- [Narrator] Funding is made possible in part by the Shorewood Historical Society, dedicated to preserving Shorewood's rich history for the benefit of current and future generations.

Additional funding provided by the Milwaukee Press Club.

(helicopter blades whirring) (guns firing) - [Mike] When you say combat reporter, it usually brings to mind the picture of a battered, unshaven, weary correspondent trudging through the mud.

Now it may surprise you, but this lady who has covered wars, and violence, and danger ever since she was 18 years old.

She is a woman who has covered seven wars in the past five years, and her name is Dickey Chapelle.

(uplifting music) - Ah, yes, miss Dickey.

I met her at the Marine Press Center in Da Nang.

I was 23 years old and she was 46 and she seemed to be rather motherly and offering some good advice, and I was soaking that up.

- She had to prove herself.

And God knows she did.

She was my hero, yes, certainly.

- It's very honorable what she did, and I'm shocked that people don't know who she was and don't even know her name.

- I had never heard of Dickey Chapelle in my entire life, and when I was actually first in the Coast Guard, one of the people that I worked with said you've got to check out this book called Brown Water, Black Berets.

And in that book, there's a chapter about Dickey Chapelle.

She did something that was not very common in a time where it was not easy to do what she did.

- The thing that sticks in my mind, is that she said the main thing you have to always remember about covering combat, is you've got to survive to get the story and the pictures out to the world.

If you get killed in there, it's all for nothing.

(helicopter blades whirring) (explosion booms) (machine gun firing) - [Kathy] War used to be considered a job solely for men.

It didn't matter if it was fighting it or reporting about it.

One of the best known American women combat correspondents was Margaret Bourke-White, the very first American female photojournalist and the first woman to work in combat zones during World War II.

Pulitzer prize-winning reporter Marguerite Higgins, best known for covering the Korean War from the front lines, also made a familiar name for herself.

Perhaps lost in the shadows of these successful women was Dickey Chapelle, another gutsy woman among the first to write about and photograph men at war.

It's how and why she covered war that made a difference.

With troops on the battle lines while other correspondents tended to stay in designated press centers.

She put a face to those who served, sharing their personal stories along with accounts of what was really happening during combat with the rest of the country.

- The sum of her core was she was really doing this because she felt she was doing the right thing.

That she was telling people things about war that they needed to know and that she was a good person to do it, just as good as anybody.

She felt that her gender should never get in the way.

- [Kathy] Those who knew Dickey Chapelle remember a signature uniform that complemented her petite frame.

Fatigues, an Australian bush hat, dramatic harlequin glasses, her beloved Leica camera, and a pair of small pearl earrings.

She said she wore the earrings so as not to be mistaken for a marine.

- I believe my father gave them to her.

She wanted to express the fact that she was a woman and that she was in a place where a woman was not expected to be.

She never ever asked for any quarter or any favoritism for her gender, but she was proud of her gender.

- I noticed 'em.

She never talked about 'em, but I think, that although she was hard-bitten, tough as nails.

And portrayed that aura, especially she's working in a man's world at a man's game in combat.

But she wanted to preserve just that bit of femininity, and she did.

- [Kathy] In the end, it was much more than her gender that secured her spot in the history books.

It was the often ugly result of war, killed in action, that placed her name at the top of a firsts list.

On November 4th, 1965, Dickey Chapelle became the first American woman war reporter killed in action, and the first female correspondent killed in a place called Vietnam.

- I respected her.

I listened to her advice.

I wept when she died, really ripped the heart out of me.

(upbeat piano music) - [Kathy] Dickey Chapelle called Wisconsin home.

She nurtured her trail blazing spirit in Milwaukee's northeast community of Shorewood where she spent much of her childhood.

She marched to the beat of her own drum at a time when girls were supposed to be girls and boys were boys.

She was often physically described as short and chubby and wore glasses because she was quite nearsighted.

This quirky, precocious tomboy embraced a competitive and determined spirit.

She dreamed about flying airplanes.

She thought nothing was going to stop her.

Given her unconventional behavior and personality, it was not surprising she took on several different names, sometimes by choice, to fit a particular mood or imaginings.

Dickey Chapelle was actually born Georgette Louise Marie Meyer on March 14th, 1919, named after her aunt.

She was the first child born to Paul Gerhard Meyer and Edna Englehardt-Meyer, both of rich German heritage.

Five years later, brother Robert came along.

He grew up to be a geophysics professor at the University of Wisconsin.

- They were somewhat close.

But I think it was because Dickey was older, he had sort of put her on a pedestal a bit, and I wouldn't say that they palled around together.

