Yeah Moltke and a better army had no part in defeating the Austrians and the French. Uh huh! Grumpy
Category: War
In 1966, Catherine Leroy flew to Vietnam with a Leica and a hundred dollars in her pocket. Her photographs and unpublished correspondence, gathered in the book One-Way Ticket to Vietnam 1966–1968, reveal the courage and voice of a pioneer in war photojournalism.
“My parents and friends don’t understand the reasons that drive me to leave. For me, it’s quite simple… I’m twenty-one years old, I want to become a photojournalist and the biggest story is the Vietnam War.” This profession of faith by Catherine Leroy, almost a manifesto, opens the album orchestrated by Robert Pledge, Dominique Deschavanne and EXB editions, devoted to her first two years of reporting.
Nothing predestined this young woman from the Catholic bourgeoisie of Enghien-les-Bains to become a war reporter, except an early attraction to adventure. A severe asthmatic in childhood, forced into classical piano, she became passionate during adolescence for jazz and parachuting, accumulating eighty-four jumps before her departure. “She was born angry,” her mother confides to Robert Pledge, founding member of the Catherine Leroy Foundation.
This underlying rage drove her when she dropped out of high school. Determined, Catherine Leroy worked overtime hours at Manpower, saved up to acquire a Leica M2 and bought a “one-way” ticket to Saigon. A one-way trip to hell that would make her the only female “war photographer” in Vietnam until 1968. Others would follow from 1969 onwards, mostly French women: Christine Spengler, Françoise Demulder and Marie-Laure de Decker.
Fighting spirit
While she may not have known how to handle her camera well, the future war reporter had courage to spare and a sense of observation that emerged as soon as she entered Vietnamese airspace, narrated like a cinematic prologue. “The Air Vietnam DC8 from Vientiane [Laos] has been circling above Tan Son Nhut airport for a long time.”
Her eye notes every detail. “At our feet, a hundred planes parked along hangars with metal roofs. On the two runways, transport planes and helicopters take off and land every minute. The stewardess approaches and offers candy to the passengers; a fragile silhouette, she moves about, smiling, molded into a sky-blue Ao Dai [the traditional Vietnamese dress], embroidered with a red and yellow dragon.”
These accounts are the heart of the work, which interweaves striking photographs and family correspondence. Eighty-seven letters from Catherine Leroy to her parents were recently discovered in a box, carefully preserved by her mother. Nearly half are included in the book. This epistolary voice draws the portrait of a determined woman, despite the ambient sexism that manifested itself even before her departure for Vietnam.
Brothers in arms and enemy colleagues
“‘War is a man’s business. A woman has no fucking place there.’ A journalist friend just gave me his true thoughts. I don’t respond. My decision is made,” she relates. Upon arriving in Saigon, Catherine Leroy once again confronted conventions. German photographer Horst Faas, photo director of the Associated Press, advised her to cover the sidelines of the conflict.
Catherine Leroy categorically refused, demanding to get as close to the action as possible. Faas capitulated, gave her a few rolls of film, and promised fifteen dollars per selected shot. But the photographer wasn’t done facing obstacles. “It’s still the ‘jungle’ in Saigon. All the French journalists are tearing each other apart. (…) It’s very hard to be considered as a woman in Saigon – two designations in use, whore or bitch.”
“At first, Catherine Leroy mostly spent time with French photographers who were delighted to see this young woman join them, but when they realized she was going to become a competitor, they became very unpleasant and really played dirty tricks on her,” explains Robert Pledge. In one of her letters to her parents, the photographer outright calls them “bastards.”
The rage to win
This male hostility never dented her determination. Especially since American or British photographers, like Larry Burrows, took her under their wing. “I’m friends with the American press and use CBS’s ‘Plymouth’ for my travels,” she writes to her mother. “The great war photographer Don McCullin spoke to me about her bravery in glowing terms,” adds Robert Pledge.
In the field, Catherine Leroy quickly proved herself. The young woman befriended American soldiers, shared their daily life, slept, ate, put her life in danger with them. “She was very small and slight, and could slip in everywhere,” notes Robert Pledge. “But what characterizes her is that she lived on site and constantly went on missions with the GIs, because she was broke and it was a way to be housed and fed.”
Dressed in fatigues, she slipped among the combatants, capturing the lightning speed of gunfire, the terror of displaced populations. Her ultra-tight framing revolutionized war photojournalism. “She was someone who had no fear,” testifies Robert Pledge. “She had a very physical sense of proximity, she wanted to be there, very close, right up against it.”
