“My parents and friends don’t understand the reasons that drive me to leave. For me, it’s quite simple… I’m twenty-one years old, I want to become a photojournalist and the biggest story is the Vietnam War.” This profession of faith by Catherine Leroy, almost a manifesto, opens the album orchestrated by Robert Pledge, Dominique Deschavanne and EXB editions, devoted to her first two years of reporting.
Nothing predestined this young woman from the Catholic bourgeoisie of Enghien-les-Bains to become a war reporter, except an early attraction to adventure. A severe asthmatic in childhood, forced into classical piano, she became passionate during adolescence for jazz and parachuting, accumulating eighty-four jumps before her departure. “She was born angry,” her mother confides to Robert Pledge, founding member of the Catherine Leroy Foundation.
This underlying rage drove her when she dropped out of high school. Determined, Catherine Leroy worked overtime hours at Manpower, saved up to acquire a Leica M2 and bought a “one-way” ticket to Saigon. A one-way trip to hell that would make her the only female “war photographer” in Vietnam until 1968. Others would follow from 1969 onwards, mostly French women: Christine Spengler, Françoise Demulder and Marie-Laure de Decker.
Fighting spirit
While she may not have known how to handle her camera well, the future war reporter had courage to spare and a sense of observation that emerged as soon as she entered Vietnamese airspace, narrated like a cinematic prologue. “The Air Vietnam DC8 from Vientiane [Laos] has been circling above Tan Son Nhut airport for a long time.”
Her eye notes every detail. “At our feet, a hundred planes parked along hangars with metal roofs. On the two runways, transport planes and helicopters take off and land every minute. The stewardess approaches and offers candy to the passengers; a fragile silhouette, she moves about, smiling, molded into a sky-blue Ao Dai [the traditional Vietnamese dress], embroidered with a red and yellow dragon.”
These accounts are the heart of the work, which interweaves striking photographs and family correspondence. Eighty-seven letters from Catherine Leroy to her parents were recently discovered in a box, carefully preserved by her mother. Nearly half are included in the book. This epistolary voice draws the portrait of a determined woman, despite the ambient sexism that manifested itself even before her departure for Vietnam.
Brothers in arms and enemy colleagues
“‘War is a man’s business. A woman has no fucking place there.’ A journalist friend just gave me his true thoughts. I don’t respond. My decision is made,” she relates. Upon arriving in Saigon, Catherine Leroy once again confronted conventions. German photographer Horst Faas, photo director of the Associated Press, advised her to cover the sidelines of the conflict.
Catherine Leroy categorically refused, demanding to get as close to the action as possible. Faas capitulated, gave her a few rolls of film, and promised fifteen dollars per selected shot. But the photographer wasn’t done facing obstacles. “It’s still the ‘jungle’ in Saigon. All the French journalists are tearing each other apart. (…) It’s very hard to be considered as a woman in Saigon – two designations in use, whore or bitch.”
“At first, Catherine Leroy mostly spent time with French photographers who were delighted to see this young woman join them, but when they realized she was going to become a competitor, they became very unpleasant and really played dirty tricks on her,” explains Robert Pledge. In one of her letters to her parents, the photographer outright calls them “bastards.”
The rage to win
This male hostility never dented her determination. Especially since American or British photographers, like Larry Burrows, took her under their wing. “I’m friends with the American press and use CBS’s ‘Plymouth’ for my travels,” she writes to her mother. “The great war photographer Don McCullin spoke to me about her bravery in glowing terms,” adds Robert Pledge.
In the field, Catherine Leroy quickly proved herself. The young woman befriended American soldiers, shared their daily life, slept, ate, put her life in danger with them. “She was very small and slight, and could slip in everywhere,” notes Robert Pledge. “But what characterizes her is that she lived on site and constantly went on missions with the GIs, because she was broke and it was a way to be housed and fed.”
Dressed in fatigues, she slipped among the combatants, capturing the lightning speed of gunfire, the terror of displaced populations. Her ultra-tight framing revolutionized war photojournalism. “She was someone who had no fear,” testifies Robert Pledge. “She had a very physical sense of proximity, she wanted to be there, very close, right up against it.”
On the Cambodian Highlands, she captures a First Cav soldier in the middle of an operation, his gaze lost in the hostile jungle. In the Da Nang region, she photographs a wounded marine during a “search and destroy” mission, his face twisted in pain. Catherine Leroy photographs the hunt and brutal arrest, punches to the face included, of two suspected Viet Cong before their interrogation in the Mekong Delta. Her images tell the story of the conflict’s violence, “the waste of a generation.”
She also documented the forced displacement of the population during the so-called “search and seizure” phase. And immortalized the ballet of First Cav UH-1 Huey helicopters during Operation Pershing in Binh Dinh province. Seeing them today, it’s impossible not to think of the helicopter attack set to the Ride of the Valkyries in Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now.
The angel’s jump
February 21, 1967 marks a turning point. Catherine Leroy becomes the only civilian woman to parachute with the American army during Operation Junction City. Bob Cole photographs her before training, blonde braids sticking out from her helmet. “My 85th jump,” she writes laconically. The airborne assault of the 173rd Airborne Brigade near the Cambodian border remains the only operation of its kind during the conflict.
Her letters reveal a contrasting personality, oscillating between youthful carelessness and fierce determination. “Saigon, late May 1966. You know, when you see war, you realize that everyday problems are trivial and that bourgeois life isn’t much fun,” she writes to her mother. “I don’t really feel like I’m working. Let’s say I’m walking around with my eyes open, my pocket still light and that this vagabond life, all in all, suits me.”
“And hell, when you’re young, you might as well live dangerously,” she continues in her correspondence. This bravado barely conceals the ordeals endured: malaria, multiple injuries, thirty-five shrapnel fragments in her body in May 1967. “Catherine Leroy talks about photos, of course, about the operations she attends, as if she were going away for the weekend,” comments Robert Pledge. “It’s a way, for her, to reassure her parents.”
A legend in the making
The Tet Offensive sealed her legend. In February 1968, during the Battle of Hue, Catherine Leroy photographed the recapture of the citadel by Bravo Company of the 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment. Captured by North Vietnamese forces, she produces an exceptional report on the invisible enemy, images that would make the cover of Life accompanied by eight pages and an editorial entirely devoted to her work.
“Unprecedented for a young woman, let alone a French photographer,” emphasizes Robert Pledge. The only female photographer to cover the Vietnam conflict as a war correspondent (1966-1968) and the first woman to win the Robert Capa Gold Medal for her reports on the Lebanese civil war, Catherine Leroy nevertheless died in relative obscurity in Los Angeles, in July 2006, at sixty-one.
“Catherine Leroy was forgotten through her own fault,” confides Robert Pledge. “She certainly had a big mouth, but never to boast or put herself forward. Which necessarily hurt her career.” Un aller simple pour le Viêt-nam 1966-1968 partially repairs this memorial injustice. The images, never cropped, with three exceptions justified by the loss of the original negatives, follow a meticulously reconstructed chronology.
“The combination of her images and her words (…) aims to be the most faithful possible restitution of the travel diary of a young woman barely out of adolescence who immersed herself in the horrors of war,” conclude Robert Pledge and Dominique Deschavanne in their foreword. Catherine Leroy would return to Vietnam in 1975, during the fall of Saigon, then in 1980 to contemplate the reunified and peaceful country. “She was determined to come full circle.”
One-Way Ticket to Vietnam 1966–1968, by Catherine Leroy, is available from Atelier EXB for €49.
