruption. “Kate thought people wanted to talk to her partly because she was a woman.”14

  She was uncovering corruption at ever higher levels of the Vietnamese government when she was shot at near her home in Saigon in late 1968. The clumsy would-be assassin missed. “I got a couple of pot shots fired at me a couple of times and at one stage UPI took me out [of Saigon] temporarily because
there was word of a contract man coming to get me.”

  She felt more at ease in the field, even when she was interviewing and reporting under dangerous situations. When it was time to file, she was adept at using the clunky field phone to call in the story to Saigon. Her calls zipped through the military relays in part because the soldiers were surprised to hear her extremely soft female voice. Once her call reached the bureau, though, her signature whisper was a problem. The UPI subeditors would routinely shout: “Kate, speak up, I can’t hear you.”15

  During the summer of 1969, officials in Washington privately conceded that the war was lost or at the least that Americans could not win. Nixon began planning a phased withdrawal of American forces, a process he called Vietnamization. The war would gradually be handed over to the South Vietnamese. His first withdrawal was 150,000 troops.

  Webb was excited about covering the story of the South Vietnamese taking control of their war. It dovetailed with her understanding of how this war would be won or lost. She shared all of this with Bob Stockton.

  Jeremy saw Kate relax with Stockton and enjoy the sophisticated side of Saigon. The couple strolled down the tree-lined avenues hand in hand. They dined at fine French restaurants—the Champs-Élysées on the rooftop of the Caravelle Hotel and the Aterbea. They crossed into Cholon to eat at Eskimo, for the best Chinese food in the city. The Chinese quarter had calmed down since the Buddhist uprisings, when FitzGerald and Daniel Ellsberg had been surrounded by a mob. Webb even went to movies, pleasures she had previously denied herself in favor of obsessive working habits. Jeremy noticed the effect Stockton had produced on Kate: “She spent so much time with him. He was so impressive.”