Photographs by Dickey and Tony Chapelle, Nat Geo Image Collectionīut Chapelle’s sex didn’t grant her any special treatment as a journalist. Sometimes being underestimated worked to her favor: She sold a book on military training to her editor by performing the entire Army fitness test in his office. She was used to being a novelty in the offices of generals and within Marine units. A LIFE OF WARĬhapelle once wrote that the story she reported again and again was of “men brave enough to risk their lives in the defense of freedom against tyranny,” and this frontline perspective made her a legend at a time when there were few female journalists in newsrooms and fewer on battlefields.
After Tony collected funds for her release, she began to hop from conflict to conflict, seemingly undeterred by danger. She became a publicist for an airline and a research institute but couldn’t resist covering the Hungarian revolution, where she was held prisoner for a month. Each time Chapelle began to settle down, she was called back by war. She and Tony began photographing the after-effects of war and traveled to nearly two dozen countries as volunteer photographers for relief agencies and the State Department. Still, she couldn’t shake the taste for foreign reporting. “Be sure you’re the first woman somewhere,” an editor in New York advised early in her career. Six years later she married Navy photographer Tony Chapelle-then 40-who soon became her reporting partner. Air Service Magazine, titled “Why We Want to Fly,” and at 16 she enrolled in MIT along with six other female students that year. At age 14, she sold her first article to U.S. As a child, she took her nickname from her hero, Arctic explorer Admiral Richard Byrd, and dreamed of being a pilot or an aerospace engineer.
TAKING TO THE SKYĪ fast-talking Midwesterner, Dickey Chapelle was born Georgette Meyer. Years later, other journalists reported that Vietnamese Airborne troops were still reminiscing about the small, foul-mouthed woman who’d jumped with them.
But her tally of conflict zones would end in Vietnam, where she became the first American woman correspondent to die in action. Army wings pinned to an Australian bush hat shading her black-rimmed glasses and pearl earrings, she ventured where other reporters dared not go and insisted on reporting only what she could see firsthand. Unauthorized use is prohibited.Ĭhapelle was one of the bravest female journalists of her time and surely the most experienced. was fighting a guerilla rebellion that would drag on for 20 years. Clinging to the motto “Only you can frighten you,” she made a practice jump into Korea the next year and then went off to Vietnam, where the U.S. In training, Chapelle was told that there’s no reason to close your eyes during a jump, and she likened this philosophy to her style of journalism. After learning with the Screaming Eagles, she became the only woman authorized to jump into combat with paratroopers in Vietnam. She’d been called “the polite little American with all that tiger blood in her veins” by Fidel Castro held in solitary confinement during the Hungarian uprising and affirmed as the first correspondent accredited by the Algerian rebels. She’d been working as a war correspondent since 1942 and had reported on dozens of conflicts.
Army’s 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, on the border between Tennessee and Kentucky. It was 1959 and Chapelle had hooked up with the U.S. Photograph by Dickey Chapelle, Nat Geo Image Collection Here, South Vietnamese soldiers man a gunboat on the Mekong Delta. In a story for National Geographic, she photographed how the war was fought on the water. With dozens of operations under her belt, Dickey Chapelle was one of the most experienced correspondents covering Vietnam.