Kate Webb’s articles from Phnom Penh were essential to understanding why Washington’s strategy wasn’t working. She had deep sources in the foreign diplomatic community, but she excelled with her Cambodian contacts. Cambodian government and military officials, important professionals, politicians, journalists, and the business community trusted her, giving her access and information reflected in her articles.
Senior correspondents around Asia noticed. One of the first stops for visiting journalists was the UPI bureau to sit down with Webb and ask how the war and the politics were shifting. She generously briefed her colleagues, including men who had belittled her work in Vietnam. Her main advice was not to confuse the Cambodia conflict with Vietnam’s war. They both were part of the American war, but the Cambodians were fighting to defend themselves against the Vietnamese.
She also told them that she had little firsthand knowledge of the Khmer Rouge who were fighting behind the North Vietnamese army.
Webb’s reporting paid off when she broke one of the biggest stories of 1971. She discovered that Lon Nol, Cambodia’s prime minister and commander in chief, was partially paralyzed from a stroke he suffered on February 8, 1971, and the government was keeping it secret. The Cambodian government feared for the country’s fortunes if the enemy learned that Lon Nol was incapacitated. Who would take over? What would the Americans do? When Webb filed her story, UPI asked for a comment from Washington. The Nixon administration refused to confirm the story and tried to kill it. Webb argued for forty-eight hours with her bosses, saying the story was true and had to be printed. She won. Once UPI published the news of the partial paralysis of the head of Cambodia, every other news organization followed. For days the New York Times published her accounts of Lon Nol’s recovery and its effect on the war.
The danger in Phnom Penh never let up. One night, North Vietnamese surrounded the Cambodian base where Webb was trapped with the commander of the local unit. The commander called for airstrikes as mortars were landing closer and closer. The American bombers arrived, but the pilots couldn’t communicate with the Cambodian forward air controller. They spoke English; he only spoke French. The Cambodian colonel asked Webb to translate to give the proper coordinates to the pilots. She agreed, but only if the colonel put his pistol to her head and threatened to kill her if she refused. Then she called in the strikes.41
WEBB RARELY TOOK a day off because “Sundays don’t belong in Cambodia or in any war.” She rarely wrote home to her sister and brothers. She showed little interest in having a serious boyfriend—Bob Stockton had done enough damage—until one man managed to slip past her guard, a Cambodian journalist named Ly Eng.
Tall and well educated, Eng drove a battered mini-sports car and took his work seriously. He was a reporter for the Cambodian newspapers Koh Santhapheap (Island of Peace) and Domneung Peel Prik (Morning News). Webb had many friends within the Cambodian press corps and had already admired Eng’s work, especially a political cartoon about American aid feeding corruption in the government.
She asked a Cambodian journalist to point him out at a news conference and was pleasantly surprised to learn that Eng was the urbane Cambodian she had already noticed. She introduced herself, and soon the two were reporting together, cross-checking their stories with each other’s sources.42
In the Phnom Penh press corps, Webb and Eng were breaking several unspoken rules. They treated each other as equals in an environment where Cambodian journalists were habitually considered second class, at best. Those who worked for the foreign press corps as translators, news gatherers, and photographers were well treated but not as equals; foreign journalists were rarely friends with their Cambodian colleagues.43 They were paid $1.50 a day and were never given credit in print for their reporting and rarely for their photographs.
Webb knew that any romantic involvement with Eng, an Asian man, would break a different taboo, one that dated at least as far back as colonial days when the “white man’s burden” included protecting their women from native men. The reverse was not the case. Plenty of Webb’s male colleagues had Vietnamese or Cambodian girlfriends; some became their wives. More than a few men frequented local brothels, bragging about it afterward.
To those who pressed Webb closely about her relationship with Eng, she said they were friends, drinking buddies. But in her private writings, Webb referred to this “tall, skinny man with impatient eyes and a shock of fine hair” as her “midnight lover. A lonely woman with a lonely man.”
