On March 3, 1945, the 12th day of the campaign for Iwo Jima, Dickey Chapelle climbed a ridge overlooking the front of what was supposed to be one of the bloodiest battles of the war so far.
“I stood straight up, planted my feet firmly and raised the camera,” the photographer wrote in her autobiography, What’s a Woman Doing Here? “Three tanks far enough away to look toy-sized moved through the finder; bouncing visibly seconds before the detonation reached my ears.”
But aside from that, nothing happened. “The only sounds were those of my breathing, some wasp-like noises and the crunch of my boots on the gravel. Where were all the people?”
When she returned to the American officer who had escorted her to the area, she found out: They were hidden.
“’That,’ he said, ‘was the god-damnedest thing I ever saw anybody do in my life,’” she recalled in her book. “’Do you realize that all the artillery and half the snipers on both sides of this war had ten full minutes to make up their minds about you? Didn’t anyone ever pound into your head that you do not—Lord in heaven!—stand up on a skyline? And do you realize that if you’d got yourself shot I’d have had to spend the next ten years of my life filling out papers?’”
Chapelle vowed to shoot the rest of her photos lying down, but it wasn’t until days later that she understood the lieutenant’s distress. “The wasp-like noises I had heard were snipers’ bullets whizzing by,” she wrote. (This is how the science of fear makes soldiers stronger.)
It was one of her first lessons as a war correspondent, and an assignment that would lead to some of her most reproduced photos of all time. For the next two decades she would embed with military units around the world, taking photos for publications including National Geographic, Life, and Reader’s Digest, in places such as the Dominican Republic, Lebanon, and Cuba.
It was 1965 when she died on assignment in Vietnam after a nearby Marine triggered a tripwire boobytrap on patrol. Shrapnel from the blast severed Chapelle’s carotid artery, killing her shortly after. Chapelle became the first female American war correspondent killed in action. She was given a full Marine burial.
A plaque dedicated in 1966 by Wallace M. Greene Jr., commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, read: “To the memory of Dickey Chapelle. War correspondent killed in action near hear on 4 November 1965. She was one of us and we will miss her.”
The following photos and captions are from the book Dickey Chapelle Under Fire, a retrospective of Chapelle’s work by John Garofolo.
from Reader's Digest http://ift.tt/2gXhU8t
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