Last week I wrote about Dickey Chapelle, the intrepid photographer who lost her life while on patrol with the Marines in November of 1965. Three months later, a tiny 23 year old Frenchwoman named Catherine Leroy arrived in Saigon and became the only female photographer working in Vietnam, a distinction she held for the next two years. During this period women such as Ann Bryan, Kate Webb, and Cynthia Copple were also taking pictures but they were regarded more as writers than as combat photographers.
Cathy was born on August 27, 1944 near Paris, just 8 days after the city was liberated from the Germans. She arrived in Saigon in 1966 armed with a Leica M2 camera, one hundred dollars and a determination to establish herself in the male-dominated field of war photography. She wangled an accreditation with the Associated Press and began photographing major military operations including the months-long battle of Hue.
Cathy soon had trouble with her visas. In a letter home to her parents she wrote, “I have visa problems. I’ve received a letter telling me the visa was refused. I’m rather worried. This is not the time to be thrown out of the country.”
If you’ve read A Season in Saigon now you know where Tallis’s visa problems originated.
Cathy’s visa was eventually sorted out and in January of 1967 she wrote to her father, “I’m jumping for joy” at having received permission to jump with 101st Airborne. The following month she reported, “I jumped in a parachute yesterday with the 173rd Airborne….Seven hundred men were dropped in less than ten minutes just three miles from the Cambodia border. I was in the 4th plane, a C-130 with sixty men.”
Cathy wrote more than a hundred letters home to her parents. To “Dear Mommy” she wrote about her routine in Saigon, the assignments she received, and often asked for things from home. “Send my pink trousers and the small navy blue top…we have to change often because it’s very hot. ” With her mother she was breezy and upbeat. Letters to her dad are more descriptive of her work, the hardships of war reporting, her worries about assignments she lost.
During her career she took hundreds of unsparing photographs that brought home the grittiness, the courage and the gut-wrenching losses of the war. In 1968, Look magazine published her last major photo essay titled This Is That War. In an editorial published alongside her photos, Look’s editors wrote, “The photographs on the preceding pages are not published by LOOK to shock you into realizing that war is hell. We’ve all been shocked before….LOOK publishes these photographs to remind you of some things many Americans seem to have forgotten: that people and nations make mistakes….The Vietnam war has been a mistake, destroying something precious in the word “America.” The editors concluded, “We believe that the most important national business before us…is to wind up our involvement in the Vietnam war as quickly and honorably as possible….”
Cathy’s searing photos left an important record of the war. Many of them, and excerpts from her letters home are available online at dotationcatherineleroy.org. I believe her most important contribution as a photojournalist was the essay in LOOK that brought home to the editors, and to the magazine’s 6.5 million readers, the necessity of forging a path out of the Vietnam war. It would take another seven years before the fall of Saigon and the departure of the last Americans.
In 2005, Cathy published a book, Under Fire: Great Photographers and Writers in Vietnam ( Random House). She died of cancer a year later while working in Santa Monica, California.
A Season In Saigon is meant as a tribute to Cathy and to the dozens of talented and unsung women who risked it all to cover the war, and whose work deepens our understanding of how we got to Vietnam, what it cost, and how it ended.