When men in the press corps noticed Webb arriving with Eng at the hotel late, long past normal working hours, they started referring to Eng as Webb’s “tame Cambodian.”
When his Cambodian colleagues saw Eng with Webb, they presumed it was romantic and considered Eng a Romeo for dating the Kate Webb. Eng said, yes, they were and then he concocted elaborate fantasies about their amazing sex and then repeated them to Webb. “I told them we are lovers and I tell them what wonderful things we do in so many details.” Their love affair was much more sporadic than Eng’s boasting implied.
The gossip poisoned their friendship. They did not fit in anywhere as a couple. When she brought Eng to the opium den, they were thrown out because Chantal did not allow Cambodians into her private foreigners’ club. Eng’s family home was their one meeting place where Webb was treated like a sister, the beloved Mademoiselle Kate. She and Eng never openly became a couple. In one of her notebooks, Webb later wrote: “Ly Eng, for me, the end I never saw.… The bottom line as a woman—we argued. He said if you love me you will come with me.… I said I’m not into suicide.”44
So Webb reverted to her old ways of avoiding her emotional life: work and more work.
With Webb outperforming many of her competitors, it had become difficult for news organizations to claim women didn’t belong on the battlefield. The New York Times had relented and sent its first and only woman to cover the Vietnam War in 1970. Gloria Emerson, a talented and eccentric fashion reporter based in Paris, “was allowed to go to Vietnam because the war was supposed to be over so it didn’t matter if a female was sent.” She went on to win a George Polk award for her coverage.45
When François Sully, the Newsweek correspondent who reported on Cambodia, was killed in a helicopter crash, Kevin Buckley, the magazine’s bureau chief, sent Sylvana Foa from Saigon to become its resident stringer in Phnom Penh. With her arrival, Webb finally had a female friend in the small permanent press corps.
On the night of April 6, 1971, Webb sat alone again staring at a map of Cambodia, mulling the military maneuvers and drinking warm beer. The next morning Webb went over her schedule: a business dinner at the Hotel Royale, the arrival of the new Burmese ambassador, the morning announcement of a new government offensive. She decided to take a quick look at the offensive and drove down Highway 4 south toward Kompong Speu to see if FANK had a fighting chance. The Japanese photographer Toshiichi Suzuki came with her to take pictures.
The next morning, her Datsun car was found on the highway, abandoned, with no sign of Webb or the five other journalists also covering the front. The search began. No one wanted the saga of Kate Webb to end in a ditch in the desolate Cambodian countryside.46
CHAPTER TEN
Against the Odds
IN A SUDDEN AMBUSH, NORTH VIETNAMESE FIRED STEADY blasts from their AK-47 rifles, killing most of the Cambodian unit Webb and the others were covering. The journalists scrambled across the highway and hid while the North Vietnamese came out and counted their dead. That night Webb and the others cautiously wound their way through trees, as insects bit them and brambles scratched at their skin, searching for a way out. The next morning, their luck ran out.
Just before noon, Webb, Tea Kim Heang, Chhim Sarath, Vorn, Charoon, and Suzuki walked straight into two young North Vietnamese soldiers. Everyone was surprised. All six journalists were wearing civilian clothes and one was a tall foreign woman. The soldiers ordered them to squat and took away their belongings—wallets, Webb’s bag, binoculars, notebooks, ca
mera, and her good luck Chinese charm hanging from a golden chain.
They were given a metal bucket of water to drink. Webb passed it to the others first. It was empty when it was given back to her. “That the others hadn’t left me anything, and what it meant, shocked me… there was a huge loneliness in my head that never left me.”
Their captors tied their wrists behind their backs with baling wire, tape, and vines and marched them single line. Tall tree branches were stuck in their wrists as camouflage. At the first rest stop, their shoes were taken away and thrown into the trees. They were given rubber sandals and ordered to march.
