First to the Front

Lorissa Rinehart's biography traces the life of Georgette "Dickey" Meyer Chapelle, a trailblazing American war correspondent and photojournalist whose career spanned from World War II through the early Vietnam War.

Born in Shorewood, Wisconsin, Dickey graduated high school two years early as valedictorian and enrolled as one of only three women in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT's) 1934 aeronautical engineering class. She flunked out after hitching a ride on a supply plane to cover a flood airlift. Jobs at an air circus and the Miami Airshow followed. While covering a 1939 Havana airshow for The New York Times, she witnessed a pilot die in a crash. A resulting connection brought her to New York for a publicity job at Trans World Airlines (TWA), where she enrolled in photography classes taught by Anthony "Tony" Chapelle, a charismatic World War I veteran more than twice her age. Despite his volatile temper and controlling behavior, Dickey fell in love, and they married. She took his last name for life.

After Pearl Harbor, Tony shipped out to Panama as a Navy photography instructor. Dickey secured her own press credentials and sailed there aboard an unarmed freighter through waters patrolled by Nazi U-boats. She photographed elite jungle troops, but military censors rejected her articles on national security grounds. Back in New York, Tony kept her grounded for three years. In late 1944, she seized a chance to pitch war coverage in the Pacific, where no female photographer had reached the front. She pushed forward from California to Pearl Harbor to Guam, repeating her refrain: "As far forward as you'll let me."

Aboard the hospital ship USS Samaritan near Iwo Jima, Dickey photographed wounded Marines and staged a blood donation drive whose images the Red Cross used for a decade. She flew to Iwo Jima on a medical evacuation plane, photographed a field hospital under mortar fire, and learned the cardinal rule of combat reporting when a lieutenant told her she had been standing under sniper fire on a skyline. At a pre-Okinawa gathering, she met General Lemuel Shepherd, beginning a relationship pivotal to her career. On Okinawa, she joined medical patrols, held a flashlight during surgery on a civilian whose leg required amputation, and participated in her first infantry patrol under grenade and rifle fire. She discovered the bond Marines call esprit de corps, a solidarity she would chase for the rest of her life. Press officer Bern Price informed her she was under arrest for embarrassing a rear admiral who had denied her permission to go ashore, and she was escorted off the fleet at gunpoint.

Navy censors confiscated her work and revoked her credentials, burying most of her historic coverage. Her Cosmopolitan article on combat fatigue identified symptoms of what would later be called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) with remarkable accuracy. Tony's first wife arrived, revealing their marriage was not legally valid. Through Quaker connections, Dickey arranged for the organization to send her and Tony to Europe as documentarians. Over two tours from 1947 to 1949, they documented postwar devastation across Poland, Austria, Germany, and France. In Warsaw, her flashbulb triggered panic attacks in orphaned children for whom flashing light meant gunfire. In Berlin's Quaker center, she documented discussion groups where former fascists confessed their pasts and were met with forward-looking acceptance. Tony's overspending plunged them deep into debt.

In 1952, the State Department's Point Four Program, a US foreign technical-aid initiative, sent them to Iraq, Iran, and India. Dickey documented anti-locust campaigns in the Iraqi desert, lying in a field of insects while crop-dusting planes sprayed over her. In Iran, she covered village-level aid projects while British attempts to rig elections destabilized the country. In India, she spent weeks with the Madia Gond Indigenous people, documenting effective farming techniques. National Geographic accepted her locust article, the breakthrough she had chased for a decade.

Tony's abuse escalated. He told Dickey she could not be both a journalist and a real woman. In 1955, she came home to find him in bed with another woman. She moved out, hired a divorce lawyer, and accepted a job at the International Rescue Committee (IRC). In October 1956, the Hungarian Revolution erupted.

Dickey secured penicillin, a Life magazine commission, and IRC funding. Near the Austrian border, she crossed into Hungary 15 times, guiding refugees to safety. On a deeper mission to deliver penicillin, Soviet border guards captured her. She was taken to Budapest's Fö Street Prison, where she endured nearly six weeks of solitary confinement, starvation, and relentless interrogation. She emerged deaf in one ear and with PTSD but resolved to return to combat journalism.

In 1957, the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) invited Dickey to become the first Western journalist embedded with their guerrilla forces fighting French colonial rule. Smuggled into Algeria, she marched with the Scorpion Battalion in the Atlas Mountains and documented the aftermath of a French bombing of a Bedouin village that killed 18 civilians. She found an unexploded American-made bomb and published the evidence, criticizing US complicity in arming France.

Dickey's career accelerated. The Department of Defense (DOD) restored her press credentials. She covered the Navy's nuclear capabilities, patrolled Turkey's Soviet border, and embedded with Fidel Castro's forces during the Cuban Revolution, concluding that "Machinery does not win wars. Men do." After civilian parachute training, she made a night tactical jump with the 101st Airborne Division. Later, she parachuted into South Korea's demilitarized zone with the First Special Forces Group, becoming the first woman to paratroop with the US Armed Forces.

A tip about covert operations led Dickey to Laos in 1961, where the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was secretly arming Hmong guerrillas, a highland ethnic group allied with US-backed forces. Over five weeks, she documented CIA-funded arms drops and direct combat by American Special Forces. In Vietnam, she wrote a guerrilla warfare treatise for the Marines arguing that conventional tactics were futile against an enemy whose goal was to break individual will. She became the first reporter of either gender credentialed with the Vietnamese Airborne, making nine jumps and marching over 300 miles. She lived with the Sea Swallows, an anticommunist militia in the Mekong Delta. In briefings to Marine Corps leadership, she challenged racist myths about Asian soldiers. For National Geographic, she photographed the first image of a US Marine in combat in Vietnam, which the DOD tried to suppress. She won the Overseas Press Club's George Polk Award.

Dickey spent eight months with anti-Castro Cuban exile militias in Miami, helping construct weapons and surviving an explosion that hospitalized her with burns. She returned to Vietnam in 1964, embedding with a river assault group to document the night-fought water war in the Mekong Delta.

Marine Commandant General Wallace Greene pinned his own insignia on Dickey's bush hat alongside the Vietnamese airborne wings and Sea Swallows emblem she already wore. On November 4, 1965, while on patrol with the Seventh Marines near Chu Lai, a Marine ahead of Dickey tripped an improvised explosive device. The blast killed her instantly. She was 47 years old and died as she had always wanted: on patrol with the Marines. A Marine honor guard buried her with full military honors. Hungarian freedom fighters left 12 red roses at her grave, and the 82nd Airborne staged a mass paratroop jump over the Dominican Republic in her honor. A marble plaque at Chu Lai reads: "She was one of us, and we will miss her."