On the Cambodian Highlands, she captures a First Cav soldier in the middle of an operation, his gaze lost in the hostile jungle. In the Da Nang region, she photographs a wounded marine during a “search and destroy” mission, his face twisted in pain. Catherine Leroy photographs the hunt and brutal arrest, punches to the face included, of two suspected Viet Cong before their interrogation in the Mekong Delta. Her images tell the story of the conflict’s violence, “the waste of a generation.”
She also documented the forced displacement of the population during the so-called “search and seizure” phase. And immortalized the ballet of First Cav UH-1 Huey helicopters during Operation Pershing in Binh Dinh province. Seeing them today, it’s impossible not to think of the helicopter attack set to the Ride of the Valkyries in Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now.
The angel’s jump
February 21, 1967 marks a turning point. Catherine Leroy becomes the only civilian woman to parachute with the American army during Operation Junction City. Bob Cole photographs her before training, blonde braids sticking out from her helmet. “My 85th jump,” she writes laconically. The airborne assault of the 173rd Airborne Brigade near the Cambodian border remains the only operation of its kind during the conflict.
Her letters reveal a contrasting personality, oscillating between youthful carelessness and fierce determination. “Saigon, late May 1966. You know, when you see war, you realize that everyday problems are trivial and that bourgeois life isn’t much fun,” she writes to her mother. “I don’t really feel like I’m working. Let’s say I’m walking around with my eyes open, my pocket still light and that this vagabond life, all in all, suits me.”
“And hell, when you’re young, you might as well live dangerously,” she continues in her correspondence. This bravado barely conceals the ordeals endured: malaria, multiple injuries, thirty-five shrapnel fragments in her body in May 1967. “Catherine Leroy talks about photos, of course, about the operations she attends, as if she were going away for the weekend,” comments Robert Pledge. “It’s a way, for her, to reassure her parents.”
A legend in the making
The Tet Offensive sealed her legend. In February 1968, during the Battle of Hue, Catherine Leroy photographed the recapture of the citadel by Bravo Company of the 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment. Captured by North Vietnamese forces, she produces an exceptional report on the invisible enemy, images that would make the cover of Life accompanied by eight pages and an editorial entirely devoted to her work.
“Unprecedented for a young woman, let alone a French photographer,” emphasizes Robert Pledge. The only female photographer to cover the Vietnam conflict as a war correspondent (1966-1968) and the first woman to win the Robert Capa Gold Medal for her reports on the Lebanese civil war, Catherine Leroy nevertheless died in relative obscurity in Los Angeles, in July 2006, at sixty-one.
“Catherine Leroy was forgotten through her own fault,” confides Robert Pledge. “She certainly had a big mouth, but never to boast or put herself forward. Which necessarily hurt her career.” Un aller simple pour le Viêt-nam 1966-1968 partially repairs this memorial injustice. The images, never cropped, with three exceptions justified by the loss of the original negatives, follow a meticulously reconstructed chronology.
“The combination of her images and her words (…) aims to be the most faithful possible restitution of the travel diary of a young woman barely out of adolescence who immersed herself in the horrors of war,” conclude Robert Pledge and Dominique Deschavanne in their foreword. Catherine Leroy would return to Vietnam in 1975, during the fall of Saigon, then in 1980 to contemplate the reunified and peaceful country. “She was determined to come full circle.”
Guénola Pellen
Guénola Pellen is a journalist specializing in culture and the United States, where she edited the magazine France-Amérique for 15 years. She divides her time between Paris and New York.
John looked like a character on Hee Haw, if a character on Hee Haw was not terribly silly. He carried himself like a grandfather. He was thin and always wore the same basic uniform — a pressed collared shirt buttoned at the neck and wrists, spotlessly clean bib overalls, and a ball cap. He had some chronic medical problems, so I saw him fairly frequently in my medical clinic. He also lived right down the road from me.
One day in the clinic, John was complaining about pain in one of his arms. I had him unfasten his shirt sleeve so I could take a look. I was surprised to find that his forearm was a mass of well-healed scars. When I inquired regarding the details, he explained that he carried fragments from a German potato masher grenade in that arm and that it still bothered him from time to time. That conversation led to some of the most fascinating stories.
