She was there, on the ground in Cambodia, when so much of the world turned away. She covered the horrors of the American bombing of Cambodia, the barbaric civil war, and the unfathomable brutality of the Khmer Rouge. When I read When the War was Over for a college seminar on the politics of revolution, I added a real-life heroine to my pantheon: Elizabeth Becker. As a teenager I idealized that romantic image of the hard drinking, rugged, tough guy journalist. It was all so exciting and glamorous, but all of these role models were men.
I wanted to be Mel Gibson in The Year of Living Dangerously, James Woods in Salvador, or even Nick Nolte in Under Fire. Deeply reported and filled with personal letters, interviews, and profound insight, You Don’t Belong Here fills a void in the history of women and of war.Who were your heroes during your formative years? As a child of the 1970s, many of mine were journalists, especially those reporting on war and revolution in Southeast Asia and Latin America. What emerges is an unforgettable story of three journalists forging their place in a land of men, often at great personal sacrifice. Arriving herself in the last years of the war, Becker writes as a historian and a witness of the times. In You Don’t Belong Here, Elizabeth Becker uses these women’s work and lives to illuminate the Vietnam War from the 1965 American buildup, the expansion into Cambodia, and the American defeat and its aftermath.
At a time when women were considered unfit to be foreign reporters, Frankie, Catherine, and Kate challenged the rules imposed on them by the military, ignored the belittlement of their male peers, and ultimately altered the craft of war reportage for generations. Kate Webb, an Australian iconoclast, Catherine Leroy, a French daredevil photographer, and Frances FitzGerald, a blue-blood American intellectual, arrived in Vietnam with starkly different life experiences but one shared purpose: to report on the most consequential story of the decade. The long-buried story of three extraordinary female journalists who permanently shattered the barriers to women covering war.
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