Among the female journalists who inspired A Season in Saigon, none was more important to my story than Ann Bryan. Born in San Angelo, Texas on August 18, 1932, Ann was graduated from Ballinger, Texas high school, and from Texas Tech University where she majored in journalism. Following graduation she was hired as a reporter at the San Angelo Standard Times and later edited the women’s pages, the only newspaper job available to most women at the time. Eager to report more important stories, Ann moved to New York in 1958 and applied for a job at the New York Times. When they turned her down she had a brief stint as an airline stewardess (as they were called back then) before moving to Germany to work for the newspaper Overseas Weekly.
In 1966, the Weekly sent her to Saigon to run the Pacific bureau, a job she held during the most critical years of the war in Vietnam. Working from office space shared with reporters from the Washington Post, Ann and her coterie of writers and photographers built a newspaper for American GIs that focused on stories the military was only too eager to hide. Ann published stories about fragging, racism in the ranks, the misconduct of officers in the field. When the US government tried to take her paper off the streets, Ann fought them in court and won. Years later the Weekly was described as the only American newspaper that told the truth about Vietnam as it was happening.
As I describe in the novel, in 1968, Ann began a love affair with Frank Mariano, then a reporter for ABC News. A thirteen- year Army veteran, Frank was ordered to Vietnam in 1964 where he was shot down twice while serving as a helicopter pilot. Movie-star handsome, with full lips and thick curly hair, Frank was as intense as a journalist as he had been as an army officer before the massacre at My Lai left him shocked and disgusted. He left the army for broadcasting and in Saigon, soon met and fell in love with the pretty, red-haired, soft-voiced Texan running the Weekly.
Ann spent much of her time working with Sister Robert who ran the Viet Hoa Orphanage and in 1970, she adopted a tiny, six week old orphan girl she called Jane Catherine, becoming a single, working mother at a time when it was much less common than today. Ann and Frank were married on September 5, 1972 at Sutro Park in San Fransisco with their adopted daughter in attendance. Immediately after the wedding, they boarded a flight out of San Fransisco and returned to Saigon where they settled into their work and adopted a second Vietnamese daughter, Francesca.
In April of 1975 as the North Vietnamese army moved toward Saigon, Ann, who was there to report on Operation Babylift, stayed until the last minute, helping her friends and other reporters escape. With the war behind them, Ann and Frank and their two daughters settled on the east coast where Ann worked for the Washington Post and Frank continued his work. But their life together was cut short. In the summer of 1976, Frank died from complications of heart surgery at age 45, leaving behind Ann and their two young daughters.
Ann lost Katie to a brain tumor when the child was only thirteen, and much of her writing after that was about processing her intense grief. As Alzheimers disease began ravaging her memory, she wrote that “No disease can erase the fact that Vietnam was where I found my family.”
When she died in February of 2009 tributes came from the men and officers she had known and befriended in Vietnam. Major Glenn MacDonald wrote that she was “a courageous editor…a friend to many of us, both enlisted, non-c0ms, and public information officers”. He wrote that as one of the first female war correspondents in Vietnam, “Ann could be seen jumping in and out of choppers from firebases near the DMZ to military camps up and down Vietnam. The troops were in awe of her. She will always have our deepest respect. Fairness and justice were the keywords in her vocabulary. We who served there are all better off for the fact that Overseas Weekly existed.”
Ann is one of several women whose work in Vietnam has largely gone unacknowledged. When I read her story and the stories of Kate Webb, Dickey Chapelle, Catherine Leroy, and others, I knew I had found the subject of my next novel. More than two years in the making, A Season in Saigon draws upon the real-life stories of these women who defied convention to tell their stories as only they could tell them.
NEXT WEEK: Kidnapped and held captive by the Viet Gong
