WAR TORN

Women journalists recall the terror and tragedy of Vietnam in this path-breaking collection of essays.

“Sometimes an officer would say, ‘What the hell is a woman doing here?’ and I’d shrug nonchalantly, ‘My editor sent me to cover the fighting,’ ” recalls Washington Post correspondent Ann Mariano, who went to Vietnam a skeptic and returned a committed pacifist, certain that “America’s involvement was tragic and doomed to fail.” The sentiment is echoed by several of Mariano’s peers; Lithuanian expatriate Jurate Kazickas writes, “Despite my loathing of communism and my belief that we could not walk away from the South Vietnamese, [I] began to feel the war was a terrible mistake, a sacrifice too great for any country, including my own, to bear.” Like the men who fought there, these women came of age in a terrible place, and their reminiscences ably complement an almost exclusively male literature. The dominant mood is cool resignation mixed with occasional moments of terror—a mix that yields hard-boiled lines such as these from the excellent Australian journalist Kate Webb: “A GI next to you got hit, and you didn’t. A kid who the night before had been whispering over a Dear John letter from his girl in Puerto Rico was a cold, gray weight in a slimy poncho hung on two poles.” Also from Webb, who closely resembles a latter-day Martha Gellhorn, comes the startling news that Communist Chinese forces were directly involved in the fighting, a development she did not report at the time because “plainclothes US intel guys ferreted me out and argued with me long and hard that if UPI went with the story, it could widen the war.” Protesting that the Chinese presence was already proof that the war had widened, Webb eventually yielded. But better to have this revelation late than never to have it at all.

And better late than never to have this superb gathering of talent whose work presents an overlooked perspective on the war.