War Torn Women


September 20, 2002


BROOKE GLADSTONE: Women are such a presence in war reporting now it's hard to remember a time when they weren't. Of course there were a few exceptional women -- even in the earliest days. Take Martha Gellhorn who began her reporting career in the 1930s during the Spanish Civil War and soldiered on through the U.S. Invasion of Panama in 1989. When the Bosnian War broke out she finally conceded she was too old to go. You have to be nimble, she said. During the Vietnam War, reporters had unprecedented access to the battlefield --even women reporters -- but they were rare, especially at the beginning. Recently nine of that select group published a book called War Born: Stories of War from the Women Reporters Who Covered Vietnam. I spoke to three of them. Tell me how game shows fit into your arrival in Vietnam. [LAUGHTER]

MARTHA GELLHORN: Well I went on a quiz show called Password to win 500 dollars. And I bought a one-way ticket at that time.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Jurate Kazickas was born in Vilnius during World War II; her family fled the war to a refugee camp and then finally to America. Her parents could not understand their daughter's obsession with Vietnam. She quit her nice job as a library researcher for Look Magazine!

JURATE KAZICKAS: My mother said to me, she said "My whole life, our whole life has been to keep you from never having to experience a war." But it really was our war. Like any journalist who went over there, I wanted to see for myself.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:She was 24; she thought she was immortal. She stood up in the midst of battle to take pictures. And she went to Khe Sanh, the jungle to the north near the de-militarized zone -- a place of many battles but few reporters.

JURATE KAZICKAS: I was only there 24 hours before I was wounded; mercifully not seriously. It was a little humiliating to have shrapnel in my rear end.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And shrapnel in your face.

JURATE KAZICKAS:Yes. But fortunately the only plastic surgeon in all of the northern part of Vietnam was on duty that day, and-- he said if you were a Marine, I would just take a Brillo pad and just scrub all that stuff out of your face, but he worked on me for about an hour, taking out every little piece of shrapnel.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:In the book, Kazickas asked herself why she went out on so many patrols with the infantry. "Did I really want to be a soldier? Maybe what I really wanted was to experience what another writer called 'the terrible ecstasy of war' and its horrific seduction." She recalls that one colonel commented, after hearing she was hit -- "Well, she got what she was looking for." Kate Webb was just starting out as a journalist in Australia when she felt the pull of the war.

KATE WEBB: I couldn't understand the war. And there were arguments in pubs. I was in Sydney then, and the, the boys who were marching out were getting paint thrown at them--

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Like Kazickas, Webb bought a one-way ticket. When she got off the plane in Saigon in March of 1967 and set off to find a job, she was 23. Eventually she found her way to UPI and became the Cambodian Bureau Chief when her predecessor was killed. She covered the Tet Offensive, broke the story over strong objections in Washington of Cambodian leader Lon Nol's disabling stroke. She saw many friends die. She was tough on reporters who took needless risks. Then she was taken captive by North Vietnamese troops on the south coast of Cambodia.

KATE WEBB: It's one of those things that's fascinating if you live to tell it. I was able to see-- how the other side operated -- in a limited way of course. When you're-- tied up and marching all night, you, you don't see much.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: How about the experience itself; what it was like simply to live as a prisoner of war?

KATE WEBB:Physically it was-- very tough. I lost 10 kilos in 3 weeks. Walking all night; on bare feet. You know, that's 12 hours a night. Next to no food. You have to keep sort of urging yourself on as if you're a small child. You talk to yourself [LAUGHS] and say keep going.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Journalists like Kate Webb and Jurate Kazickas paved the way for people like Laura Palmer who came to the war just as it was ending. She wasn't driven by a passion for journalism.

LAURA PALMER: I literally hitch-hiked to Vietnam.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Actually she was hitch-hiking back to Berkeley and summer school. A car stopped. She eventually hooked up with the driver, a pediatrician. He went to Vietnam. She followed him.

LAURA PALMER: Haven't you ever done dumb things for love? Come on, Brooke, tell us. You know it was 3 in the morning. He was in Morocco. The phone rang. I picked it up. He said I got a job offer! Vietnam! Six months! Do you want to go? I said sure!

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Neither Palmer nor Kazickas nor Webb for that matter had had any experience covering a war when they arrived in Vietnam. But when Palmer landed in 1972, women reporters had already proved themselves. And when the pediatrician left and Palmer began looking for work, it was women back home who did the heavy lifting. Women reporters at the New York Times had launched a major sex discrimination suit just about the time Palmer was prospecting for a job at ABC. WO

MAN: Major media organizations knew they needed women on the air. I was, as the bureau chief at ABC News in Saigon said to me on my first day at work-- [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Very graciously.

LAURA PALMER:-- [LAUGHS] He-- [LAUGHS] He sat me down beside him; I was all of 22 years old; and he looked at me and said well of all the applicants you were the least qualified. [LAUGHTER] And that was absolutely true!

BROOKE GLADSTONE:For Palmer, being female was by now an advantage in Vietnam. Some sources were more inclined to open up to a woman. But there were drawbacks. For instance she was offered a tour and lunch by General Minh, the commander in charge of the Saigon region. She thought they would eat at HQ. But a table was set in his trailer -- with a big double bed.

LAURA PALMER: And I thought "Oh, my God -- what have I walked into?" And he asked me if I liked music. I said yes, I like the Rolling Stones. And he liked the Carpenters. And then he looked at me with all earnestness and said to me "Miss Laura, would you go-go for me?" [LAUGHTER]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: She said no.

LAURA PALMER:What I really wanted to say was: you sonofabitch. People are dying under your command. This was one of the top 5 generals in Vietnam. And you're having lunch with me, giving me a fake Cartier lighter, and asking me to go-go for you? And I thought there is no way if there's this much corruption at the top that they will ever win the war.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:She did see the general again, right after the evacuation of Saigon. She sat with him briefly on an aircraft carrier sailing to the Philippines.

LAURA PALMER: He looked very small and very quiet, and he was chain-smoking Salems and drinking Kool-Aid and, I don't know, we ended up talking about Elton John and it, it just was one of those strange, surreal moments that happens often in Vietnam or because of Vietnam.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Martha Gellhorn, that crusty war veteran, wrote that "of all wars, I hated Vietnam the most because I felt personally responsible. I'm talking about what was done in South Vietnam to the people whom we supposedly had come to save. Napalmed children, destroyed villages -- my complete horror remains with me as a source of grief and anger and shame that surpasses all others." There are 9 compelling, very different stories in War Torn -- a melange of battlefields and love affairs, political commentary and personal exploration. Ultimately War Torn is less a book about women than a book about the war.

MARTHA GELLHORN: This was a, a war like no other for everybody. To get that close to the fighting. Nobody ever is, is numb to it. There were many people who had nervous breakdown. There were several suicides among male reporters. It took its toll. It really did. [MUSIC UP AND UNDER]

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Jurate Kazickas, wounded in Khe Sanh, is a writer who has co-authored several books on women's history. Laura Palmer, who hitch-hiked to Vietnam, is now an independent TV producer who works primarily for ABC's Nightline. Kate Webb, taken prisoner in Cambodia, worked most recently for Agence France Press in Southeast Asia until 2001 when she retired from journalism. Next up, directors who don't want editing to fall into the wrong hands, and a musician who wanted it in everybody's hands -- Glenn Gould. This is On the Media from NPR.