University Place

Now, this morning, it is my pleasure to introduce John Garofolo, a former entertainment industry executive and veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and author of today's feature publication, "Dickey

Chapelle Under Fire

"Photographs by the First American "Female War Correspondent Killed in Action." A commander in the U.S. Coast Guard Reserve, John has more than 25 years of active and reserves military service and has taught at the Coast Guard Academy and at Yale University. He has written a screenplay based off of the life of Dickey Chapelle and is currently working on a stage adaptation. Before we invite John up here though, however, I'd like to also welcome a special guest to introduce our topic of discussion today. We're joined today by Jackie Spinner, a former war correspondent for the Washington Post as well as author of the forward of today's book. Please join me in welcoming both Jackie and John. (applause) Well, thank you all for coming out today. I'm going to keep my remarks very, very short because this is a day to honor John's wonderful contribution to our understanding of Dickey Chapelle's work and also for Dickey Chapelle herself. I was a war correspondent for the Washington Post. I was at the Post for 14 years. My time I spent both in Iraq and Afghanistan, but primarily in Iraq. And I was really drawn and very honored when I was asked to participate because there are so many similarities between Dickey's experience as a female correspondent covering Vietnam as there are for this generation of journalists who are covering the War on Terror. The weaponry is different. The uniforms are different. The experiences are slightly different. But, really, at the core of this for a journalist like Dickey Chapelle is this desire to go and tell stories and to do it in a very dangerous place but to do it on behalf of the American people. And so I am very humbled that I was invited to participate in this project. But I'm gonna turn this over to John now because he has some amazing stories about this book that he's put together, and I really would like to hear them as well. (applause) Thank you, Jackie, for your wonderful comments and also the beautiful forward that you wrote. You know, most of the time when I see book forwards, they're appropriate for the book and they're okay, but Jackie wrote a forward that really was so beautiful and moving that it made the book a better book. And so I'm very, very grateful to you. So, thank you for that. Jackie connected Dickey Chapelle from 70 years ago to the current environment that we have today. And so I'm very, very grateful for that. And I'm also grateful for all of you being here today. It's a beautiful day in Wisconsin. There's a farmer's market across the street, so I'm really happy that you guys chose to come here instead of hanging out over there 'cause I know for me I actually was walking by, and I really was thinking about heading over that way and I decided to come over here instead. I actually thought I would get a shot of bourbon before I got here, but nobody really believed me when I said that. So, I guess we're just going to have to launch into this the best way we can. But I'd like to thank, again, all of you for being here. I'd like to thank Wisconsin Public Television for recording this. Also, there are some folks from the publisher, the Wisconsin Historical Society Press, that are here today. And so thank you for all of you being here today. Although I think that they actually have ulterior motives. They want to make sure that I'm not going to go too far off the reservation and talk about something else. But, in any case, I'm glad that you're here. There also is something I do have to mention up front because I think this is important, that Dickey has been part of the Wisconsin fabric for decades. She was born in 1919. And she is buried in Milwaukee. But, certainly, her work took place mostly out of the state of Wisconsin, and that's the reason why we know about her and why we're here today. But for quite a number of years, there's been a collection of Dickey Chapelle's work. So, for those of you who never have heard of Dickey Chapelle before, hopefully this will trigger you and inspire you to perhaps take a ride over to the Wisconsin Historical Society building over at the campus of the University of Wisconsin because they've got a great collection there of her work. There are 23,000 photos and countless letters and things, some of which are really extraordinary, that can better tell the Dickey Chapelle story. So, I absolutely encourage you to do so. So, with that in mind, I'm going to go ahead and get started 'cause I've got about an hour and 40 minutes of material to go through. I don't know if you guys have that much patience or not, and I know that I'm probably going to get a hook probably at 40 minutes, but let's go ahead and get started. When I was thinking about what would be appropriate opening remarks, there were a number of things that came to mind, but there was one story that I'd actually just, one thing that my grandfather told me once. And it was so profound that I've never forgotten it, and I think it's worth mentioning here today. My grandfather told me that there's no such thing as men's work or women's work. There's just work. And I think that that's a great way to start a discussion off about Dickey Chapelle because I think that's essentially, fundamentally, what she was really interested in doing. She always felt that, well, why can't I do something if I'm capable? What difference does it make that I'm a women make to anybody? Now, of course, in the day that she grew up it made an awful lot of difference. And you can argue that, in many respects, that hasn't changed a whole lot. But the fact of the matter is I thought that was an interesting place to start because to me it really said a lot about Dickey Chapelle's character and sort of what I think that was at the heart of what she was doing. So, let's go ahead and get started here. This is a great quote, which had I seen before the book was finished, I would have included it in the book. It's a great line from Salman Rushdie who says that a photograph is a moral decision taken in one-eighth of a second. And, again, that's something else that's very descriptive of Dickey's motivation and doing her work. She wasn't just taking pictures for the sake of taking pictures. There was a purpose. There was a reason why she was doing it. And it kind of goes back to her upbringing in Wisconsin to some extent. Dickey was born in Milwaukee. In fact, I just got the name of the hospital, and I can't remember. I want to say it's Columbia Hospital, but that doesn't seem right. So for those of you who know, it was on the east side of Milwaukee. But she grew up in Shorewood, and Shorewood is a suburb of Wisconsin. And so here's a few pictures of Dickey Chapelle as she was growing up a little girl on skates. You can see probably being on stairs wearing skates is not a very good idea. But, certainly, again, it's illustrative of Dickey's early orientation towards being kind of a daredevil, if you will. She also was a swimmer and she said that growing up in Wisconsin, she learned how to swim like a fish, like everybody in Wisconsin at that time. And so I have no doubt here there's a lot of champion swimmers in the audience. So you're definitely in good company with Dickey Chapelle. Now, this is Dickey when she was on her way to school. There's one photo that I didn't include in this particular presentation, but it's something I always got a kick out of, that Dickey Chapelle used to go to school every morning and there was a flag somewhere along the route. And so she would actually salute