I think that he watched a little bit from afar, and a little bit in awe and admiration for what she was doing.

- [Kathy] The family first lived at 902 North Second Street in the city of Milwaukee, which is now the 2400 block of North Second between Meinecke Avenue and Clark street.

Georgie Lou, as her family called her, was nine years old when the family moved to this eight-room home on Shorewood Boulevard, in what was then Milwaukee's new conservative, middle class village of Shorewood.

The Meyers apparently liked the new suburb because of its progressive character and its closeness to Milwaukee's old-world German downtown.

- Shorewood at that time was booming.

It had grown just unbelievably during the 1920's.

There was a tremendous amount of house building, but it was also heading into the depression years.

So it was probably, it appears that her father always had a job, and Shorewood was probably not as hit as hard as some places by the depression, but we had a lot of W.P.A.

workers in Shorewood at the time.

- [Kathy] While no Meyer family members live here today, the outside of the house looks relatively the same as it did back in the late 1920's and 1930's, down to the red-trimmed windows.

It was a household filled with family, including grandparents and Georgie's favorite aunt, Louise.

- Aunt Louise had her own poise, her own way of dealing with the world on her own terms, and she lived to be 107.

Dickey was encouraged by Louise to be her own person.

Even if her mother told her she couldn't do it, there were plenty of other adults in the house who told her she could, depending on what craziness she was coming up with.

- [Kathy] Georgie Lou's friends thought she was a little odd because of a certain daily ritual she started while attending Atwater elementary school, just blocks from her house.

- She certainly was very much her own person and, a little out of the mainstream in terms of the things that she enjoyed and was promoting.

There's a story about her walking to school at Atwater and every morning going by the village hall and stopping to salute the flag.

Which is not something most nine and 10-year-olds would think about doing.

- [Kathy] Georgie Lou's strong love of country always seemed to be an inspiration throughout her life.

- I should have worn a short sleeve today so I could role up my right sleeve and show you the tattoo of the American flag, and a quote from McArthur that says, "Duty, honor, country."

And underneath that is my Vietnam service ribbon.

This level of patriotism I learned from her.

- [Dickey] I grew up in the heart of the United States, and I believed that I could do anything I really wanted to do and I still believe it.

In the first place, I hope you will never say it without a sense of its uniqueness.

You have just defined Americanism.

Because nowhere else in the world and I've now worked in my 44th country, nowhere else in the world can a woman about 17 or an old lady in her forties like I am, nowhere else in the world can she say, I can do anything I want to do.

- She was just one of those people that was adventuresome and smart and just wanted to do something in life.

She was way ahead of her time.

I think she was brave.

- [Kathy] Dickey Chapelle probably had her father to thank for often supporting her wild ideas and, in part, for her bravery.

Paul Meyer spent a lot of time at construction sites, as a building supplies salesman.

He had a way of teaching his young children how to handle certain situations.

- Her father supposedly took her and her brother to construction sites and had them walking up on the tops of the buildings and telling them, just don't look down, you'll be fine.

And she perhaps learned something about how to handle fear.

Making them be a little bit stronger and able to handle what life would throw them.

- [Kathy] Paul Meyer, a quiet and reserved man, became active in the local republican party, which may have prompted political discussions at home.

- She did mention to me at one time that she grew up in a family and in an environment where pacifism was very much (speaks in foreign language) and yet she became perhaps as a bit of rebellion against that background she became fascinated with the idea of combat.

- [Kathy] Georgie Lou's mother, a tall slender woman, had a brief teaching career and a college degree in domestic science.

She imparted some lessons of her own on Georgie Lou, who called her mother marmee, or marm, for short.

A protective and domineering mother, Edna strongly encouraged Georgie Lou to keep up her writing and english skills during her years at Shorewood high school.

- I think she really was an influence and they had a long close relationship.

Her mother, like probably many mothers, she drove Dickey crazy and then after she died, she sort of was maybe a little lost without her.

- [Kathy] While at Shorewood high, Georgie Lou dabbled in the radio club and wrote for the school newspaper under her new name, G.L.

Meyer.

Outside of school, she hung around local air fields, sometimes talking her father into taking her there.

- Flying was a big interest of hers.

Being able to even just go out and watch the stunt flyers, which was a big thing at that time, wanting to fly herself, wanting to be an engineer.

All were, her mother said you'd be a nice english major, that will be fine, be a writer.

- [Kathy] In fact, Edna Meyer discouraged her daughter from anything to do with flying airplanes for safety reasons and perhaps social pressure.

Aside from Amelia Erhardt, girls and planes just didn't mix back in the 1930's.

