No amount of firepower
could keep Dickey Chapelle
away from war. In her photo
(below) from the Vietnam
War, an inferno flushes Viet-
cong soldiers from a hut in the
Mekong Delta. Chapelle cov-
ered dozens of conflicts. She
died from wounds suffered
when she was with marines
on patrol in Vietnam.
GEORGE F. MOBLEY (TOP);
DICKEY CHAPELLE
In 1959 Dickey Chapelle prepared to
leap off a tower. The pioneering war
correspondent was accompanying the
U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division
in Kentucky and, at 41 years old, was
parachuting for the first time. She was
terrified. But fear never lasted long for
Chapelle. She proclaimed parachuting
as among “the greatest experiences
one can have.”
By then, Chapelle had reported on
dozens of conflicts, including World
War II. She’d been held in solitary
confinement during the Hungarian
uprising and was the first journalist
accredited by the Algerian rebels.
Fidel Castro called her “the polite lit-
tle American with all that tiger blood
in her veins.” After training with the
Screaming Eagles, she became the only
woman at the time authorized to jump
with combat paratroopers in Vietnam.
Born Georgette Meyer, Chapelle took
the nickname Dickey from her hero,
Arctic explorer Adm. Richard Byrd. She
dreamed of being a pilot or aerospace
engineer. At 14, she sold her first article
to U.S. Air Services magazine; at 16,
she enrolled at MIT. She married Tony
Chapelle in 1940.
The couple began writing and pho-
tographing stories for National Geo-
graphic in the 1950s, but after they
separated, Dickey took on both roles.
Pinning Vietnamese paratrooper and
U.S. Army parachutist badges to her
bush hat, she ventured where other
reporters didn’t dare go. If her pres-
ence was a novelty, it didn’t grant
her special treatment. “Not once has
a general ever offered to trade me
a SECRET operations order for my
fair white virtue,” she wrote to her
publisher. She named her autobiog-
raphy What’s a Woman Doing Here?
after a refrain she often heard on
the battlefield.
“There’s no question” that war is
no place for a woman, Chapelle once
told an interviewer. “There’s only one
other species on Earth for whom a
war zone is no place, and that’s men.”
In 1962 Chapelle became the sec-
ond woman to receive the George
Polk Memorial Award, the highest
citation for bravery from the Overseas
Press Club of America. She’d seen
more fighting in Vietnam than any
other American—17 operations in all.
But her conflict tally would end there.
On November 4, 1965, Chapelle
was on a Marine mission near the
coastal city of Chu Lai. About 8 a.m.
the patrol unit walked into trip wire,
which triggered a grenade that was
wired to a mortar. Chapelle was hit in
the neck by shrapnel. She died on the
floor of a helicopter—the first female
American correspondent to die in
combat. Years later, other journalists
reported that Vietnamese Airborne
troops still reminisced about the
small, foul-mouthed woman who’d
once jumped with them.TRAILBLAZERS 133