the flag every morning on the way to school, which even back then was a great show of patriotism and certainly wasn't necessarily what kids her age were doing. So, one of the things you might find with Dickey growing up is that she wasn't necessarily in step with most of her peers at that time. But then, somewhere in her life, she came across this gentleman. Does anybody recognize him first before I go on? All right, good. Then I chose the right photo then. This is a very, very famous person in American history. This is the future Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd, who was the Antarctic explorer. And he was an aviator, and he was clearly a handsome guy and quite adventurous And so he caught the eye of Dickey Chapelle when she was a girl. And so, from then on, she became really fascinated with a couple of things, one of which was aviation, one of which was being an adventurer and explorer, which, of course, given her family's background of which they were German immigrants that came to the United States about 1850, they were all pacifists. So she was raised in a pacifist house where they looked at war as being absolutely unthinkable and morally wrong, and certainly coming off the heels of World War I, you can certainly understand that being a reasonable point of view. But needless to say, that was something that was very, very important to Dickey because that was what she was raised with. So, here she was a pacifist but she was also interested in all these kinds of adventurous things, and here was a guy who was an explorer. He was, at the time, he was a commander in the Navy and he was an aviator and he was a military guy, but he didn't fight wars. Although, she didn't know that he was a World War I veteran and actually did have some combat experience in his earlier life. But, in any case, Admiral Byrd had such a profound effect on what she wanted to do and she was so enamored with him that she eventually changed her name. She was born Georgette Meyer, and she went from being Georgette Meyer to Dickey Meyer. Now, for a while the Dickey part was a little messed up because apparently Byrd's nickname to his friends and family was Dick. Very, very common nickname for Richard. And so I think that her experiment with Dick Meyer didn't quite work so well, and she feminized it a little bit more to Dickey. So, she ends up finishing up her life in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, as the valedictorian at Shorewood High School. And, again, she probably was just as happy to leave Shorewood at that point as maybe some of her friends, or maybe non-friends would be better, that really hadn't connected with her very, very well. But she was the valedictorian and she was very, very smart and she was interested in things like aviation, and so she got a scholarship to MIT, which, in 1935, was a very, very rare thing for a woman to get a scholarship in aeronautical engineering. So it was really a rare thing, but it speaks to how smart she was. And, certainly, she had an awful lot going on with her upstairs, and she was a very, very bright kid. So, needless to say, she does go to MIT. She's taking aeronautical engineering classes, but one of the discussions that she had with her mother about this crazy idea about flying was sort of put to bed with, "Well, I think you're not going to fly; "you're going to write instead." 'Cause she was actually a pretty good writer and very, very interested in writing even when she was a little girl. But so she takes a journalism class while she's at MIT. So she has this great opportunity. She's one of the few women at MIT in 1935. She was 16 years old. And so what do you think she did with that opportunity? She stopped going to classes, she hung out at the Navy base and the Coast Guard base that was nearby, and she was actually working on writing stories about some of the things that they were doing. Now, I have to tell you, this is, I've looked at that picture and it's like, well, that's a great picture. But she's probably 16 years old. Maybe 17, but I'm going to go with 16. And now, I have a 15-year-old daughter, and I can honestly say that I try and be as reasonable as I can about sort of, you know, how people develop as they grow up. But if I ever saw my daughter with that smile on her face, I can guarantee you that I would be in there dragging her out. Now, of course, her parents couldn't do that because they're in Milwaukee while she's in Boston. And so, obviously, you can see that young Georgette Meyer did transform quite a lot during the course of her life into a beautiful young woman. A heavy smoker, actually, as it were. And so that was a very common picture that you could see with Dickey having a cigarette throughout her life. But, needless to say, her academic career tanked. After two years at MIT, she did drop out, unfortunately. But she did get a story published in the Boston Traveler. In fact, she had two stories that were published in the Boston Traveler. One was essentially a story that she had worked out with the Coast Guard who were operating seaplanes out of Boston and which she was able to figure out is that there's certain type of navigation telemetry that she had sort of figured out. And so she was excited about that and managed to get that story published. So, she was at that point, you could argue, a professional journalist, which was good because she had no career (laughs) at MIT. They did ask her to leave. So she ends up going back to Milwaukee, and so she starts working at the airfield nearby. Curtiss-Wright had an airfield outside of Milwaukee. And so there were stunt pilots that were flying out of there. So every Sunday there was an airshow in Milwaukee, apparently, in the 1930s. And so she talked herself into getting flight lessons for free in exchange for doing paperwork and all that kind of stuff for the pilots and the people that ran the airport and stuff. So she did that and her parents kind of put up with it and she was apparently hanging out with, you know, kind of a rough crowd, according to her parents anyway. They weren't very, very happy about her hanging out with these barnstormers and ne'er-do-wells and wing walkers and all that sort of stuff. So, as it turns out, her grandparents had retired to Coral Gables, Florida, so they shipped Dickey off to Florida. And, of course, what her parents didn't realize is that one of the largest airshows in the United States was in Miami. So, she managed to get herself a job working at the (laughs) airshow and doing public relations and things and cover the airshow. So, she was meeting exactly the kind of people that her parents didn't want her to meet, but she met them anyway. And one of the things that happened at that particular time is that the Miami airshow, which was a very, very large airshow, there were 17,000 people that were reported to be there in 1937. There was an airshow in Havana right afterward. And so she was asked by the person who ran the airshow who was sending people over to Miami if she would go and be a chaperone for the six Miss Miami Aviation contestants that were going to Havana. Now, of course, she was 18 years old herself, so this probably wasn't a very, very good idea. But he said, "Oh, by the way, as long as you're there, "if something happens, why don't you write it up "for the New York Times or the Associated Press." It's like, "Oh, okay." So she's there at the airshow as a chaperone for these young girls, and, unfortunately, there was a crash. There was a pilot that was killed. The head of the Cuban air force crashed. And so that was a big story. So she ends up, you know, composing her story, running over to a pay phone, and she had absolutely no idea who she was supposed to