Women battling for news

By Michael Tsai
Advertiser Staff Writer

In "War Torn: Stories of War from the Women Reporters Who Covered Vietnam," Denby Fawcett writes that Vietnam "is my life. If you pinch my skin, Vietnam is there. If I rub my eyes, Vietnam is underneath."

Denby Fawcett reported on the war in Vietnam for The Advertiser. Advertiser library photo • Sept. 23, 1969

"When I first came back, there was such a negative feeling about Vietnam and even about us being associated with it as reporters," said Fawcett, now a political reporter for KITV News.

It was worse for women reporters like Fawcett, who had to fight for the right to work alongside their male counterparts, yet often were not accorded the same respect.

"As females, there was a level of disbelief about what we had actually done," she said. "People didn't want to listen; they didn't want to believe we had witnessed what we had."

And so Fawcett and many of her female peers kept silent about their experiences. Even as the country came to reconcile its most devastating military defeat, as it assimilated its lessons into political discussion and re-imagined its images in popular culture, Fawcett kept her personal stories of fear, confusion, friendship and loss to herself.

Then, two years ago, she was invited to participate in a conference of women reporters who had covered the Vietnam War. The event was sponsored by the University of West Virginia and organized by the dean of its journalism school, Christine Martin, who years earlier had interviewed some of the participants for her master's thesis.

"The conference lasted four hours, and people had to be physically removed for it to end," Fawcett said. "That gave me the confidence that this was something people were interested in."

The participants didn't stop talking after the conference was over. Before long, Fawcett and eight other well-respected journalists — columnist and Big Island resident Tad Bartimus, Jurate Kazickas, Edith Lederer, Ann Bryan Mariano, Anne Morrissy Merick, Laura Palmer, Kate Webb and Tracy Wood — had agreed to collaborate on the manuscript that would become "War Torn," a Random House hardback that has just been released.

Each contributed one section. Fawcett's, appropriately titled "Walking Point," serves as the first chapter of a collection that in its vivid telling, adds a fascinating dimension to American understanding of the war.

In addition to the nine essays, "War Torn" also includes a map of key areas in Vietnam and a meticulously researched time line spanning the French colonization of Vietnam in 1858 to the reunification of North and South Vietnam in 1976.

"I'm especially proud that this is a serious book, not just a collection of personal remembrances," Fawcett said. "So much of what has been published already has been male-written and male-oriented. I think this book will add a voice that hasn't been heard before."

Real dangers

The nine chapters are as distinct as the women who wrote them. Each, in its own way, speaks to the will of the reporters to defy convention in pursuit of their personal and professional callings, and to the odd conjoining of joy and grief the experience exacted.

Fawcett admits to being naive about what to wear to cover a war, packing sundresses, pearls and a bathing suit for her Vietnam stint. Advertiser library photo • 1966

The dangers the authors faced were real and ever present.

Kazickas was in Khe Sanh interviewing Marines when artillery shells rained down. Her tape recorder caught the sound of her own voice yelling, "I've been hit ... I've been hit."

Later, a group of doctors — uncomfortable in dealing with their first female casualty — discovered a piece of shrapnel two inches from her spine.

Kazickas responded, "Is it below my bikini line?"

Bartimus went to Vietnam in the peaceful period between the U.S. pullout of 1973 and the final North Vietnamese offensive of 1975.

"I don't have famous battles to relive or fields of dead to forget," she writes. But her life was devastated, all the same.

Without the American military infrastructure to provide helicopter rides and press briefings, Bartimus was left to navigate Vietnam on her own resources and, at times, under the protective eye of her Vietnamese colleagues.

In time, however, Bartimus began to experience periods of weakness and fatigue, the first symptoms of a mysterious and debilitating disease that eventually ended her career with the Associated Press.

"In my youth, I thought I was invincible, that if I didn't get shot or visibly maimed, I'd get away clean," she writes in her section, "In Country." "But surviving a war doesn't mean you escape being its victim. Something in Vietnam — perhaps Agent Orange, perhaps some other toxin — got me as sure as a crippling bullet."

'I had no idea what to bring to a war'

Fawcett arrived in Vietnam in 1966 with a letter of accreditation and a promise of $35 per article from The Advertiser. She was 24 at the time, and her only experience as a reporter had been writing for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin's women's pages.

"I packed my suitcase with sundresses recently shortened to the appropriate 1960s mini length by my mother's Japanese dressmaker, sandals, pearls, dark glasses and a bathing suit," she writes. "I had no idea what to bring to a war."

Fawcett, seen here leaping from a helicopter, says troops offered journalists some protection in Vietnam. Advertiser library photo • Feb. 5, 1967

Fawcett's accounts of the next year and a half reveal a consciousness evolving through shocks of anxiety and frustration, joy and camaraderie. Hers was a struggle not just to prove her worth as a journalist, but to assert the rightful place of women covering combat situations.

As one of the earliest women reporters in Vietnam, Fawcett helped pave the way for those who would follow. And the obstacles were formidable, from the paternalistic officer who refused to let her enter a combat area because she reminded him of his daughter to Gen. William Westmoreland, commander of the U.S. forces in Vietnam, who moved to restrict women reporters from staying overnight in the field — a move that would have made it impossible for the reporters to cover most combat assignments.

In what turned out to be a rare show of solidarity, Fawcett joined other women reporters in arguing against the proposal. Fawcett writes that she is sad now, "knowing how much we had in common and how we could have supported and comforted one another."

Yet the impulse to remain separate from other women reporters was neither unique nor, in many ways, unjustified.

Fawcett said she sometimes shied away from stories that seemed feminine in perspective, in part to show that she could function in the same manner as her male counterparts. In retrospect, she says, she is proud of those stories that deviated from the masculine norm, that sought to depict the lives of average people turned upside-down by the war.

In the three months it took to complete her chapter, Fawcett said she relied on old clippings, many preserved in a scrapbook by her father's secretary, to reconnect memory with reality.

"I wrote it in patchwork style — there were all these things that were so salient in my mind," she said. "I figured they would all come together."

And generally, they did. The strength of Fawcett's section, as with each of the eight other chapters, is the author's generous personal revelation balanced with an unblinking journalistic eye.

In Fawcett's Vietnam, butterflies flutter — "the sun shining on their wings" — in the middle of a Vietcong ambush, helicopters drop off food and supplies and take away black plastic bags full of the dead, and sex is like "breathing good air, a stamp of gratitude for being alive."

Raised in the Eisenhower '50s, Fawcett said she came to Vietnam with the same sureness of purpose many of the first GIs carried.

"I supported the war," she said. "I believed in a good country that did the right things. But the legacy of Vietnam is that it wasn't always so."

The new correspondents

Although the essays in "War Torn" were written before the Sept. 11 attacks and the subsequent U.S. military action in Afghanistan, the book is likely to benefit from rising interest in the people who now battle for exclusive reports in the world's new war zones. Fawcett, for one, is reluctant to compare the two.

"Vietnam was a declared war, and it followed certain rules of convention," she said. "As reporters, we had access, and our writing wasn't censored. We were part of the groups we followed, and to some degree, we had their protection.

"I have a degree of concern for all the reporters in Afghanistan because they're all alone," she said. "They have no access and, because of that, they sometimes put themselves in danger to get their stories."

Although the official debut of "War Torn" takes place Sept. 16 in New York, Fawcett already has made promotional appearances in Boston and Martha's Vineyard, Mass. She'll appear with Palmer on NBC's Today Show on Sept. 18.