- [Edna] No daughter of mine is going to set foot in an airplane.

- [Kathy] That was probably the first time young Georgie was told she couldn't do something.

But that did not stop the determined young woman from fueling her passion for planes and daring ventures.

- Her brother Bob was in my class.

Her brother used to talk about her once in a while, that she was off learning how to fly, and doing things like that.

He was always surprised at what she was doing.

My husband walked to school with Bob Meyer every morning and one time I asked him, my husband, if he knew that Dickey Chapelle was Bob Meyer's sister.

And he said "Well, if she was, he never talked about it."

Georgette Meyer, there's nobody like her and nobody else is going to be like her.

(upbeat swing music) - [Kathy] It soon became time for another name change.

This time to a moniker that would stick, Dickey.

But the story behind this particular name isn't so simple.

One version is that when Georgie Lou was in high school, she went to the Oriental theater on Milwaukee's east side to watch a film on someone she admired, aviator and polar explorer Admiral Richard Byrd.

And then her family says she actually met Byrd and shook his hand following a talk at her high school.

So the story goes, she didn't wash her hand for days and changed her name to Dickey.

Then years later, newsman Mike Wallace asked the question.

- [Mike] First of all, where does Dickey come from?

- [Dickey] Dickey's my grandmother's maiden name.

- [Kathy] Family accounts of her grandmother's maiden names indicate otherwise.

So the real reason behind the name Dickey may never really be known.

What is known is that Georgette Meyer, Georgie Lou Meyer, G.L.

Meyer, or Dickey Meyer, was a smart kid.

Smart enough to skip a grade and graduate from Shorewood high school in 1935 as valedictorian at the age of 16.

Her academic prowess resulted in an unprecedented achievement for a teenage girl in the 1930's.

She received a full scholarship to M.I.T., the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to study engineering and the design of airplanes.

But after two years, she flunked out, apparently bored with the classroom, still longing for real adventure in the skies.

In fact, she opted against taking an important chemistry test in order to cover a food airlift to the flooded city of Worcester.

She realized planes and news reporting made a pretty good combination.

Back in Milwaukee, she headed to Curtiss-Wright Field, now Timmerman Airport, to catch an air circus or two and hoped for a few flying lessons.

And then there was this, Dickey's mother learned of an affair with a pilot, and sent Dickey to live with her grandparents in Florida.

But Dickey still found her way to an air show in Miami and got a job writing press releases about the show.

She soon landed a job in the publicity office at Transcontinental and Western Airlines in New York.

Meanwhile, she still loved heading to the air circus when it came to town and logged lessons in her pilot book.

But it eventually became clear to Dickey that her near-sightedness would end her desire to be a pilot.

Instead, her professional career was taking off, just as her mother had wished, as a writer.

- [Patty] Dickey, you started I understand as a cub reporter out of Milwaukee by selling a story to the New York Times.

- [Dickey] Yes, Patty, I did.

And no more auspicious sale has ever been made in my life.

- [Patty] What was the story?

- [Dickey] The Grumman fighter plane then held one of the world's speed records.

Had never been covered in a power dive, straight down power dive.

- [Patty] What?!

- [Dickey] No, no it had never been covered, because there was only one seat in it, but there was one model in the whole world that happened to have two seats in it.

I went up to Leroy Grummond and I said, "Sir, have you ever "heard of a reporter describing "the sensations of a power dive," and he said, "If you want to ride my airplane "why don't you just say so?"

(upbeat jazz music) - [Kathy] It was 1939, and life changed even more for Dickey Meyer.

A photographer named Tony Chapelle arrived on the scene.

He was one of the first navy photographers in World War I and now worked as a photographer for TWA.

Dickey took Tony's photography class because he suggested she learn the skill to enhance her storytelling.

He once told her-- - [Tony] You have to be able to write, too, so you can do captions.

But the picture is your reason for being.

It doesn't matter what you've seen with your eyes.

If you can't prove it happened with a picture, it didn't happen.

- [Kathy] The two eventually married in Milwaukee on October 2nd, 1940.

Dickey became Tony Chapelle's third wife.

Tony, 20 years older than Dickey, supposedly had a secret.

He divorced wife number two illegally in Mexico.

Dickey and Tony's relationship ended with an annulment after 15 years together.

Tony Chapelle reportedly married two more times.

- I don't know what attracted her to him except that he was one of the world's greatest con men.

He could con anybody into or out of anything, - [Kathy] During their relationship, Tony helped Dickey get established as a photojournalist.

She had no steady jobs, just a lot of freelancing, often for women's magazines.

Her photography credentials were often described as mediocre.

