You Don't Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War

I have just had my first 5 star read of the year! You Don't Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War by Elizabeth Becker is an amazing fast paced read. This is a great good fast paced work of nonfiction that reads like it is a novel. It is about three amazing women, Catherine Leroy, Frances Fitzgerald, and Kate Webb, who were journalists covering the war in Southeast Asia in the 1960's and 1970's. Each of the three have an amazing story. Cathy Leroy was French, Kate Webb from Australia, and Frances Fitzgerald was a scion of New York socialites. Each played a profound role in how the Vietnam War was covered as well as being the first women covering combat and allowed into combat zones with the full cooperation of the US show more military. These women set the standard and defined the role, and what a standard it turned out to be. Fitzgerald wrote some of the best books about the causes and problems of the American policy in Southeast Asia, and Webb was the first to cover Cambodia and predicted what would happen there. Leroy's pictures are some of the most lasting images of the war that are stuck in the public mind. This book makes me want to go read some of the books that they were reading when they were struggling with how to write the Vietnam War, as well as some of the books that they wrote. I am ashamed to say that I had never heard of these women or the role they played in history. Happily, this book has remedied that situation.

This is one for anybody who is interested in the history of Indochina, Cambodia, and the Vietnam War. Just in case you missed it - I highly recommend this one. It may be hard to find, but if all else fails there is always ILL. Use it to get this book. It isn't a big book, but it sure packs alot of history and action between its covers. show less

Elizabeth Becker, herself an experienced journalist who cut her teeth most importantly in Cambodia and became a witness at the war crimes trial of the few surviving Khmer Rouge leaders, chronicles French photojournalist Catherine Leroy and American correspondent Frances FitzGerald (both primarily in Viet Nam) and Australian correspondent Kate Webb (primarily in Cambodia), all three during the period of the U.S. war in Indochina. .

I stumbled across this recently published You Don't Belong Here a couple months ago in a B&N display for Women's History Month and picked it up on impulse. Glad I did. The only one of the three subjects I'd ever heard of was FitzGerald (though I've yet to read Fire in the Lake, but I just a few weeks ago show more serendipitously stumbled across it in a nice hard-cover w/dj at a used book store). I'd also especially like to get hold of Leroy's Under Fire: Great Photographers and Writers in Vietnam and perhaps also Webb's account of her 23-day captivity by North Vietnamese troops, On the Other Side.*

Becker's book includes a small, limited collection of photographs; but there's a web site for Dotation Catherine Leroy (English-language version) with substantial images of Leroy's work. One of her particularly powerful photos reproduced in the book (part of a series of shots that can be found on the website) is of Navy Corpsman Vernon Wick by the side of a mortally wounded Marine, Hill 881, April-May 1967 © Dotation Catherine Leroy.

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* The subtitle of Webb's book mistakenly identifies her captors as Viet Cong. I suspect she was fortunate to have been captured by more disciplined North Vietnamese regulars rather than by VC guerillas. show less

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