call because she didn't have any phone numbers. But it turns out there was a reporter that was there that kind of took pity on her and said, "All right, I'll make the phone call for you. "But FYI, in the future, "reporters are usually pretty competitive "so you might want to figure out who you're supposed to call "before you actually start reporting on something." And so she gets a byline in the New York Times. When the person who was going to be the incoming publicity director for TWA heard the story, thought it was hysterical, and he hired her on the spot. So 18-year-old Dickey moved from Miami to New York to work for TWA. So she does that for a year or so, and during the course of that year she meets this guy. This is Tony Chapelle. He was 20 years older than she was. He was a photographer, and he was in charge of the photo department for TWA. But he also was a photography instructor. So he taught Dickey photography, as well as other students and things. But he took a special interest in Dickey because they started dating and then eventually got married in 1940. And so, 1940 rolls around and imagine you're Mr. and Mrs. Meyer in Shorewood and you find out that your 20-year-old daughter is married to a guy who's 40-something years old and divorced, probably multiple times and all that. But as it turns out, they actually really liked Tony a lot. And her mother, in particular, was thrilled because she sort of had adult supervision, but she called Tony her bulldog. (audience laughs) So, you know, they never worried about the fact that Dickey wouldn't be taken care of while Tony was with her. And he was actually a very good photographer, and he was a great photo finisher. But he had other attributes that weren't necessarily so great. But, in any case, (laughs) so they get married, and so they end up, and here's Dickey when she was a little bit older, and you can see that, again, her transformation kind of continued from a young girl to a young woman. And here was a photo that Tony also took of her that was a very, very popular photo of her. In fact, it apparently ran in the Miami, not the Miami, the Milwaukee Journal, and so Dickey certainly signaled to anybody that may have known her previously that she had completely transformed herself and was a different person. And I think that Dickey was always trying to transform herself in her life. But, in any case, so here's Dickey in, really, her milieu. She really loved aviation. Now, she did actually, I have to tell you that when she was in Milwaukee she did take flight lessons, but she was really a terrible pilot. And even she said, "That I nearly crashed "in every single part of the field." And the lessons that she had gotten in exchange for her work basically went to her brother who finished them off for her because she really was pretty dreadful. And so, thank God she didn't continue as a pilot 'cause this would be a very, very short story. Here's the Meyer family at Christmas. At one point, we have... Let's see, on the bottom is her mother Edna, her father Paul, there's Dickey and Tony and her brother Bob. Now, Bob, later on, actually, when he grew up, he became a very well known geophysicist that taught at the University of Wisconsin for a number of years. And so he had quite a career in academics in his own right. But that's the family in 1943. And, as we all know, kind of backtracking a little bit, that in 1941, December 7th, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and Tony did what many other people did at that time. He went and he reenlisted in the Navy. He was a Navy World War I veteran as well, and he was made a chief photographer's mate. And so his story at that point took a little bit of a divergence because he was assigned to Panama to the Coco Solo Naval Air Station. And so he had the opportunity to be one of the first instructors of aviation photography to the Navy's new crop of photographer's mates that were doing that. And it actually was a pretty dangerous job. Now, since Dickey was a Navy dependent, she couldn't go with him. But what they realized is that if she could get a credential as a war correspondent that she could get sent down by the War Department to Panama to cover activities that were going on down there. And that's exactly what happened. So it took her about three months. She got credentialed as a war correspondent for Look, which she had taken some pictures for. Tony was a very good instructor, and she did turn out to be a pretty good photographer. But she gets herself down to Panama, which was a good thing, but it was also a bad thing because all the other Navy wives had been shipped off a long time ago. But Dickey was still there, and she managed to stay there actually for quite some time. And what she did was she was covering the 14th Infantry Division. And, you know, I forgot to show you this picture of her. This is the picture that she took of herself before she was putting in for her press credentials. And she actually made that little C armband herself. Which I always thought was kind of cool when I found that out. I think that her nieces still actually have that armband. So, Tony is down in Panama. He's doing his work with the Navy. The Navy's not too thrilled about Dickey Chapelle being there, but they really couldn't get rid of her until the Secretary of the Navy shows up. Frank Knox was there, and Dickey was going to take a picture of him except that she had a big Speed Graphic photo camera, the kind that you might have seen news photographers carrying. You still see them in the movies. It's almost like a cliche with this giant light. Well, the light bulb exploded, and so, needless to say, the security detail for the Secretary of the Navy wasn't very thrilled about that. And so, needless to say, neither was the base commanding officer of the base. And, unfortunately, he told Tony she's gotta go. And Tony said, "She doesn't take her orders from me. "You're going to have to take it up with the War Department. "They're the ones that sent her down here. "She's a credentialed war correspondent." Well, there's one thing that the base commander could do, and that's transfer Tony, which is what he did. So, that night when Dickey went home, he was gone. So she moved back to New York and worked on trying to get her skills back up. She was writing 2,000 words a day, which is an awful lot of writing to write every single day. She had worked on her photography previously, up until World War II. Afterwards, she had an opportunity to do her work in Panama. But, yet, here she is kind of trying to write. Now, what's interesting is she wrote in her autobiography something about the fact that it was such a miserable experience that what she would do is when she had to do anything that was unpleasant, like, I don't know, walking through the Hungarian-Austrian border in wintertime or getting off of a plane at night, she would say, "Well, at least it's not writing 2,000 words a day." And actually trying to write a lot, I can understand that completely. It is miserable trying to be that detailed in your work. But, needless to say, she did do it, and eventually she was able to get a credential, in 1945, to cover the war in the Pacific, which she did. She was assigned to a hospital ship that was on its way to Iwo Jima, and the hospital ship was the USS Samaritan. And, consequently, as you might imagine, there were a lot of casualties that she was facing. And, you know, it's certainly understanding she wanted to get ashore. The Navy did not want her to get ashore because there was a steady stream of casualties that were coming through every day, and some pretty horrific, as you might imagine. And we certainly are well-aware of the consequences of war, and