- She was taking a lot of film and a lot of the photos were not necessarily coming out as well as they should have.

- Dickey had an eye for a dramatic picture.

(dramatic music) My father taught her photography.

He taught her composition and she grabbed on to that like an artist.

I mean she was a Rembrandt of composition.

What she was not was a technician.

Apparently, the use of a light meter was something that she never quite mastered.

- [Kathy] At one time, Life magazine turned down several of Dickey's stories because Margaret Bourke-White became their female star.

As slim as Dickey Chapelle had become, she was big on guts and tenacity.

With Tony's help, Dickey's first big success came when she sold a story to the New York Times about American pilots enlisting in the Canadian air force to fight against Hitler.

The story, published on October 27th, 1940, billed Dickey as the first female correspondent having access to Canadian airbases.

(machine gun firing) (cannon booms) World War II was underway when Tony Chapelle volunteered himself back into the navy and was stationed in Panama.

Dickey couldn't go along as a navy wife, but she could go as a news photographer.

Look magazine agreed to send Dickey to the canal zone where she would cover gun crews on freighters running the Japanese blockade, but Dickey had to get her own credentials.

According to biographer Roberta Ofstroff, Dickey soon found herself dealing with the obvious gender issue and answering to an army Colonel in Washington, D.C. - [Colonel] I presume you know, Mrs. Chapelle, that troops in the field have no facilities for women.

- [Kathy] Dickey, downplaying the woman thing again, shot back, saying she was sure the 14th infantry had solved much tougher problems than that, and they would probably think of a way to lick this one too.

A response that probably helped future female war reporters, including former combat reporter Jackie Spinner, who is now a journalism professor at Columbia College in Chicago.

- I was on the front lines as a woman and it could be complicated.

Where was I gonna go to the bathroom?

With nine marines standing around me?

It was very delicate.

You learn.

A Gatorade bottle is better than a water bottle.

It never crossed my mind not to raise my hand to go to Iraq because I'm female.

I just assumed that I could go, that I could raise my hand and is that because of Dickey Chapelle?

Absolutely.

- [Kathy] Dickey ran into another problem while doing a story in the Panamanian jungles on the army unit known as the Bush Masters, army censorship.

All film and copy had to be approved before it went out.

Dickey would battle military censorship her entire career, always frustrated that only part of the truth, the kind that would boost morale, could be told.

- In all the conflicts Dickey Chapelle covered, there were accounts that were disputed, official accounts that ended up being disputed by the journalists who were on the ground.

We go to war because we need to bear witness.

After Panama, Dickey spent the next two years being a wife and freelancing in New York.

According to Ostroff, Dickey made sure she was never paid more than Tony, so as not to bruise his male ego.

- I would not be surprised.

That sounds a little like her, and I think that reflects the loving nature of their marriage.

- [Interviewer] And what do you do for just shear kicks, Dickey?

- [Dickey] I think one of the nicest things that happens to me is not to have to pack and go anywhere, and four day holidays, let's say, on which I can stay home and play housewife.

I don't do it terribly well.

- [Kathy] Staying home and covering the women's beat both got old for Dickey.

That was about to change.

She made sure of it.

(dramatic music) Dickey Chapelle began her war reporting career in earnest in the early 1940's.

She freelanced for a chain of magazines and headed to the South Pacific on board the U.S.S.

Samaritan assigned to photograph activities of the nurses and the use of whole blood in transfusions for the wounded.

Her goal, get to the front lines.

In typical Dickey style, she got what she wanted, first convincing a press officer to let her take her story to a field hospital.

From there, she talked her way to the front lines, covering the marines and the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

- The marines, they didn't throw her off Iwo Jima.

I think the relationship she developed then, when you stop and think of some of the officers that she must have met in World War II, Wally Green, General Wallace Green for example loved her.

Because she was more of a marine than a lot of marines were.

- They're the toughest sons of bitches in the world.

And she was impressed by people who were tough sons of bitches.

She liked tough.

- [Kathy] To help tell their story and the stories of war, Dickey kept copious notes.

Dozens of reporter notebooks housed at the Wisconsin Historical Society provide some insight into her penchant for detail, observations and opinion.

And sometimes she even slipped in a reminder to write ma and a grocery list or two that usually included cigarettes, Pall Mall, her smokes of choice.

And she took chances to get the right photograph at the right angle to tell a story.

She once stood on top of a ridge in Iwo Jima when a furious lieutenant yelled at her.

- [Man] That was the (bleep) damnedest thing I ever saw anybody do in my life.

Do you realize all the artillery and half the snipers on both sides of this (bleep) war had ten full minutes to make up their mind about you?

