cover image War Torn: Stories of War from the Women Reporters Who Covered Vietnam

War Torn: Stories of War from the Women Reporters Who Covered Vietnam

Gloria Emerson, Tad Bartimus, Denby Fawcett. Random House (NY), $24.95 (320pp) ISBN 978-0-375-50628-4

Often only hours before you took that first sip of ricard or your martini... you had been watching a medic give up on a kid of eighteen or nineteen and flip a cold poncho over his face. Often you could hear the artillery of a battle across the Saigon River. So Kate Webb, a former UPI correspondent, recalls her days as a reporter in Vietnam, moving back and forth between the devastation of the field and the decadent and chaotic nightlife of Saigon. Her story is part of War Torn: Stories of War from the Women Reporters Who Covered Vietnam, written by former correspondents including Denby Fawcett, Jurate Kazickas and UPI's Webb and Tracy Wood. The book collects nine reporters' memoirs that recall the period of 1966 1975, when women's reportage, as Gloria Emerson notes in her introduction, was much rarer than today. Author tour. (Aug. 20)