she had sort of a front seat on that. But there's one of the stories that she really, really always liked to tell. And I think that I'm going to go ahead and just tell it on her behalf. Now, here you have a panoramic view of Iwo Jima, right? Now, we already know that the military was less than thrilled about her being there. And by the way, there were other women that were reporting on World War II. She was not the only one. But, that being said, she still persisted, and she managed to get herself onto Iwo Jima. And she was determined to get herself to the front. So she found a couple of Marines, and she said, "Hey, could you guys take me to the front?" And they said, "I guess." So they took her on a Jeep, they drove her someplace, stopped, she kind of looks around, and they're just saying, she says, "What's this?" And they say, "It's the front." She says, "Oh." But she knows that there was a little ridge, a little hill. So, she climbs up the hill, climbs up to the top of the hill. So she's standing around looking out, and I don't know exactly what the view that she saw was, but, you know, it could have been something like that. Iwo Jima looking out across the airfield to Mount Suribachi, which is where the famous flag raising took place. So, she's standing up there, kind of looking around, she has her camera, and she notices that there's like these buzzing things that are kind of whizzing by. And she's thinking, "I didn't realize there were insects on Iwo Jima," but she just assumed that they were wasps. So, she stands up there for 10 minutes, kind of looking around, taking some pictures, you know, not really in any particular hurry. She goes down, and she has two Marines that are waiting for her. And I've got to find this because this is something that I definitely have to read, and I want to make sure I get it right. So... And, of course, nothing is ever easy, right? My favorite thing to do is flip pages. All right, sorry about that. So, she goes down. There's these two Marines. They're dumbfounded, they're shocked. And so, she kind of walks over to them as if nothing had happened, and one of them charges over to her. And so, I'm going to read this. There's bad words. So, just please bear with me on that, and if you're easily offended, then just kind of go like that. So, here's what this Marine tells her. "That was the (audio cuts out) thing "I ever saw anybody do in my life! "Do you realize all the artillery and half the snipers "on both sides of this (audio cuts out) war "had 10 full minutes to make up their minds about you? "Didn't anyone ever pound into your little head "that you do not stand up, stand up, good Christ in heaven, "on a skyline, let alone stand up for 10 minutes?" But he wasn't finished. "And do you realize if you'd gone and gotten yourself shot, "I'd have had to spend the rest of the war "and 10 years after that filling out "(audio cuts out) papers?" (laughter) I kind of understand his concern, but I have to tell you, you would think that this idea that those things flying by her head weren't insects 'cause it's a volcanic island. There were no insects on Iwo Jima. And even if there were, they probably wouldn't have survived three days of naval and aerial bombardment. It's a volcanic island, and so those were snipers' bullets that were flying by her head. So that night, and by the way, actually, I should have asked this before, but would somebody mind reading something for me? It's really easy. It's very, very short. Big type. There's got to be somebody that can do a better job reading Dickey Chapelle than me. All right, I got somebody back there. Super. So, I can't, I'm told that I can't walk that way because I'll get shot by the cameraman, so I have to ask you to come up. And you can read it from wherever you're comfortable, but just make sure you, there you go. So, Dickey Chapelle goes back, and she's very, very excited about the fact that she really had this (laughs) near-death experience, which most people would say counterintuitively is probably not a good thing. But this is what Dickey had written afterward because she couldn't sleep. And so here's what she wrote. "It was dawn before I fell asleep, "and later in the morning, I was only half-awake "as I fed a fresh sheet of paper into the typewriter "and began to copy the notes "from the previous day out of my book. "But I wasn't too weary to type the date line firmly "as

if I'd been writing date lines all my life

"from the front at Iwo Jima, March 5. "Then

I remembered and added two words

under fire. "They looked great." Thank you. So, that was her near-death experience. She was actually excited about the fact that she, here and now, was a legitimate war correspondent because she had been under fire. So, it was a pivotal moment for Dickey Chapelle and her career, and so I think that's why she always tended to like to talk about it because, A, when you think about it, you're standing up in the middle of a war zone of a battle that was known as one of the bloodiest battles of the Pacific war. I believe there were 30 Medals of Honor awarded on Iwo Jima. So, it was a pretty tough fight. And she was thinking that there were bugs that were flying around up there, and it never occurred to her that it might be bullets. But again, she was naive. She was 26 years old, and her experience as a war correspondent previous was photographing the 14th Infantry Regiment training in Panama. So, she knew when she was going to get fired at. So, you know, it was a whole different experience. But needless to say, it was something that stuck with her the rest of her life, and it was very, very important to her. Now, while she was on Iwo Jima, this was one of the pictures that she had taken of a wounded Marine, and it probably was, up until Vietnam I think, her most reproduced photo that she had taken because it was used in a lot of blood drives and things like that. And that was a very, very important picture. Now, for me, whenever I look at photographs, there's always something that kind of gets my attention. It's always the things that you wouldn't think. So take a look at that and see if there's something in there that just sort of seems a little bit odd given the circumstances that we're looking at with somebody who's mortally wounded. The caption on this photo was "The Dying Marine." Yeah, it kind of looks like a smile. It wasn't, though. But 'cause there was a smiling picture of him. He did survive this, by the way. He was in the hospital for about a year afterwards, and Dickey went to visit him the next year. -

Audience

I remembered and added two words