- [Kathy] Dickey thought it was so peaceful up on the ridge, except for the wasps whizzing past her head, something she mentioned to her bunkmate back in Guam.

- [Dickey] There is no insect life on Iwo Jima.

It's a dead volcano.

They were not wasps.

- [Kathy] Sometimes, things didn't go Dickey's way.

On Okinawa, an admiral revoked her press credentials because she was in the way of fighting a war.

Life Story magazine fired her.

An editor rejected her graphic photos, saying they were too dirty.

Still lacking military re-accreditation, and with her husband's encouragement, Dickey submitted her work to other magazines, including Cosmopolitan, which published her photos of wounded marines on Okinawa.

That would be the end of her World War II assignment.

(upbeat happy music) Soon after, Seventeen magazine hired her on as their only photographer and then as associate editor.

But as the cold war loomed, Dickey grew restless in her job.

Professionally, Dickey and Tony teamed up on several humanitarian efforts, wanting to remind people of what havoc war wreaked and what terrible problems remained.

Personally, they grew apart.

Their marriage ended in 1956.

- It was a loving relationship and it was a respectful relationship.

That my father cheated on her?

Very likely, considering everything else about his lifestyle.

I believe she that was the only woman that he ever truly loved.

(ominous music) - [Kathy] Dickey was on her own, photographing Hungarian refugees for the International Rescue Committee and Life magazine.

On December 5th 1956, while transporting penicillin for the refugees with two Hungarians, she was captured on the Hungary-Austrian boarder.

Carrying a small Hungarian dictionary, she was sent to a prison cell in Budapest.

- [Interviewer] Who threw you into solitary, tell us about that?

- [Dickey] The Hungarians accused me of being illegally in Hungary.

In the 38 days in solitary confinement, of course part of the treatment is never to explain to you what you're really accused of.

I was told that I had been tried and censured for conspiracy against the Hungarian state and would be hanged twice.

The public trial, many weeks later, at that, I was convicted of illegal border crossing.

In solitary, you have nothing to read, so you can't read, you have nothing to write with, so you can't write.

You have no needle and thread so you can't sew.

Your feet must be flat on the floor.

The idea is, of course, it's a psychological pressure which is considered torture.

- You have to have an inner core of absolute steel to survive something like that and not go crazy.

- She was a total anti-communist, which makes sense, because she was in prison during the Hungarian uprising by a bunch of communists who did not treat her particularly well.

- [Kathy] That experience troubled her for the rest of her life.

- The marines were out stomping through the countryside, and they had rounded up a couple of what they call V.C.

suspects, and they had tied their hands behind their back with commo wire, and they had squatted them, they blindfolded them, gagged 'em, and squatted them down and then piled concertina wire around them until it was about that high and this is razor wire I'm talking about and then they put two marines with rifles pointed at them, and Ms. Chapelle looked at that and just went berserk.

The gunny sergeant who was in charge of this platoon, she drew herself up, she wasn't a very big woman, but she drew herself up and she got right in his face and she ate him a new one.

She was, sarcasm was dripping from her.

She said, "Are you sure that you have good enough control "of these dangerous prisoners?

"Don't you think you maybe should get commo wire "and tie their feet together?"

And afterward, I asked her, "Why did you do that?"

If that had been me, that guy would have probably pulled his .45 and shot me.

As it was, he didn't know what to do with Dickey, and she later, when I asked, she explained why.

And it grew out of her treatment when she was taken prisoner by the Red Army during the Hungarian uprising of 1956.

- [Patty] To look at her, you'd never believe that she was smuggled into Algeria and witnessed the F.L.N.

trial and execution of a traitor.

The time on that story Dickey was approximately when?

- [Dickey] That was in august 1957.

I had to be kidnapped out of Madrid.

Having made arrangements originally in New York, and I had the privilege of being the first American reporter to go straight from New York to the rebel Algerians and then of course come right back.

I was de-kidnapped 31 days later.

- [Kathy] Dickey's work on conflicts around the world continued when she covered marines on the front lines in Lebanon and the Cuban freedom fighters in Miami.

In November of 1958, she grabbed her Leica cameras and talked her way into Cuba as a tourist.

She spent weeks there photographing Fidel Castro's revolution for the Reader's Digest.

After Cuba, there was post-war Korea, where fighting and death continued.

She covered Laos for the Reader's Digest.

That's where she met a fellow photojournalist who gave her an Australian bush hat to protect her from the sun.

It soon became part of her trademark.

She made two trips to Vietnam.

The first time for National Geographic magazine producing a piece called Water War in Vietnam.

