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War reporter Kate Webb visits Iowa State March 3-4By Lori Runkle
After Kate Webb graduated in 1964 with honors in symbolic logic from Australia’s Melbourne University, she made stained glass windows and painted before flying to Saigon in March 1967 to cover the Vietnam War. "A painter's eyes help take photographs and helps description,” she wrote in a recent email. “Symbolic logic, or any kind of logic for that matter, is a nice counterpoint to propaganda and persuasion.” Webb visited Iowa State and the Greenlee School March 3-4. She presented "A War Reporter Is Just a Reporter - No More, No Less” on March 3 in the Great Hall of the Memorial Union. Webb, who supposedly retired from journalism in 2001, is currently the Scripps Howard Visiting Professional at the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University in Athens. Webb was 23 years old traveling on a one-way ticket to Saigon, and armed only with an old Remington typewriter and a couple of hundred dollars. The Vietnam War was the biggest news story of the year, and Webb planned to be there to cover it. In Webb’s personal essay “Highpockets,” which is included in the anthology “War Torn: The Personal Experiences of Women Reporters in the Vietnam War,” she writes, “…I found myself as often as not in the field as in parliament (yes, there was a parliament) and passed the test of finding out whether I could function and write amid the knife-edge fear of battle.” Webb, who worked for United Press International until 1977, covered assignments in Vietnam that she described as “turning sad.” In “Highpockets,” she writes, “Small kids stepped on land mines... A GI next to you got hit, and you didn’t. A kid who the night before had been whispering over a Dear John letter from his girl in Puerto Rico was a cold, gray weight in a slimy poncho hung on two poles.” How did Webb handle the danger and fear of working in a war zone? Her direct two-word answer, “Keep trucking,” kept her moving. Four years later, in 1971, Webb described her promotion to UPI bureau chief in Cambodia as stepping into a dead man’s shoes. Frank Frosch, who was the previous UPI bureau chief in the country, was discovered facedown in a paddy field. Webb was his replacement. "Cambodia was a different war,” she writes in “Highpockets,” and Webb took many of the risky assignments herself. In April 1971, Webb, along with four other journalists and their driver, were captured by North Vietnamese troops on a road that ran through the Kirirom mountains in Cambodia. The six captives, dressed by their captors in black Viet Cong pajamas, were interrogated for hours and marched through the hot jungle. The prisoners’ health deteriorated rapidly due to their poor diets, strenuous marches, insect bites and unsanitary living conditions in a humid jungle environment. During Webb’s captivity, she often vomited, shivered from fever, excreted blood in her stools and walked for miles on pus-filled feet that she described as feeling like “sacks of jelly.” After 23 days, the prisoners were released. During her captivity, Webb had been reported killed; her family had held a memorial service for her; she had the opportunity to read her own obituaries. Despite this temporary setback, “I did not stop after Cambodia,” she writes. "With UPI, later as a freelancer, and the last 17 years with the AFP (the French news agency), I moved on to cover India and sometimes Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, the Philippines, and East Timor and Indonesia.” Webb is featured in the December 2001/January 2002 The Correspondent, a Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Hong Kong online publication. The story states, “Through it all, (Webb has) kept a few basic journalistic tenets alive. Kate is utterly anal about getting facts straight and quotes accurate. She's also renowned for screaming at the desk when stories stumble, and can be a right horror some days, colleagues admit. 'The more you get the facts right on breaking news, the less chance there is for people to lie,’ she says.” When asked where the native New Zealander calls home, Webb replied, “Where I hang my hat.”
Last updated: March 4, 2005 |
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