YOU DON'T BELONG HERE

An incisive history of the Vietnam War via the groundbreaking accomplishments of three remarkable women journalists.

In her latest, Becker, who has covered war and foreign policy for the Washington Post, NPR, and the New York Times, focuses on the careers of Frances FitzGerald, Kate Webb, and Catherine Leroy, interweaving their stories as they traveled to Vietnam in the mid-1960s. As U.S. involvement was escalating and news organizations continued to send men to chronicle the war, these women paid their own ways and sought out freelance reporting opportunities. French photojournalist Leroy was already a licensed parachutist when she arrived in Saigon in 1966. A year later, she became the first journalist to join in a combat parachute jump, and she gained widespread recognition for her up-close images of soldiers in battle, many published in Life. Webb was an Australian freelance correspondent who eventually became the United Press International bureau chief in Phnom Penh. After being captured by North Vietnamese troops operating in Cambodia in 1971, Webb made international headlines when premature reports of her death led to a New York Times obituary—before she emerged from captivity several days later. FitzGerald’s arrival coincided with the Buddhist uprising in South Vietnam in 1966. Realizing the events could serve as “a window into an unsettling truth about Vietnam,” she sought to understand and write about the Vietnamese on their own terms. Her debut book, Fire in the Lake (1972), won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer and Bancroft prizes. “Leroy, FitzGerald, and Webb were the three pioneers who changed how the story of war was told,” writes Becker. “They were outsiders—excluded by nature from the confines of male journalism, with all its presumptions and easy jingoism—who saw war differently and wrote about it in wholly new ways.” The author was also present as a journalist in the final years when the war shifted to Cambodia, which adds depth and a riveting personal dimension to the book.

A deft, richly illuminating perspective on the Vietnam War.