And at the age of 40, Dickey Chapelle became the first female reporter to win approval from the Pentagon to parachute jump with the American troops in Vietnam, making six jumps in all.

- [Interviewer] Here's a girl who also parachuted into the combat area in Vietnam.

But what in the world ever persuaded you to parachute the first time and what it was like do you remember what it felt like the first time you parachuted?

- [Dickey] Well in common with the rest of the human race I think about four million people have not parachuted, I thought I was going to be killed.

♪ Where have all the young men gone ♪ They are all in uniform ♪ When will they ever learn ♪ When will they ever learn - [Kathy] In 1961, Chapelle penned her autobiography.

It was published under a title she thought focused too much on her gender.

- [Interviewer] Your book, which has just come out, and is really a fascinating book, is called What's a Woman Doing Here?

Which seems to me to be a pretty good question, because is a woman's place Dickey at the front and jumping out of airplanes the way that you've done, and winding up in solitary confinement, is that a woman's job, no fooling?

- [Dickey] It is not a woman's place, there's no question about it.

There's only one other species on earth that a fighting front or any of the other situations you described is no place and that's men, as long as men continue to fight wars, why I think observers of both sexes will be sent out to see what happened.

- I never treated her as a woman, nor did she ask to be treated as a woman.

She had her own personality and she was just one of the guys.

You know, one of the good guys, really.

- [Interviewer] What can you do on a front that a man can't do?

- [Dickey] There's one thing I can do a little bit better I think than any man and that is glorify brave men which is after all the basic job of a woman.

- [Interviewer] That's the basic job of a woman to glorify a brave man?

- She was one of us, she went out to get the story and she got the story, and there was no BS about her, no hand holding.

That's what I give her more than anything else.

She never had to, you know, like some correspondents that I could name, you almost had to take them by the hand and say, come on, here's your story over here.

And Dickey was never that way.

Dickey did do a lot to enhance Dickey's reputation.

- I don't feel that fame was her primary motivation.

I feel that she firmly had her eye fixed on the truth.

The reason I say that is because you wouldn't, I don't think, try to take the risks that she did if you were just going for fame.

- [Kathy] Fellow journalists started to recognize Dickey's reputation and her work in Vietnam.

In 1961, she received the prestigious George Polk award from the Overseas Press Club.

She also went on to win the 1963 National Press Photographers Association's photograph of the year for this photo originally published in National Geographic.

It's of a U.S. marine on aerial patrol with South Vietnamese soldiers taken in 1962.

- I like the photos that she took often of soldiers just being soldiers, not necessarily the battle shots and I think that we tend to look at a conflict and revere the people who take the photos of things blowing up.

(dramatic music) But to understand the war, you have to be in the back of the line behind the front line.

She spent a lot of time in the front as well, but I was really captivated by her images from the back of soldiers having a smoke.

They're timeless in many ways, because I could take that same image and in my mind, I could see soldiers or marines that I had spent time with in Iraq or Afghanistan, and if you go honestly to tell a story, to document what you're seeing, how can you miss the civilians?

They're part of the conflict.

They still lived even as they were trying not to die.

- [Kathy] John Garofolo, a commander in the U.S. Coast Guard Reserve, has become very familiar with Dickey Chapelle's photographs.

- She could capture a moment.

She could see a moment that was very, very dramatic and she could capture that, and the one thing about shooting war, or actuality, they don't stop and wait for you to get the picture.

I think that it's important that people know who our heroes are, all of them, even the ones that are nontraditional.

- [Kathy] Captivated by her story, he first wrote a screen play hoping to capture Hollywood's attention.

Something he hasn't given up on.

He's also writing a play for the Milwaukee Rep to consider.

His latest accomplishment is a pictorial book of Chapelle's images, published by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press.

- I think that the camera probably helped her focus her fears.

She's got a job to do.

And so you can't avoid that camera that you've got held in front of your face and I always feel, that, at least the way I look at it is that, you know, that having a camera does provide that sort of sense of mediation.

You're out of the moment because you're focusing on something else and so I think that the focus probably helped her continue to move forward.

Her camera was probably her shield.

- [Kathy] Garofolo asked Jackie Spinner to write the foreword for his book.

- [Jackie] Her photographs are so telling.

Which is what's so remarkable about this book is that you really get to see the war as she experienced it through her camera.

And you know, she saw a lot.

And you know, I didn't see her stopping herself from taking a picture.

I mean, she took some remarkable images on instinct.

- [Kathy] Maybe it was instinct that prompted Dickey to send much of her professional writings and photographs to the Wisconsin Historical Society before she went back to Vietnam in 1965.

