You Don't Belong Here by Elizabeth Becker

The professor essentially kneecapped my academic future. I had worked my way through college, petitioned to create a degree program in South Asian studies, and won a fellowship to graduate school. He said the one was not related to the other. My master’s adviser had rejected my thesis on the Bangladesh War of Independence after I refused to sleep with him. The short answer was a nightmare I was all too keen to leave behind. Soft spoken and to the point, she asked, Why had I crossed the ocean to cover a war? Webb had been in the news for surviving capture by the North Vietnamese and then writing a book about the experience. Our mutual friend, Sylvana Foa, had arranged for Webb to host me overnight and make sure I caught the morning flight to Phnom Penh. After I waved to her, she steered me through arrival formalities and into a dim sum restaurant with a view of the harbor. She was immediately recognizable from the news photographs: the thick-cropped brown hair, shy smile, and intense brown eyes. It was January 1973, and I was on the penultimate leg of my flight from Seattle to Cambodia to become a war correspondent. W HEN I ENCOUNTERED HER AT THE H ONG K ONG AIRPORT, A cigarette dangling from her free hand, I had never met anyone like Kate Webb. 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.

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.

You Don't Belong Here by Elizabeth Becker