They followed a very slender young North Vietnamese soldier, their feet in pain. At night they slept in bunkers, Webb in her own, the five others together. She realized that explaining they were bao chi—journalists—was of little help. “If a North Vietnamese captured on a battlefield in South Vietnam had said he was a journalist a fat lot of good that would have done him.”
They were told they would be questioned by the North Vietnamese but separately. Webb was last. She had watched as the others were called away, had heard shots fired after each one, and then waited. None had returned. When they came for her, Webb was taken to a table, seated opposite a soldier who was roughly sixty years old. She gave her name, and when asked for her rank, she answered she was a journalist, a civilian without rank. This first long interrogation was a series of questions, often repeated: Who won the battle on Highway 4? Why were you down on Highway 4?
When Webb answered she had been there to find out what was happening, her interrogator asked her, “Why would you risk your life to find out what was happening?”
She began to feel more like a journalist and less like a prisoner. She thought through her chances for release and realized she had to convince the North Vietnamese she was neutral, not an American, and that her identification that plainly stated she was British (based on her passport) was official. It seemed to work, and from then on she was known as co Anh, or “the English girl” in Vietnamese.
When the interrogation was over, Kate was ushered to a clearing where the other journalists were waiting for her. No one had been harmed much less killed.
She tried to stay sane as the North Vietnamese had them march through Vietnamese-controlled Cambodia toward a military camp. One morning she rose at dawn before the other journalists and squatted next to ten NVA soldiers eating their breakfast of rice and tea. She pointed to a bar of soap nearby and then to herself. The soldiers understood and pointed toward the river. For the first time since her capture, she was allowed to bathe and for a few hours felt much better.
They marched by night to avoid detection, through jungles and over mountains, wading through streams and across paddy fields. When they passed through traditional Cambodian villages like silent shadows, Webb held her head high hoping someone might notice a Western woman captive and spread the news. During the day they slept fitfully.
Interrogations followed the marches. One interrogator snapped at her when she seemed to disregard his instructions. Something about his anger seemed familiar. She recognized in him the eyes she had seen “too many times in the faces of American, Vietnamese and Cambodian soldiers. The anguish of having to fight on and reduce oneself to an animal with no time to mourn or save friends; all that ground into a passion to strike back at the cause of it all. And I’d seen that hate worked out on prisoners, even the dead, when the first bullet wasn’t enough and a GI just kept pumping lead into the still body, till a buddy led him away or the clip was empty.”1
Toward the end of one march, Webb was so exhausted her “legs felt like bones with no muscles and the jungle was like a black-and-white movie undulating past.”
She kept placing one foot in front of the other, propelled by the memory of an orange. She focused on it obsessively: “Bite into it, and the sweet juice runs down your throat. Make a little hole in it, and the juice squirts out.”2
During their second week as captives, the reporters were placed in a permanent camp.3 Their socks had worn out, and their feet were badly cut, with open sores. A young North Vietnamese guard sewed up the sores with needle and heavy thread, spacing the punctures to allow the pus to leak out. Next, a field medic soaked wads of cotton with Mercurochrome to sanitize the wounds before wrapping them in thin calico field dressing. Webb’s badly mauled feet were infected so she was given crumbling penicillin pills. Watching the medic minister to her, Webb thought he “seemed so terribly young. It was like being treated by a very serious Boy Scout. I wondered what he’d think of the movie M.A.S.H.”4
They gave him an obvious nickname: Medic. Among the North Vietnamese soldiers was also Cook, Gap Tooth, Dad, Carpenter, and the Twins. Carpenter helped build huts for the two foreigners and another for the four Cambodians. Webb thought they looked like a cattle thief’s hideout, but Suzuki said they were typical of North Vietnamese peasant houses. They spent two weeks there, in a place they baptized as Phum Kasat, or press village.