A Shocking Introduction to War
I presume everybody has seen the extraordinary Steven Spielberg film Saving Private Ryan. That was John’s unit during World War II. He landed on Omaha at 0630 in the morning on 6 June 1944, as a member of the 2d Ranger Battalion. John hit the beach in the first wave.
John obviously survived that horrible fight across the shingle and the subsequent bloody advance through the Bocage country. He was assigned to a reconnaissance unit in Patton’s 3d Army and met Patton twice. John told me that General Patton had a surprisingly high-pitched voice, but that he was as profane and flamboyant in person as the movie made him out to be.
John once overheard a conversation between Patton and Bradley as they were leaving a command post that went something like this: “Ike doesn’t know how to fight a damn war! If we keep slogging it out with these SOBs face-to-face we will never end this thing. He’s got to hit them hard, and he’s got to hit them in the flanks. That’s what’s going to get us to Berlin!”
John lost two toes during the Battle of the Bulge. He also battled his way through the hell of Hurtgen Forest. Throughout it all, he carried an M1918A2 Browning Automatic Rifle.
One Fruitful Combat Patrol
At one point, John and his squad had moved forward to gather intelligence on German troop dispositions. He found himself crouched down in a drainage ditch beside a rural road as massive German tanks roared by. He had no idea what kind they were, save that they were huge.
A German officer in a motorcycle sidecar eventually pulled up and stopped right in front of him. The man stood up in the sidecar and began glassing the area opposite him with what was obviously a very nice set of binoculars. John found himself covetous of those binoculars.
Looking left and right to make sure that there were no more German tanks within sight, he stood up, drew a bead, and killed both the German officer and his driver with a full magazine from his BAR. Scampering up into the road, he retrieved the binoculars before leaping back into the ditch. His patrol leader then ran up cursing like a sailor.
The Lieutenant explained in stark terms that their mission was intended to be stealthy and that John’s actions would likely bring down the full weight of the German Wehrmacht upon their heads. He said his patrol leader berated him viciously. Then he got a mischievous look on his face and said, “But I’ve still got those binoculars!”
The Voyage Home
When finally the war ended, John got tagged to make the trek back across the Atlantic aboard a troopship. Mid-ocean they encountered a ghastly storm that rolled the vessel relentlessly. John told me that was the most terrified he had been during the war. He believed that, after all he had been through, now he was going to drown in the middle of the frigid Atlantic Ocean. The storm eventually cleared, and, aside from some seasickness, he was no worse for the wear.
John returned to his tiny little Southern town to a hero’s welcome. His mom threw a party, inviting friends and family from all around to celebrate his coming home unscathed from the war. He said they stayed up late visiting until everyone grew tired and gradually made their way back to their own homes. John’s dad wasn’t in the picture for some reason, so only he and his mother remained.
His mom then took him to his bedroom. She had maintained the space just as it had been two years before when he had left for Ranger training. Once she had him tucked in, she returned to her own bedroom, changed into her night clothes, and crawled in bed. For what happened next, I’ll use John’s own words:
“I lay there in the dark staring at the ceiling, and I just couldn’t do it. So I got up quietly, tipped out into the backyard, and got a shovel out of the woodshed. Then I dug a hole and crawled down into it, because I found that, after nearly a year under fire, I could no longer sleep above ground.”
His mom heard the noise and came out to investigate in her nightgown. When she saw her young son curled up in that hole and realized for the first time what he had been through and how it had changed him, she wept. We honestly just have no idea…
Fallout
When I knew John, he was well into his 80s. His wife had already passed years before, and he lived alone. I once asked him if he had struggled to cope with his wartime experiences. He just smiled.
He said that the nightmares started soon after he came home. He would wake up in the night screaming about the things he had seen and the things he had done. He said it used to scare his poor wife to death.
John said that he still had those nightmares despite its having been more than half a century since the war. He said he would sometimes wake up alone in the night screaming. Then he said that he would realize who he was and where he was and that he was safe, and he would just go back to sleep.
Ruminations
John would have melted into any typical Southern crowd. He didn’t look like anything special. However, the man came home from World War II with two Purple Hearts among his many other combat decorations, having helped wrest control of Europe from a monster.
John spent his professional life in the timber business. He was an active member of his local church and enjoyed tending his expansive vegetable garden. I waved every day I saw him as I passed his house enroute to work. He died at age 88 after a long fruitful life. John was a invisible hero, a true warrior’s warrior hiding, as it were, in plain sight. I was proud to call him my friend.