WAR TORN: Stories of War from the Women Reporters Who Covered Vietnam, edited by Jurate Kazickas, Random House, 288 pages, $24.95.
They were among the first female war correspondents, the journalists who covered Vietnam. For the most part, their editors didn't want to send women to cover combat. The generals were also reluctant.
But this was the most important story of their generation. And so they found their way to Vietnam, several dozen women — free-lancers, some of them, and others on assignment. And as with many Americans who went to Vietnam, they didn't talk much about the war after it was over.
But then, in April 2000, at the invitation of the dean of the journalism school at West Virginia University, a group of these women got together to participate in a symposium. And they talked about the things they saw and the way Vietnam changed their lives.
After the symposium, the journalists, most of whom had not been friends during the war years, stayed in touch with each other by e-mail and telephone. Eventually, they decided to write a book. The result is a fascinating bit of history called "War Torn." In it, nine women each wrote one chapter.
Some of them did not go to the battles. Most did. They went out to the green hillsides in helicopters. They crouched in ditches. They saw young men die, in agony, in the mud. Then they went back to Saigon, to the parties and the liquor and the dope and the gourmet French food.
The contrast unnerved them. Wrote Tad Bartimus of Associated Press: "Cocktail conversation swirled around whether it was worth risking your life for another picture of another dead soldier, another story about an orphaned child."
In one chapter after another, their memories echo and build. The women recall love affairs, love made amazingly fierce because death was everywhere. And they recall the incredible brotherhood between the men who were fighting. It was a closeness that they, as noncombatants, had never known, and, they realized, that they would never know.
"The way men bonded in war fascinated me," writes Jurate Kazickas, who was a free-lance reporter. "The comradeship, the sharing of these intense moments under fire, was unlike any other human experience."
Even as they lived through it, they knew Vietnam was changing them. Kate Webb of UPI wrote: "I couldn't face boiled eggs. They reminded me of how thin people's skulls were. Cars backfiring made me jump. On my first R&R (rest and recreation, a GI term that the journalists adopted), I found I couldn't run over grass for fear of mines. I also found that survivor's guilt is a fact of life."
Bartimus believes she was made sterile by Agent Orange. Webb was taken prisoner. Jurate Kazickas was wounded and was not the same afterward. She recalls, "When we were mortared, suddenly I found myself trembling. Lying flat on the ground, clawing the dirt, suddenly I was paralyzed with fear. I couldn't take pictures. I couldn't take notes. Getting wounded had jolted me to the inescapable truth that I was just as vulnerable as any of the thousands of GIs who were casualties of this war.
"It was time for me to leave. But it was not easy to disengage. . . . What story could possibly involve me so profoundly again? How could a normal life hold my interest after all this?"
The last chapter of "War Torn" is written by Laura Palmer of ABC News. It begins, "I never expected to go to Vietnam, but I did. I never expected to become a journalist, but I did. I never expected that a wretched war's greatest legacy to me would finally be one of love, but that's what it has been.
"Saigon feels like my hometown because it is where the rest of my life began. It's where I met friends I will cherish forever and loved with an intensity that has few parallels. . . . Vietnam defined my generation and shaped the woman I became . . . .
"Vietnam destroyed my fear of death and, ultimately, Vietnam brought me closer to God . . . ."
It took a long time for these women to tell their stories. No surprise about that. Journalists are trained not to tell their stories.
It is as Tracy Wood's UPI editor told her on her first day in Vietnam: "The most important rule, the one you can never forget, is this: We are only reporters. What happens to us, what we think, what we feel, what we experience, doesn't matter. We're here to cover the war. Any time we get too scared, too sick of it, too tired, we can hop on a plane and go home. The military and the civilians can't do that. They're stuck. They're the story. Not us."
Readers will be glad these reporters finally decided to probe their past. In "War Torn," Vietnam becomes real again, the way it was during the 1960s, when it was vivid and live every night on the news.
E-mail: susan@desnews.com