On Their Own: Female Correspondents in Vietnam

Women went to Vietnam as war correspondents in unprecedented numbers in the 1960s and early 1970s. A combination of intellectual curiosity, professional longings to be at the center of a big story and a simple lust for adventure drew women to the jungles of Southeast Asia, just as those same urges had long drawn men to the spectacle of war. For a decade and a half, women begged, cajoled or simply paid their own way to Vietnam. Together they transformed the role of women as war correspondents from an aberration to a norm. But very few of them were acknowledged as the professional equals of their male counterparts— then or now