: Shiny shoes. Well, that would be good. Well, he was a sailor. They wore neckties in war back then. So, you know, that's not so surprising. I'm going to move across here. His toothbrush. That's just one of those sort of odd little things that kind of got my attention because it's just so ordinary in this extraordinary picture with, again, the caption was "The Dying Marine," not "The Marine with the Best Dental Hygiene." But he's got his toothbrush, and it's like, well, of course he would. That's what people did. They stuck their toothbrushes in their pocket. I mean, they were still doing certain things that they would try and do to maintain their hygiene. And I'm sure, actually, Jackie, you might have been carrying around a lot of baby wipes in your time when you were out in the desert. I mean, I had baby wipes, which was really kind of funny and I'm kind of surprised that to this day my wife never really picked up on that 'cause that's a great opportunity to have kind of given me a hard time about it. But needless to say, sometimes in the most extraordinary moments, we still see these ordinary things that come out, and that's one of the ordinary things. And, as I said, this guy did survive. So, Dickey later felt that the photo caption was a little bit overly dramatic. But that Marine stayed in the hospital for a year afterward, so it was pretty serious. The fact that he survived really was probably nothing short of miraculous. But it sort of does prove that having whole blood available on the front is really a good thing. So, needless to say, Dickey goes from here and heads over back to Guam. She was finished with her Iwo Jima experiment, and then the next opportunity she had was Okinawa, which was the bloodiest battle of the Pacific war. And she was order expressly by the admiral who was in charge of public affairs for the Pacific fleet to not go on to Iwo Jima. She was on another hospital ship, the USS Relief, and she decided that, based on her experiences on Iwo Jima, that, yeah, the hospital ships are telling an important story, but she sort of already saw that. She managed to get herself onto shore on Okinawa as well. And, as you might imagine, people weren't really thrilled about seeing a woman on Okinawa. And so, she did kind of go from unit to unit, and most people would say variations of, "What the hell are you doing here?" You know, "Go someplace else." And so, she eventually got enough "go someplace elses" to get herself to the command post for the 6th Marine Division, which was run, at that point, by General Lemuel C. Shepherd. And Shepherd, of course, is like, "What the hell are you doing here?" type of thing. But Dickey managed to talk him into allowing her to stay. And so, he turned her over to a colonel that worked for him, one of his deputies named Colonel John McQueen, who said, "Okay, well, I'll tell you what. "We're going to hook you up "with one of our field medical units "that's actually moving forward right now." So, they got her over there. She spent 10 days going around Okinawa with this Marine field medical unit. And so she did her thing. She actually assisted in a couple of surgeries. Not on the surgeries themselves but holding flashlights and things because they didn't have any lights and things. They were under mortar and artillery attack during that time, and she got more pictures. There's only one problem with the getting more pictures is that eventually the Navy figured out that there was a woman on Okinawa, which, A, they didn't want in the first place and, B, she got onto Okinawa without proper approval to do so. So, needless to say, you can imagine the admiral is kind of pissed off, to say the least, and so he essentially had her arrested. That was sort of the way he called it. She was arrested on site. Once they found her, they pulled her off, put her on an LST and sent her back to Guam. Now, while she was in the harbor off of Okinawa, she saw some pretty horrendous kamikaze attacks. There were a number of ships that were in her area that were sunk. Fortunately, her ship wasn't hit. So, I don't know if any of you are familiar with the kamikazes, but those are suicide bombers, and the Japanese used them with great affect towards the latter battles of the war in the Pacific. Fortunately, she did make it back home, but when she got back to Guam, she was there without her military press credentials because since she had disobeyed orders, the Navy decided that she was not going to be a credentialed reporter for the military in the foreseeable future. So, it took her 10 years before she was able to get reaccredited. So, she gets herself home, and trying to figure out, "Now what do I do?" The war is almost over. She was having trouble selling her pictures. She was there on an assignment on Okinawa and Iwo Jima for Fawcett Publications. And one of their publications was Woman's Day and Popular Mechanics. And the editor told her something, and I think it was the editor for Woman's Day, said, "Dickey, you should know better than this. "We can't use these photos. "The wounded look too dirty." (laughter) So, she was sort of dealt with that sort of absurdity. And how do you answer a stupid question or a stupid statement like that? And you don't. But she was able to get a job working for Seventeen magazine as one of its early photographers, and so she was traveling around a lot. She did do a lot of work. She was traveling around a lot. And her husband, Tony, who was a great photographer, great photo finisher, great teacher, probably had a lot of not-so-great attributes as a human being. And so while she was traveling, very, very often Tony was probably having an affair with one of his photo students. Eventually she did figure it out, but at that point it's questionable whether she knew. She probably had some idea but just did what a lot of wives did back then. She just overlooked it. But needless to say, she got an assignment through the editor at Seventeen who was a Quaker who had sent her on assignment to document a Quaker work camp that they had had in Kentucky back in the late '40s. And so based on that, she was able to take Tony. In fact, it was a condition of her employment to go to Europe to cover the American Friends Service Committee relief efforts in rebuilding World War II is she had to go with a man, her husband. So she talked Tony into going, who really didn't want to go, actually. I mean, he had done some traveling around on his own. He'd been to China, obviously, and Panama. So, he had done enough of his work, and he was kind of tired of the traveling. And there's one thing I have to mention about Dickey. I forgot to bring this up before. About Tony. And that is when he was in Panama, he trained 27 sailors before he got shipped out thanks to Dickey. And out of those 27 sailors, seven were wounded during the war and three were killed. So, what he was doing was actually very, very important. And, of course, anybody that's doing any kind of military training and has been involved in it knows that there are a lot, there's a lot at stake. And so, it's something that you really need to be taking seriously. And so, again, he knew the realities of war and how dangerous things could be, which, of course, was one of the reasons why he was never thrilled about Dickey going off and being a war correspondent. But circumstances sort of worked that he was kind of maneuvered into having to accept it. So, now they're traveling around Europe, and this is their relief work phase. They worked for the American Friends Service Committee. They worked for a number of other relief agencies as well because even though there was some interest in it, Dickey started finding out that she was getting some of the same response that the editor had told her about, "Well, the wounded look too dirty." And it's like, "Well, the refugees look too dirty." Can you get them looking happier? You know, things like that. And so, it actually was tough for them. They did manage to stay out doing that, working for a number of relief agencies, including CARE, the International Rescue Committee, and then there was a State Department program called the Point Four Program in the early '50s. And so, while they were in Europe documenting all of the rebuilding of, really, the world after the war, they traveled around in trucks like this. So, not only was this their office, they actually lived in that. So, imagine being with your beloved for years at a time, in foreign countries, driving around on the mother of all road trips in a truck like this. But that's what they did. And so, really, Dickey and Tony did have a good relationship. I mean, he certainly had some flaws as a human being, but he was actually a very pleasant guy. He was very, very happy-go-lucky in general, and he certainly put up with an awful lot because at this time he was in his 50s and he