Suzuki was a lifeline. He had covered the war from Hanoi for Nihon Denpa television and spoke fluent Vietnamese, with the accent and vocabulary of the north. He knew the social order of the North Vietnamese and their unspoken rules. As a result, he was able to behave respectfully, which the soldiers appreciated. One night a guard invited him and Webb for some “special tea.” Suzuki knew exactly what they meant, smiled, and followed them, warning Webb the tea would be country-style rice wine. It was high-octane wine presented in a half coconut shell. They each took a sip until they had drained the fiery liquid. Her throat burned, but afterward Webb had her first good night of sleep since her capture.
On rare nights she heard the melancholy sound of a flute until bombing resumed in the hills and blocked the music. She discovered Carpenter was the mysterious flautist. When their paths next crossed, she found herself wondering, “How come the world is designed that you’re on one side of the fence and I’m on the other?”
Sleep was often interrupted by nearby fighting and bombing. In one of her darker moments, Webb imagined dying from a bomb dropped by an American pilot, maybe even one she knew. Another pitch-black night she thought she was hallucinating when she went outside for air and saw an enormous creature lumbering toward her—an elephant ridden by two NVA soldiers and dragging an artillery piece.
Webb was anxious about her health. She was losing weight, her head throbbed, and blood was in her stools. The one thing she didn’t worry about was mistreatment by the guards. None of them attempted to take advantage of her or the others. They never asked for favors—or worse—in exchange for cigarettes or food. She considered their behavior the result of “incredible discipline.”
The long interrogations exhausted her. They usually involved the same questions asked repeatedly by the same interrogator: What were you doing behind enemy lines? Why were you on Highway 4?
“We find it unbelievable that you would go down the highway, which is very dangerous, alone in your car, just looking for the truth,” he said.
“Sometimes I think my job is crazy myself,” she replied.
He reminded her she was a prisoner of war and could be shot at a moment’s notice. She refused to accept the designation of prisoner of war since she wasn’t a soldier. The interrogator showed a sense of humor. “Then consider yourself an invited guest.”5
The political game got serious when a North Vietnamese political officer was dispatched to record statements written and read by Webb and Suzuki for Radio Hanoi. Webb composed three neutral paragraphs saying she had been treated well and that “the withdrawal of American troops was an important step toward allowing the peoples of Indochina to determine their own future.” The officer was not pleased. She sounded pro-American.
Suzuki and Webb were depressed afterward, fearing their words could be used as propaganda. Suzuki met her outside the hut and handed her sticks and small stones. To lift her spirits and his, he made an unusual proposal: “Let me teach you the tea ceremony that every Japanese girl learns.�
� With delicate precision, they practiced the tea ceremony every day, using the sticks and stones to pretend to pour water, whisk the tea, and serve each other. Webb imagined herself in a kimono. The ritual allowed them to concentrate on art, forget their deprivation, calm their nerves, and keep their sanity.6
To the anguish of their families, Radio Hanoi never played the statements that would have confirmed they were still alive.
KATE’S SISTER, RACHEL Webb Miller, and her husband, Geoff, were back in Canberra where he was posted to the main office of the Australian Foreign Ministry. He was given the news the family had all feared: another journalist was missing in Cambodia and it was Kate. He called Rachel, pregnant with their third child, to tell her Kate was in the most serious danger of her life. Rachel called their brother Jeremy, who was in a Sydney pub, and their other brother Nicholas.7
The media was notified, and Kate Webb’s disappearance became front-page news in Australia.
“OUR GIRL IS MISSING IN ACTION” was the Sunday Mirror headline, taking pride in the fact that Webb had started as a cadet at their paper. Their coverage, though, read like an obituary.
“Kate Webb is missing in action in the Asian War.… She saw more action than most men but although she was offered a big—and safe—job with UPI in Washington, she insisted that she must stay in Asia until the war ended.… Her old colleagues on the Sunday Mirror are hoping against hope that Kate Webb will turn up safely.”8
You Don't Belong Here Page 21