By the mid 60's, the U.S. involvement in Vietnam escalated.

As did protests across the country, including on college campuses.

Dickey Chapelle had become quite outspoken about why the United States should be in Vietnam, and she advocated for a tougher army.

- Let's win the war against the people who are going to bury us and debate the reforms of government other than our own after we're sure that we're all going to be here to worry about it and that we're not going to be surrounded and strangled.

- We were pretty opinionated ourselves, (laughs) but we couldn't, Dickey could.

I think her opinions were probably an offshoot of what was going on out in Saigon.

And the correspondents got so sick of hearing the crap that we were putting out at the five o'clock, what we called the five o'clock follies.

- Well what do you think of this protest demonstration against the actions in Vietnam?

- Well it seems to achieving a purpose in that they are getting attention.

- Her position on the Vietnam war was nuanced.

She was a little bit more pro Vietnam war than let's say a town like Madison was, and so this made her position when she went to the university to speak as part of a panel discussion, I think more challenging and different, because it was a complex position.

I believe that she was more supportive of the military than she was of the war.

(machine gun firing) - [Kathy] The war was not a huge topic of discussion during Aunt Dickey's infrequent visits.

- She came here with decks of cards, taught me to play poker and dice, and taught me to play craps.

- Besides really teaching us as women that we could be players on the world's stage, which I think is the most important thing, she also taught us about makeup, and how to put on false eyelashes, and how to put on powder, and lipstick.

All of those kinds of thing and we were sort of country girls in a way compared to her from New York city, here in Madison, Wisconsin, and so it was all very fascinating.

- [Kathy] Soon, it was time for Aunt Dickey to go back to work in Vietnam.

(rock music) In September of 1965, The National Observer newspaper assigned Dickey to follow a group of marine recruits from basic training to Vietnam.

Because of her outspokenness about censorship, she had trouble getting a visa for her second trip to Vietnam.

Her old friend, General Wallace Greene, helped her out.

He also showed his admiration for her by giving his marine insignia to Dickey.

She attached it to her Australian bush hat.

Before going back to Vietnam, Dickey Chapelle said she wanted to be on patrol with the United States Marines if she died.

- I mean, it's something you just can't believe.

- [Kathy] She did die.

On November 4th, 1965, with the marines during Operation Black Ferret near Chu Lai.

Five marines and one navy corpsman were also wounded.

- As best that I know, she was following this platoon leader.

Marine platoon leader and he tripped a either a mortar round or a shell that had been booby trapped and the Viet Cong were very good at booby traps.

And apparently, when it exploded, a piece of shrapnel caught her in the neck and she, it hit her in her carotid artery and she died.

There was some, I've read... there's speculation that she did not die, that she died en route to Da Nang, or to the med, so she died in the field.

You know, you have to, you have to think, was there anything that you could have done that could have maybe made that not happen.

I mean, you know, it's like any of your friends get killed or wounded badly.

It just hits you.

And here, you know, having been with her, you know, less than, I think it was probably maybe I want to say about three hours, that I'm sitting on the flight line and having seen her off, and then say three hours later, she's dead, yeah, it just, you know, it really hits you.

- (sighs) I remember my dad receiving the phone call and sitting down, and you know, sort of that sense, well he had always been afraid that this would happen and it finally happened.

And of course, he was very, very sad and despondent, but he also felt like she was doing what she wanted to do.

She was telling the stories that she wanted to tell on her own terms and he admired her for that.

- For me at nine years old, I didn't really understand the concepts of death and it was a little abstract for me.

But what was very real for me was my father's reaction and my father's reaction was extremely strong and it came from the fact that the only clip they showed was her on the ground with no one around her being filmed.

So I knew that his reaction was, why isn't that person dropping that camera and helping this woman?

- I didn't learn about her death until I came out of the battle at landing zone x-ray on the 16th of November 1965.

I called my bosses in Saigon and dictated my story of the battle and I was about to hang up and the boss said, "Did you hear about Dickey Chapelle?"

and I said "No, what?"

He said, "She was killed with the marines last week."

And I had come from basically a week of carnage, hundreds of American boys dead, thousands of North Vietnamese boys killed, stinking in the jungle, and I had been surrounded by death and dying and now I find out my friend, Dickey Chapelle had been killed, and it just, it was more than I could bear.

I walked out the door, I hung up, I walked out the door of the officer's club, at Camp Holloway in Pleiku and I sat down on these wooden steps, and just cried like a baby.

She meant that much to me.

What a really good person, great reporter, and photographer.

I miss her enormously.