wasn't getting any younger. And Dickey, of course, was still in her late 20s, early 30s, and had nothing but energy. So, it was kind of hard for him to kind of continue with that sort of life, and he really just wanted to get back home. And eventually they did go back in 1953. Now, they did have a couple of stories that ended up in National Geographic that resulted from this partnership of theirs. And, in fact, in the book that I wrote, there's not very many photos from the relief era because of the fact that there were so few that I could identify as photos that were definitely taken by Tony, or Dickey, because everything that they did at that point, everything that they wrote and everything that they, all the photography that ended up getting submitted was credited to Tony and Dickey Chapelle, or Dickey and Tony Chapelle. So, there's no way really of knowing which Chapelle had taken which photo. And then as far as, it's like, well, wait a second, I know artists. And artists, even though they may have been very collaborative at that point, they would care about what their work was and the way it was represented. That was my assumption. And so I figured if I could find Tony's work, then I could at least sort out what might have been Dickey's and what might have been Tony, but in talking to Tony's son, oh, I forgot to mention this 'cause Dickey didn't know about this either. At the time Dickey and Tony got married, Tony was still not legally divorced from his second wife. The other thing that he had neglected to mention is that he had a son that he just forgot about, I guess. And, of course, Dickey was livid about that, as you might imagine, and insisted that she have a relationship and sort of forced Tony's hand about sort of supporting him and trying to put him in schools and things. But Tony's son, Ron Chapelle, Dickey's stepson, spent most of his life in foster homes. So, Tony was that absentee of a parent. They did have a relationship as they got older, but the relationship was really never great. But one of the things that Ron did tell me when I talked to him is that unfortunately Tony's either fifth or sixth wife, he's not really sure exactly which, they still can't pin, he think it's actually six. But after she died, which was after Tony had passed along, she tossed away all of his photos, all of his negatives, all of his darkroom equipment. So, there is virtually no chance of really identifying all of Tony's work. And he was a photographer for quite some time. As I said, terrible human being, but he was apparently a very good photographer. And so it's really looking at it from the standpoint of photography as an art. I think it's tragic that as bad of a person as he may have been that there still is some part of historic record that's lost. But, needless to say, it also speaks to Dickey and Tony's relationship at that time because they really were working as a team. I mean, they were very, very close, and I think that's probably why Dickey may have overlooked the fact that he was sleeping with his students when she wasn't around for a very, very long time because their relationship worked. But over time, it did stop working. And when she was back at home, she got a job working in publicity for the International Rescue Committee, which, by the way, the chairman of which was? Richard E. Byrd, at that point. Admiral Byrd was the chair of the International Rescue Committee. So, it worked for her on a number of different levels. It was a job, and she still had a connection to her hero. So, one day she comes home and there's Tony with, let's just say he was closely entwined with one of his, not one of his photo students. It was a woman from Germany who was a refugee that they had sponsored into the country. And so Dickey had known her. And I think that was the breaking point, and that was the end of their marriage. Now, of course, as you might imagine, their breakup was pretty bad, didn't really work so well. She was pretty angry at him. She used that opportunity to go get her military press credential because people like Lemuel C. Shepherd, who was the commanding general of the 6th Marines at Okinawa, was now the commandant of the Marine Corps. And Colonel John McQueen was the commanding general of the Marine Corps recruit depot in San Diego. So, they were able to help her get reaccredited as a military correspondent. And so, she started going back and covering the military again, which is what her first love was. That was what she was really passionate about. And so, she did have the opportunity to reengage in covering military operations. Over time, she went to jump school, and she got her jump wings when she was 40. And now I've never been to jump school, and most of the people I know that have are usually 19. There was a Coast Guard chaplain who was 44 when he went to jump school, and the Marine Corps and Coast Guard chaplains come from the Navy so they're all Navy chaplains and they're assigned to the other services. And he's the oldest person that I know of, that I've heard of that had gone. But Dickey had gone when she was 40, and, again, back in 1959 or so, that was a rare thing for anybody in general that wasn't 19 or 20 in the military, but certainly for a woman it was extraordinary. So, she ends up continuing what she calls her period of life called the bayonet borders. Her bayonet borders reporting 'cause she was going to all these banana wars around the world. All these little places. She had gone and she had reported on, I'm going to kind of screw up the timeline a little bit here 'cause we're running a little short, but she had gone to cover the war in Algeria, the French and Algerian rebellion. She had been to Cuba. She had been running around with the Castros, which she had gone because she felt that they were legitimate freedom fighters and she was very shocked to find out that a lot of her work, which included being sold to Reader's Digest, was really helping promote a guy who was as bad as the dictator that he had replaced, but she didn't know that at the time. And so, she had gotten that reputation, at this point, as somebody that was willing to go as far forward as necessary to get the story, she would stay as long as it took to get the story, and she was very, very professional in doing it. So, in that story here, this is 11 out of 1958. So you can see, it's hard to see. I'm going to move over here again, move out of frame, but this is Dickey. And you can kind of see she's got a camera and she's right in the back of a Marine. Now, one of the things that she did take to over time is when she was with a formation, she liked to be on point. So, she was literally right behind the first and farthest forward person in any movement that she found herself in. So, essentially, that's Dickey probably as far forward as she could get with the Marine that was willing to let her do that. But one of the other pivotal moments in her life, or events in her life, was when she went to cover the Hungarian uprising. She was out there in 1956 with other people, like James Michener who was there. And James Michener actually mentioned her in a book called "The Bridge at Andau," although he didn't mention her by name, he talked about her. And so, Dickey had this idea that she was going to go to help the relief efforts there, and she was going to bring penicillin and smuggle it to various refugees that were trying to cross from Hungary into Austria. So she was working with the Hungarian freedom fighters. To do that, she was also semi pseudo-representing the International Rescue Committee, and she had also had an assignment from Life magazine to send them photos of what she was seeing. Now, Life magazine, by the way, did say, "Oh, by