Woman at War

She snapped combat pictures on a ridge at Iwo Jima while bullets sprayed around her. She cracked up in a Jeep under mortar fire in Cuba. She was threatened with hanging in a Communist prison in Hungary. She parachuted into Viet Cong territory and got back with the story and pictures she had gone after. But last week War Correspondent Dickey Chapelle's luck ran out. While covering a Marine operation near Chu Lai for the National Observer and radio station WOR, she stepped on a land mine and became the fourth war correspondent to be killed in Viet Nam.-

After covering World War II in the South Pacific, Dickey showed up just about everywhere men were shooting at each other: Korea, Hungary, Kashmir, Cuba, Algeria, the Dominican Republic. She traced her interest in battle to her quiet childhood in Milwaukee, where, as she recalled in her autobiography, What's a Woman Doing Here?, she was taught "that violence in any form is unthinkable. It was so unthinkable that it became as attractive a mystery to me as sex seemed to be to other teen-agers."

One of the Troops. At 19, Dickey married War Photographer Tony Chapelle, who taught her camera craft. The couple saw little of each other during World War II and were eventually divorced. But Dickey had learned her lessons well. She took thousands of gripping war pictures--many of wounded and dying men. It was as if she had a compulsion to make the home front aware of the miseries and the glory of war, of the "eternal, incredible, appalling, macabre, irreverent, joyous gestures of love for life, made by the wounded."

In all her wars, which she covered for publications ranging from the Reader's Digest to LIFE to the National Geographic, Dickey never demanded any special treatment. Men did their best to keep her out of danger, but she always managed to find it. While covering the rebels in Algeria, she learned to subsist on a diet of half a dozen dates a day, to sleep on a rock, to urinate only once a day to prevent dehydration. She could do 50 pushups. "In fatigues and helmet," said an admiring Marine Corps commander in Viet Nam, "you couldn't tell her from one of the troops, and she could keej up front with the best of them."

By the Rules. She could also take punishment like a man. During the Hungarian Revolution, she slipped over the Hungarian border without a visa. She was soon caught and thrown into a cold, grimy jail for seven weeks. By starving and brainwashing her, the Communists tried to force her to admit that she was guilty of espionage. But she never broke. "The old rules," she wrote later, "still held good in this as in any other conflict between human beings. If you fought hard enough, whatever was left of you afterward would not be found stripped of honor."

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