Spies, Lovers and Prisoners of War

By Tracy Wood

In Vietnam May, 1972-Feb. 1974

March 30, 1972. Holy Thursday in New York. Half way around the world in Vietnam, already Good Friday. Easter week. The week North Vietnam proved to the world one more time it had the manpower, the firepower and most of all, the willpower, to launch yet another full-scale offensive against the South.

“We’re sending someone to Vietnam to beef up the bureau,” UPI foreign editor Bill Landry told me as NVA troops raced south toward Hue. “You’re next on the rotation.”

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. I was in New York, working on the foreign desk at UPI, at that time one of the world’s largest news organizations. I was studying Chinese with the promise that when Peking opened its borders, I would be on the first team in. In the meantime, there was the excitement of New York, a sometimes-difficult boyfriend and a job I loved.

And not Vietnam. Everyone at UPI was clear on that. The war was winding down and so was the UPI Saigon bureau.

Part of me — a big part — was relieved. The war was so old, it seemed it always was a piece of my life. Stuey Burns, the quiet older kid who lived a block or so away in the New Jersey town where I grew up, died there. Johnny Biddar, whose mom and my mom were friends since high school, was a helicopter medevac pilot there.

I’d read books on the war, covered demonstrations against the war, listened to endless debates about the war and, for the past seven months, edited daily stories from the Saigon bureau about the war.

I’m not violent by temperament and don’t enjoy violent or even scary books or movies. I’d never known violence in my personal life and, frankly, the idea of going to Vietnam frightened me.

But the minute the invitation left Landry’s mouth, the other part of me, the decisive part, knew I was going.

“When do I leave?”

Landry looked out over the newsroom.

“There’s something I need to tell you.”

UPI’s executives had debated whether to send a woman to Vietnam. Editor Roger Tatarian and News Editor H.L. Stevenson wanted me to go. Landry, my immediate boss, didn’t.

“Why not?”

Landry was a veteran foreign correspondent who’d covered the world’s major conflicts and glamour spots, from the savagery of civil war in the Congo to the luxury of Paris. He’s a mild, fatherly personality with no children.

“I don’t believe women should cover wars,” he said, the glare from the florescent lights on his glasses hiding whatever was in his eyes.

I didn’t know how to answer. There were more than 100 reporters and editors in that huge, UPI world headquarters. But the only sound I heard was the clacking banks of teletype machines that streamed stories across the wires from Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, Asia and the rest of the U.S. For the first time in my life, someone in a position to decide my future was telling me that because I was a woman, I wasn’t good enough.

Kate Webb, one of the finest combat correspondents of the Vietnam War — male or female — worked for UPI. In fact, right then she was covering the South Vietnamese Army’s flight from Quang Tri, the provincial capitol south of the DMZ.

A year or so earlier she was captured by North Vietnamese troops in Cambodia, held for three weeks and nearly died of malaria before being released. Was that what spooked Landry?

“If anything happened to you, I’d feel bad,” he continued.

Stop. Right there. Landry had just articulated the problem that for generations held women back. Not overt sexual discrimination. Not conviction that women couldn’t do the job. Something much harder to fight: well-meaning men in positions of authority who honestly believed it was more important to protect women from risks than encourage them to reach for the stars.

“Wouldn’t you feel bad if a male reporter got killed?” I wanted to argue but kept silent. I was going. Tatarian and Stevenson had decided that.

Less than a year later I was sipping coffee with North Vietnamese diplomats in Vientiane, Laos, all alone and chafing with uncertainty, negotiating the final details for U.S. press coverage of the release of American prisoners of war. Outside, Walter Cronkite and more than 30 other journalists from major U.S. newspapers and television networks waited for the results.

In the months between New York and Vientiane, I learned, as had thousands of unschooled Americans before me, how easily the human body is shredded by small bits of steel. I discovered that a child raised in the midst of garbage and death still will smile at a glimpse of its mother’s face. I looked into the blank eyes of American prisoners of war, nerve endings battered and souls too fragile to risk revealing even a toehold of hope.

I drank and sparred with Cold War spies, the real kind who slide from persona to persona, and late at night whisper in confidence the terrors of their childhood. I witnessed, over and over, a love and gentleness between men for each other that I never knew existed.

I fell in love myself.