They did so by covering the same stories and taking the same risks. Several experienced fierce fighting, one was wounded and one was captured. These young women–almost all were in their 20s–sought the same kind of release from the horrors of what they saw as did their male colleagues. “My own opiates were good Scotch whisky purchased cheaply from the PX, and sex,” notes Denby Fawcett, who reported for The Honolulu Advertiser. Drugs were also in abundant supply.
The women were enthralled with the war’s drama and traumatized by its agony. Wood is astonished by the “love and gentleness between men” in the face of death. Tad Bartimus sums up the psychic aftereffects of witnessing so much: “Half a life later, Vietnam is still my phantom limb,” she writes. The reporters’ moving encounters with the American and Vietnamese victims of the war induced sadness and reflection, not the stridency that marked both sides of the debate about the war back home.
Jurate Kazickas, a Lithuanian-born American freelancer, believed the war was just, but she gradually grew disillusioned. “The tangled memories,” she writes, “come and go like the strange movements of that pea-size piece of shrapnel under the skin of my ankle.” The best of these powerfully evocative reminiscences get under a reader’s skin as well.
