YOU DON’T BELONG HERE, HOW THREE WOMEN REWROTE THE STORY OF WAR by Elizabeth Becker

Catherine Leroy, a French daredevil photographer, Frances FitzGerald, a blue-blood American intellectual, and Kate Webb, a New-Zealander/Australian iconoclast, arrived in Vietnam with starkly different life experiences but one shared purpose: to report on the most consequential story of the decade. At a time when women were considered unfit to be foreign reporters, Frankie, Catherine and Kate paid their own way to war, arrived without jobs, challenged the rules imposed on them by the military, ignored the belittlement and resentment of their male peers, and found new ways to explain the war through the people who lived through it.

In You Don’t Belong Here, Elizabeth Becker uses these women’s careers and lives to illuminate the Vietnam War from the 1965 American buildup through the Tet Offensive, the expansion into Cambodia, the American defeat, and its aftermath. Arriving herself in the last years of the war, Becker writes as an historian and a witness to what these women accomplished. What emerges is an unforgettable story of three journalists forging their place in a land of men, often at great personal sacrifice, and forever altering the craft of war reportage for generations.
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. Public Affairs/Hachette Group, 2021. The book was translated into French under the title Vous n’avez pas votre place ici – Trois femmes qui réécrivirent l’histoire de la guerre and released in April 2025 by Omblage, Paris.

Elizabeth Becker is an award-winning journalist and author who began her career as a war correspondent for the Washington Post in Cambodia in the late 1960s and early 1970s. She later became the senior foreign editor for National Public Radio and a New York Times correspondent covering national security and foreign policy. She has been the recipient of numerous awards including accolades from the Overseas Press Club, DuPont Columbia’s Awards and was a member of the Times team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for covering 9/11. She is the author of When the War was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution, the definitive book on the event that has been in print for twenty years. Meeting with Pol Pot (2024), a fiction film by Rithy Panh, is a free adaptation from real and dramatic events that happened to Becker and two of her colleagues working in Cambodia in 1978.

CLOSE UP ON WAR — THE PIONEERING PHOTOJOURNALIST CATHERINE LEROY IN VIETNAM by Mary Cronk Farrell

Close Up On War tells the story of a young Parisian woman who overcame gender and professional barriers to take groundbreaking battlefront photographs during the Vietnam War. Inspired by pictures published in French newspapers and magazines and determined to witness and record the unfolding action, Catherine Leroy followed the advice of iconic combat photographer Robert Capa: Get close! At the age of 21, she arrived in Saigon in February 1966 as a freelancer, forging ahead despite her lack of experience. The book is a detailed account of Leroy’s achievements that leaves the reader marveling at her sheer determination, bravery, and disregard for her own safety as she documented what was happening in Vietnam. It is illustrated with over forty of her powerful photographs. The preface and the introduction are by two Vietnam War Pulitzer Prize winning journalists, Nick Ut and Peter Arnett respectively. (Amulet Books, Abrams, New York, 2022) www.abramsbooks.com

A former television journalist, Mary Cronk Farrell now writes acclaimed award-winning books for children and young adults that tell the stories of little-known women whose strength and courage helped shape history. She resides in Washington State in the United States.