the way, if anything happens, "we're going to disavow any knowledge "of our connection with you." So, it was great for them. But, you know, they were also sort of covering themselves because one of the things that happened during the Hungarian uprising is that the Russians were shooting journalists as spies. So, that was their pretext. If you had a camera, you were a spy, you were going to get executed. And so, she knew that when she went over there. So she was, and I'm going to probably have to move so I'm going to be able to go through all of the details, but she was arrested one night by a Russian patrol while she was trying to get Hungarian refugees over to Austria. The Russians turned her over to the Hungarian secret police where she was in prison for about two months, most of it in solitary confinement. They were desperately trying to find a way to execute her as a spy, either for her to admit that she was a spy so they could hang her or somehow or other find some evidence that she had been a spy. But Dickey was actually pretty smart. Knowing that fact that they would probably look to execute her if they could, she had a little tiny spy camera, which, of course, people would use as evidence that she was a spy. No, she probably wasn't spying. It was just what she really needed to do. Walking around with a giant or five or six cameras that she would normally have used wouldn't be a very good idea when people are looking for people with cameras to shoot them. So, I think that some of the stories that people will say, "Oh, she was really spying out there for the CIA." No, I don't think so. But, needless to say, she was taken over by a car from wherever the Russians had her to the prison in Hungary. And so she managed, it was very, very smart. She, again, heavy smoker, and everybody was back then, so she smoked a cigarette. She had a cigarette in her hand, she had a pair of gloves, she pulled off the glove, reached into her bra where she had the camera taped, pulled it out, sticked it in the glove, took the cigarette and threw it out. So, they never had any evidence that she was actually taking pictures there. There was no physical evidence, which is interesting that they're worried about little things like physical evidence, but the fact that she was an American in custody was known. It wasn't a secret because she had been working for agencies and things that would have been concerned about her, except for Life. They weren't concerned about her so much, apparently. But, eventually, she was able to get out of that, and it was a horrible experience. And I think that what she had written about it was not nearly as bad as it was because she was probably a different person after she came back. And even just being in prison and going through some of the circumstances of anybody that's in a circumstance like that, it usually does change you, not usually for the better. And I also think that her treatment was a lot rougher than she had imagined. And there was some things, I had never heard this before until Joe Galloway, who was one of the book jacket contributors, had told me a couple of stories, which sort of verifies that, yeah, when she wrote her autobiography and she talked about that episode of her life, she didn't really tell the truth. Now, I also believe that some of the stories that you hear today about women war correspondents and the rough treatment that they're getting, they're probably not telling you everything that perhaps really had gone on because of the fact that they know that it's going to be an opportunity for people to say, "Well, maybe we shouldn't have women doing this job." They want to continue doing their work, and so I think that they're less likely to tell you how bad things might have gotten. And, of course, even with that, you know that there are certain circumstances where women have been kidnapped, they have been groped, they have been sexually assaulted, and raped. And so, it certainly was a tough time for Dickey. But, she did manage to go through that, and once she had recovered and kind of gotten her wits about her, she continued doing her work. She continued covering wars. She had gone to Algeria after this fact, to Cuba. And eventually she started reporting on the war in Vietnam. And she had gone to Vietnam four times, first in 1961. She was on the Laos/Vietnamese border. And her view of the war to me is very, very interesting because it's one we typically don't see because she was there so early on in that war's existence. I mean, we know more about the war from 1964 on, 1964 being the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which essentially triggered the tremendous buildup of the war. But, obviously, Americans had been running around Vietnam since the late '50s. And so, she was there covering the work of the advisers that were working with the Vietnamese army and navy. And one of the most famous pictures that Dickey had taken was this photo, which ran in the 1962 edition of National Geographic, which shows a combat-ready Marine. And there was some pushback from the Pentagon about this because they really didn't want the American public to know that American advisers were doing more than advising. And actually, to their credit, National Geographic pushed back and said, "No, we're going to go ahead and publish it." And so they did. This photograph won the 1963 National Press Photographer's Award. Dickey's early reports in Vietnam, which were not included in her book but she had already been reporting in Vietnam, were awarded the George Polk Award by the Overseas Press Club. And so she had been a reporter that started to get some note at this particular point in her life. But she was already in her mid-40s, and it was getting tougher for her. But she still persevered because that's what she did. She identified herself as a war correspondent, and she knew that's what was important to her. So, she couldn't imagine doing anything else. And so, even though she was in her late-40s and she started having some physical problems and she worked out like a fiend every day to make sure that she would never be a drag to any of the troops that she was with. And so it certainly was tough. And she came up with pictures like this. This photo is one of the ones that I wish was in the book. It was just one of those things that I just couldn't fit in there, but it's a great photo. And the reason why it's a great photo, and it's something that goes back to what Joe Galloway had told me, and that in his experience with Vietnam, for those of you who don't know, Joe Galloway wrote the book "We Were Soldiers Once and Young." And his actual participation in that battle was dramatized in the movie "We Were Soldiers." And so Joe had a lot of combat reporting experience and combat experience. So, Joe told me that since he had been with Dickey for some time before he had gone to the battle of the la Drang Valley, he knew her and he said that one of the things that she was very, very sensitive to was the way that the troops were treating prisoners. And it's like, well, of course she would because she had been a prisoner herself. So it was an experience that she had. She had been the other person that was in the handcuffs or tied up or blindfolded, getting pushed around by people that she didn't know, speaking languages that she didn't understand. So she was very, very sympathetic to the plight of Vietnamese prisoners, suspected Viet Cong prisoners, which this is what we usually have. So, she had been there several times. She had gone to the Dominican Republic and covered the war there as well. So, by 1965, she managed to get herself an assignment back to Vietnam for the fourth time. Now, at this point, she's 46 years