- The reason I volunteered to go there was first the patriotism and, secondly, I wanted a shot at the bastards that killed her.

And...

I got that shot.

- [Kathy] French photographer Henri Huet took this famous photograph of a navy chaplain administering last rites to Dickey Chapelle before her body was airlifted away.

- I've got to tell you about that photograph.

I never saw it at the time, and I didn't see it for many years after, and I was in Arlington, Virginia, for a reunion dinner of my battle buddies, and the Requiem photo exhibit was at the museum which was just a block from our hotel and I walked in the door and Henri Huet's picture of Dickey dying in that white sand at Chu Lai was right on the wall as you came in the door and I lost it right there.

I walked this entire exhibit of all of my friends who died there, and their pictures on the wall, the pictures they had taken, and I just, all I could do was look and say, I should be up there with them.

My picture should be hanging there.

I didn't think at the time that any of us were going to survive that war.

And here all of them were.

It was more than I could bear then and more than I can bear now.

- That photo haunted me for days.

The whole process of writing the foreword haunted me.

I had nightmares several nights in a row, because just remembering the fear and the almost and the close calls, and you know, her close call ended up in her death you know and I don't really speculate what was going on in her mind.

I don't think any journalist goes to war to die.

You know, you go to war to survive it, but not everybody does.

- Oh, that was such a shock, such a shock, on the front page of the paper.

The guy that shot it he was a friend and he was probably as shocked by that as anybody else.

I think his first impulse, was shock, and that was in his thinking when he took the picture.

- [Kathy] Dickey Chapelle's body was cremated in California and brought home to Milwaukee for her funeral at First Unitarian church on Ogden and Astor.

She received full military honors.

An unusual tribute for a civilian and especially for a woman at the time.

Her remains are buried at Forest Home Cemetery on Milwaukee's south side in the Meyer-Engelhardt family plot.

Ironically, a factual mistake marks this journalist's headstone.

Her year of birth reads 1918.

The cemetery received a copy of her birth certificate in 1979, indicating the correct birth year as 1919.

Paper records have been changed, but no family member has requested a change to the gravestone.

A year after her death, the marines dedicated a memorial to Dickey Chapelle in the village of Chu Lai, South Vietnam.

The plaque reads in part, "She was one of us and we will miss her."

The honors and recognition have continued for Dickey.

A plaque hangs in the Shorewood high school library showcasing graduates who have demonstrated excellence in their fields.

Look closely and you'll find her photograph included in the journalists memorial at the museum in Washington, D.C.

In 2014, the Milwaukee Press Club inducted her into their Hall of Fame.

- I first found out about Dickey just investigating stories and reports of Vietnam and the marvelous work that our service people did but also the correspondents who covered them, and the name, Dickey Chapelle popped up several times, and it always had the word Milwaukee after her.

We're quite proud that we were able to induct her into our own Hall of Fame, noting the accomplishments of greater Milwaukee journalists.

The pentagon arranged to have marine representation there.

Those were her people, the marines were her people.

- [Kathy] Here people were indeed the U.S. Marine Corps, and their Combat Correspondents Association recently honored Dickey Chapelle with the 2015 Brigadier General Robert L. Denig, Sr.

Distinguished Performance Award, and the marines hope to honor her with one last special tribute, probably the most important to Dickey Chapelle and all she stood for behind those pearl earrings.

- The Marine Corps occasionally, will make a civilian an honorary marine.

I think it's a lock that Dickey would get the honorary marine.

- Anybody who was good enough to go through marine jump school and be awarded the jump wings of the commandant of the corps uniform deserves to be an honorary marine.

- She was a pioneer, a real pioneer, and you don't go into that lightly, you go into that trying to prove something.

You go in there trying to prove you're just as good as any man at that job.

And I think she proved that.

(upbeat happy music) ♪ Oh, she was high up there in the air ♪ Caught still by a soldier's stare ♪ Whenever it was men amongst men ♪ Down upon the land ♪ And she followed those mothers' sons ♪ She felt the thunder of their guns ♪ From a pearl's eye view ♪ Just a camera in her hand ♪ She was born Georgette, but the name didn't suit her well ♪ So she blew out of Wisconsin as Dickey Chapelle ♪ She's been through this before ♪ She'll tell you war is hell ♪ Her pearl earrings caught the light ♪ On Dickey Chapelle ♪ Of Dickey Chapelle ♪ Of Dickey Chapelle ♪ Dickey Chapelle - [Narrator] Funding is made possible in part by the Shorewood Historical Society, dedicated to preserving Shorewood's rich history for the benefit of current and future generations.

Additional funding provided by the Milwaukee Press Club.