A lot of Vietnam correspondents have a story of how they came to the country: chosen by accident, paid for their own ticket by winning a game show, confused with another guy, filled in for someone else on R&R and the person never came back. Susan was no different—the choice to send her seemed random, the end result of a chain of assumptions. She was working for a women’s magazine and had a private interest in horse training—it was really the combination of those two facts that had brought her into the war. One long summer in ’66 she moonlighted for the police department, desensitizing their horses to gunfire, preparing them to cover student protests, city riots, rallies. The job required learning to shoot a pistol, launch smoke grenades from the saddle, and move the horses away from rings of fire, then toward them again—hours of this until they would happily jump through them. What we need here, said one of the officers, a transplant from the Southwest, a guy fond of flicking his hair back, of swaggering cowboy style into the barn in the early hours and staring right down at her ass as she worked, what we need here is a cow-y pony that can separate one man from another in a crowd, you know what I mean? A bolshie sonovabitch, gelded late.
She looked up from where she was working, bending down to trim a loose flap of frog off a front hoof. You mean a mare, then, she said.
Like hell! Mares can’t hack it when the chips are down. I don’t want to be right up against it and have my horse go all girly on me.
She took in a breath. She’d worked late on a story the night before and she was tired; she didn’t want an argument, especially one as inane as whether a mare was capable of going “all girly”. She moved to the next hoof and began clearing one cleft, then another, ignoring the guy. It was the only defense.
He came closer, gave the tag end of her chaps belt a little tug, and said, I like the way you ride.
She stood straight, dropping the horse’s leg, staring at the guy, the hoof pick held like a pirate’s hook. Quietly, as though sharing a secret, she said, You can fuck right off. To which he laughed hard, backing up as he did so.
That’s good, he said. That’s real good.
He told her he was biding his time for her. It won’t be long, he promised.
The horses had to walk through smoke, explosions, throngs of people. It was exactly the opposite of what is natural for them. She taught the small herd of four the same skills as for cutting cattle and slowly the horses began to disregard everything but the job at hand. Before work, on the weekends, late into the Midwestern evenings when the heat gave way to the velvet of a summer’s night, the training took up all her free time all that summer long, until she could have ridden beside a firing canon and the horses wouldn’t spook, until not even a dog was safe in an open pen because the horses would chase him out. Finally, at the end of the summer they sent a bunch of the officers into the ring with her and she focused her gaze on the one with the swagger, and felt her horse connect with her meaning, hooking on to the guy.
He made a run for it, whooping as though he enjoyed being chased, showing off to the others. He lifted his hat like a clown running in a rodeo; he made a show of pretending he was scared. But it took only four strides to catch up with him and less than ten seconds until she was circling him at a canter as he held up his hands in surrender, laughing. He expected her to let him go now, but she didn’t let him go. She kept up the revolutions, the horse rolling on its hocks, the sound of hooves like a drumbeat, so close to the guy he looked as though he’d been corked in a bottle. Now the officer stopped smiling; he stared at her helplessly, unable to move an inch, 900 pounds of horse around him like a cyclone. She watched a window of fear open on his face. He suddenly looked young and stupid; he suddenly looked like someone she felt sorry for. She sat back, bringing the horse to a halt.
Meet Millie, she said, patting a swatch of mane.
At the magazine, they thought horse training meant she was a particular type of person, a kind of rugged, intrepid girl willing to take physical risks—not what she thought of herself, not at all. Spring the next year she was called into the editor’s office and given the assignment to collect women’s interest stories for a feature they wanted on Vietnam. She was to be there only a few weeks.
War reporting? She was confused.
Her editor kept looking at the copy she was marking, barely registering the question. As you seem to like adventures, she said. The editor’s desk was littered with typescripts, paperweights, trays stuffed with clippings, envelopes, a grammar, a stamp pad, a half-empty bottle of aspirin, caffeine pills, two dirty coffee cups which sat next to the one from which she was now drinking. She smoked Larks, her lipstick ringing the filters of a collection of spent butts in the ashtray. She wore browline eyeglasses in the style of Malcolm X and had an affecting glare such that one tended not to argue.
Vietnam, Susan said. Women’s interest. It was more a question than anything.
The editor had a rash around her hairline, some kind of eczema that worsened with stress, and a large vein in her neck that bulged when she shouted, which was not infrequently. She looked up from what she was doing, scribbling over some copy with what might have been a glass marker, and reeled off a list: Orphans, hospitals, brave young GIs, gallant doctors, heroic captains, courageous American-loving civilians…go there, find it.
Susan nodded. So, no dying—She was going to say So, no dying sons, but her editor fixed her with a look that brought the entire discussion back to where it had begun, as a set of instructions. Then the older woman scratched her head and told Susan there were newsmen all over Chicago desperate to go to Saigon—didn’t she know that? Her fingers unstuck a file drawer and suddenly she slapped a manila envelope on to the desk, her eyes never leaving Susan’s.
Open it, she said.
There were photographs of women in combat gear, cameras around their necks, ponytails beneath helmets. She recognized one right away, the late Dickey Chapelle in her horn-rims and pearl studs, squinting through the lens. Another showed a girl with reddish blonde hair, a long, freckled nose. She was smiling at a soldier wearing a helmet that listed the months of the year, four crossed out, a pack of cigarettes tucked into the band.
Her editor said, That’s Cathy Leroy, age twenty-two. Little French girl arrived in Saigon with no job and no experience as a photographer. The way she makes a living is by taking more risks than the guys.
Cathy Leroy was built like a gymnast, not even five feet tall. In one of the photos she was following a group of four marines as they carried their dead buddy over a field of elephant grass flattened by the force of wind off a chopper’s rotor blades. Susan thought it was impressive what the girl was doing; it made something flicker inside her, a rush of possibility as though she had just stumbled upon a vision of herself in that same place, beneath the same hot sun and the same deafening sound of a medevac arriving. She had never, not once, considered a foreign assignment, let alone in a war zone. Now, as she flipped through the photographs her editor gave her, it occurred to her this was exactly what she wanted, or could want, if she dared.
She came across a black-and-white glossy of a brunette with cropped hair and large dark eyes, a pad out, a pen, a casual look on an intelligent face.
Kate Webb, her editor explained. She’s a stringer.
There was a pause between them, a lot of silent air that seemed solid. Susan cleared her throat. I’ve not really had any experience—she began.
The editor interrupted. Kate went out with no job at all. Like Cathy. But you have a big advantage in that your room is paid for. You’ll be on salary. She took out a fresh cigarette, waving it as she spoke. This assignment might lead to more. So think carefully before you say yes. She gave Susan a long look, brought a match to the cigarette, and inhaled sharply. Then she went back to marking up the pages she was working on while Susan sat in