You Don't Belong Here

Vietnam was a big war, as they say, and though it ended almost 50 years ago, its full story has yet to be told. However, many of its pieces lay in the much-overlooked yet incredibly nuanced reporting that women did in the war. 

Elizabeth Becker’s book explores the legacy of three of Vietnam’s unsung journalistic heroes. Each covered the war with a different angle, sense of purpose, and understanding of its—and their—place in geopolitical history. 

Becker’s vivid writing puts you next to photojournalist Catherine Leroy in the plane as she prepares to jump with the 173rd Airborne Brigade in the… show more.

Elizabeth Becker tells the story of three largely unknown but extraordinary female journalists who came into their own during the Vietnam War and the related conflict in Cambodia.

Catherine Leroy was a French photojournalist whose of-the-moment battlefield images led to her becoming the first woman to win a prestigious George Polk Award for photography.

Kate Webb was a no-nonsense correspondent from Australia who was erroneously reported captured, killed, and cremated by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, only to emerge from the jungle very much alive.

After paying her own way to Vietnam, Frances FitzGerald’s first article, published in the Village… show more.

Becker writes vibrantly about three intrepid journalists who covered the Vietnam War and the U.S. invasion of Cambodia: Pulitzer Prize-winning magazine writer Frances Fitzgerald, photojournalist Catherine Leroy, and combat reporter Kate Webb, whose insistence on getting close to the action led to her capture. Their individual stories, including traumas and injuries are set in relief against wider history.

These three women journalists broke the barrier of women reporting on war. All were different in terms of background and approach, but all were gutsy and told the story from a different perspective than their male colleagues. Given they were reporting in the 1960s, there were overt barriers that each faced to doing what they loved, whether those were rules about women’s presence on the frontlines or norms about what kind of reporting women should do. In each of their own ways, they broke down those barriers and gave us all fresh, important reporting on the conflict in Vietnam.

Elizabeth Becker recovers the stories of three iconoclastic female journalists—Catherine Leroy, Frankie Fitzgerald, and Kate Webb—who covered the war in Vietnam at a time when women were unwelcome on the front lines. Male military officials and rival war correspondents tried to ban them from reporting, but they persevered, often at great personal cost. Becker describes their bravery in the line of fire and makes the case that their coverage changed war reporting—and Americans’ perception of the war itself.

Another laudatory new book that tells the untold courageous story of three women journalist who “didn’t belong here” (in Vietnam) and defied rules, prejudice, and combat to cover the Vietnam War, thus shaping coverage that reflected new dimensions and paved the way for a new generation of women to cover the war. Their stories--a French, an Australian, and an American--are marvelously captured by Becker. From the very beginning, when no media outlet would hire them, these three women showed amazing grit, including paying their own way to Vietnam and freelancing for meager money, before they received a modicum of acceptance.… show more.

Veteran war correspondent Elizabeth Becker, who wrote about covering the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in her book, When the War Was Over, now documents the stories of three women journalists who defied both bias and danger to cover the Vietnam War. Becker reveals how photojournalist Frances FitzGerald and reporters Kate Webb and Catherine Leroy struggled against special restrictions placed on them by military commanders, uncooperative male peers, and the perils of war to set new standards of excellence for all journalists engaged in the craft of reporting on wars and conflicts in dangerous places.