old. She had just had two knee surgeries. The story that she had been working on in National Geographic in 1964 she had just found out was not going to get published. She had already been spending her career really trying to chase after a lot of jobs and also not being able to get the same kind of money that men did. In fact, when she was married to Tony, because of her loyalty to Tony, she would never take a job that paid more than he would make because she knew that it would upset him, that it would hurt him. And she was, you know, she was very, very concerned about him and what he felt to the point that even after their divorce, which was pretty messy and certainly so, you know, with the knowledge that he had been screwing around for a long time and you finally had to deal with it, but they did actually come to terms, and they remained close friends, actually, until they died. So, they were always talking, and even the woman that he was having the affair with that he did marry did report that when Dickey would come to visit them later on, that usually they would have some small talk, and she, apparently, and Dickey had sort of reconciled. There was not really, no serious hard feelings. But she said that usually what she would do is have the moment of discussion and then step away and let her and Tony talk. So she's on a patrol with the Marines in Vietnam, Operation Black Ferret. Now, we already know that she's getting up there. She's having trouble getting her stories actually even placed, and yet she still was persevering. The patrol was a search and destroy mission, and, really, ultimately the way the history will look at it, really didn't yield much in any way of anything important. They did get a few Viet Cong suspects. There were a few Vietnamese that were killed. But on the morning of November 4th, during this patrol, she was out on point, as she normally was, and the Marine that was walking in front of her tripped a fishing line, which exploded a grenade and mortar combination, spraying shrapnel out and hitting six Marines and Dickey Chapelle. And Dickey Chapelle, unfortunately, being just at the wrong place at the wrong time, caught some shrapnel throughout her body, but it cut her carotid artery. So she went down, and, of course, there were five other Marines. And, actually, one of the Marines was really a Navy corpsman, so he was a sailor, but to Marines, Navy corpsman are Marines. And so you've got one less corpsman. And so there's this chaos. And, oh, by the way, there's more reporters that are here that are taking pictures. And so there's really nothing that could be done. And so they call for a medevac, as you might imagine, they're bringing up the helicopters. There was always some question about whether she died before she got on the helicopter or after, but the best information that I have is that she was killed before she was put on the helicopter. And one of the reporters that happened to be in the same formation was a French photographer named Henri Huet, who was a very, very experienced reporter. He'd been reporting on the war in Indochina from 1954 on. And so he is considered to be one of the great photographers that reported on the war in Vietnam. He was able to take this picture, which has become one of the most iconic images of the war in Vietnam, which we see Dickey Chapelle and her what became then-famous Australian bush hat, which she had taken to wearing in the '60s. She usually had tucked a wildflower in the band, and she always wore pearl earrings, which are a little hard to see in this photo. But if you get closer, you can see distinctly she's got a pearl earring. So, Dickey Chapelle died in the field, and, needless to say, it was something that was a very traumatic moment. And so I'd like to read the message that was released by Colonel Wallace, I'm sorry, General Wallace Greene, the commandant of the Marine Corps. He said, "All U.S. Marines the world over "mourn the death of Dickey Chapelle, "who died of wounds while covering combat operations "by Marines in South Vietnam on November 4, 1965. "She was not only a skilled, dedicated newspaperwoman, "but she was an exemplary patriot "whose great love for her country "was an inspiration to all who knew her and worked with her. "It has been said by her media colleagues "that she died with the men she loved. "And it must also be said that respect, "admiration, and devotion was mutual. "She was one of us, and we will miss her." And so, the fact that she was able to get such a response from the commandant in the Marine Corps and the rest of the Marines is extraordinary, and it speaks to the importance of Dickey Chapelle not only as a war correspondent but certainly as a person. I think that she probably never achieved her goal of showing imagery that would be so horrible that people might, that sensible people might come to the conclusion that perhaps war was a really bad thing to do. But she leaves a legacy as a war correspondent that we see today. And I actually see that if I were to sort of try to figure out how Dickey Chapelle works today that, well, what she did was she is probably a model for a lot of modern women war correspondents, even though that wasn't her intent, but I think that's sort of what happened because certainly we have a lot of brave women that are out there along with brave men that are reporting on wars. And right now, we're seeing more of them are getting killed, they're getting captured. We know that we've had horrific things, like people getting their, they're getting beheaded by ISIL. We have James Foley, who was a Marquette University graduate. Lynsey Addario, actually, who's a great photographer as well, was kidnapped and groped while she was doing her work. My forward writer, Jackie Spinner, was a war correspondent, covering the war in Iraq. And so, these are women that have a direct relationship and a direct link to Dickey Chapelle today. So, there's more things that I would love to talk about and tell you about Dickey. There's one thing I do have to do, if we have enough time. This is the image of Dickey that I always, I think it's her favorite image, and I also think it's the one that shows her at her best. She's focused, she's at work. There's a tank behind her. So this is the way that I believe that Dickey Chapelle should be remembered. The fact that she was killed was a terrible, terrible tragedy, but what's important is we need to remember the work that she did, and I think that that's significant. So I'm going to go ahead, and this is only about a minute or so. But this is one of, this is a great quote from Dickey. And I think it really is also something that tells a lot about her. This was taken by one of the subjects of her. That one photo was taken by the subjects of her last story that finally appeared in National Geographic posthumously in '66. This is in sort of order of the wars. Fidel, Raul, Mrs. Castro, and a close personal friend of Fidel in that photo. That's actually my personal favorite photo right there. A selfie. And there we go back to Dickey. So, I wish I added that other hour that I'd mentioned of the hour and 40 minutes. I really do need probably that much time to go through Dickey's story step-by-step and really reinforce how each part of her life, part of life story, really had sort of created the work that we see. But we don't have the time to do that, and so I'd like to thank you all for coming. I know that with the food fair across, or a farmer's market across the street that there's lots of things that you can do, and I'm glad that you chose the opportunity to be here today. All right, well, thanks again. Thanks to all of you for being here today at the Veterans Museum. Thank you. (applause)