During the 1950's and 1960's women were still fighting for their rights.
Women were looking for equality in the work force.
The combination of scholarly interest, professional desire to be in the midst of a large story and a simple passion for adventure attracted women to the jungles of Southeast Asia.
Vietnam was the first war that saw a very large number of women on the media-war frontlines.
Many of these women won journalism awards, while others were killed or taken prisoner.
Most Americans didn't know of the women who served in South Vietnam.
These women were invisible to the public,
except for their comrades they communicated with on a daily basis.
The male administrators of the newsroom, thought that the newsroom and let alone Vietnam was no place for a woman.
If a woman was interested in covering the war she would have to
"fight like hell to get the assignment in Vietnam."
Woman journalist forefathers covering earlier wars broke the ice for the Vietnam era journalists. It was indicated by their numbers and their success creating acceptance of the female correspondents by the military and by news room bosses.
Women journalists were limited to certain duties.
They were to be limited in covering the woman's angle or the human interest side of the war. One big win that lasted long after the war was the fight for women to cover any story in Vietnam, this was a major success for their profession.
The men who ran the countries two major wire services, The Associated Press (AP) and United Press International (UPI) resisted assigning their own women employees to their Saigon Bureaus, but they continuously purchased work from the female freelancers that arrived in Vietnam on their own.
Born Georgette Louise Meyer in 1918 grew up in suburban Milwaukee as a "tomboy", mainly due to the influence of her father who instilled in her a love of adventure.
Not only do I like the lyrics but also enjoy the beat and rhythm of the song. This song emphasizes the love of adventure, the pride Dickey had as an American and how she showed that pride through the lens of her camera.
Georgette believed that a woman could do anything a man could do.
Most of her heroes were men, especially Admiral Richard Byrd, so much a hero in fact that during her teen years she called herself Dick, which soon became Dickie.
She was a very gutsy lady, with strong opinions,
who defied contemporary rules and regulations by wading into the thick of battle alongside Marines armed only with her trusty Leica cameras.
She was a middle-aged freelance photographer who carried her own pack
and dug her own trench.
She even took up parachuting at the age of 40
to cover guerilla conflicts in unfriendly terrain.
She became the first female reporter to win approval from the Pentagon to jump with American troops in Vietnam.
Dickey's greatest frustration in Vietnam was censorship.
Some of her best writing and photos would never see the light of day.
She could see early on that the war in both countries was being lost but she wasn't allowed to tell the American people.
Dickey was the third member of the press and the first and only American working as a journalist to die during combat operation.
She was the first American photojournalist to photograph the entire war and its country from an American viewpoint.
Chapelle belief was "you can go out and change the world" "If you don't someone else will."
In her career as a journalist her stories featured the heroics of men at war, defending democracy by changing the world.
Chapelle received the Reader's Digest First Person Award in 1957
for an account of her imprisonment in Hungary and in 1962,
she was given the Overseas Press Club's award
for "reporting requiring exceptional courage and enterprise."
In the last years of her life,
many of her photographs and stories
were deemed too sensitive for publication as her passion for stories began to cloud her objectivity.
Being an outspoken anti-communist, She loudly proclaimed her pro-American views.
In 1965 she convinced her editors to send her back to Vietnam.
On the morning of November 4, 1965, Dickey was killed by a land mine while on patrol with a platoon, becoming the first war correspondent killed in Vietnam and the first female reporter to die in combat. Her death was captured on film as she had captured the same life and death drama that she herself had hoped to find on her mission with the U.S. Marines.
Catherine Leroy was born in France in 1945 she was brought up in a convent in Paris.
She was captivated as a child by the pictures in Paris Match that intrigued her curiosity for war.
In 1966 at the age of 21 Catherine Leroy had never been outside France
when she bought a one-way ticket to Vietnam,
with a single Leica M2 in her bag, $100 in her pocket, three words of English and the name of a contact in Saigon.
He was the legendary photographer Horst Faas, bureau chief of the Associated Press.
Leroy was a French-born photojournalist and war photographer,
whose harsh images of battle illustrated the story of the Vietnam War in Life and Look Magazines.
Leroy decided she wanted to "give war a human face".
She was a licensed parachutist when she joined up with the 173rd Airborne Division and jumped into a combat operation, becoming the only known accredited journalist male or female to jump into combat with American troops at war
and the first to photograph the Vietcong behind their own lines after she was captured but charmed her way to freedom.
The photograph ended up on the cover of Life magazine.
She went along on a helicopter mission and was immediately pinned down right after landing. "I couldn't see anything. The sound of machine gun fire and explosions was indescribable."
The officers were yelling orders, the wounded soldiers were crying out in pain, friendly fire zoomed over her head exploding just yards away. " Sound, she explained, was one of the first things a war photographer needs to learn and understand.
"Knowing the difference between outgoing fire and incoming fire is very important. When you hear a gun fired in anger, you better know if it's coming for you."
Her most famous images were three consecutive shots without a motor-drive, "showing a young US marine corpsman (medic), Vernon Wike, crouched in tall grass in 1967 during the battle for Hill 881 near Khe Sanh. He is cradling a comrade who had just been shot by a Vietcong guerrilla. In the first frame, Wike, still smoking the cigarette he had lit before the shooting, has both hands on his buddy's chest, trying to staunch the wound.
In the second, he is trying to detect a heartbeat.
In the third, perhaps her most famous, image, known as Corpsman in Anguish, he has just realized his buddy is dead."
Her first conflict photos paid her $1000 from the Associated Press. Leroy's stark images of battle helped tell the story of Vietnam in Life magazine and other publications. Leroy was the first woman to win the Robert Capa Gold Medal Award for conflict photography from the Overseas Press Club in New York, in 1976.
For these women this was a unfolding event that eternally build their lives. The experience stood as an declaration of their ability to overcome fear, to accomplish professional success, and to demand a place in what had until then been a man's world. These women not only photographed the Vietnam War, but they did so in resistance of the restrictions of their culture imposed on them; in the process they helped change journalism. Their ability to cover conflict with astonishing transformation, and their perspectives served to widen American's understanding of the conflict.
