"Dickey Chapelle was an intrepid, precocious, determined—and brave—reporter and photographer who covered wars, revolutions, and other perilous events all her adult life, starting with World War II in the Pacific. She arrived there in late 1945 at age 26 and was aboard a hospital ship, the USS Samaritan, when it was attacked by Japanese bombers on its way to Iwo Jima. Hers was essentially on-the-job training, as she toted a bulky Speed Graphic and talked her way to the front line on Iwo Jima while the bullets were still flying. Early on, photographing wounded and dying marines, she showed a sense for the most affecting human moment amid the tragedy and terror of combat.
Chapelle was killed by a mine near Chu Lai in Vietnam in 1965, while covering a marine patrol. Her earliest experiences under fire are recounted in this excerpt from her memoir, What's a Woman Doing Here?
"THIS IS A HOSPITAL?" I asked, horrified.
"In the sight of God and the authorities, it is," said the doctor, making me ashamed of my question. He dipped his razor into his helmet. "We haven't been so badly hit as to force us to stop operating for a whole day and night now, the first time that's happened. Oh, last night we had to work for a time by starshells, but we were able to keep on."
Wordlessly, I took the camera and went into the nearest tent. It was an operating room by act of human will only. Two stretchers resting across upended crates marked whole human blood keep iced were the operating tables. Half a dozen other stretchers lined the dug-out walls. I sat on my heels in the sand and watched the doctors and corpsmen work. Bearded, red-eyed, in ragged dungarees spattered with blood, they were doing just what I'd seen the doctors in white gowns do on the Samaritan. But there wasn't a piece of furniture or medical equipment here except a canvas roll of gleaming instruments from which the surgeon occasionally took a fresh one.
I could feel the eyes of the man on the nearest stretcher watching me while I made my pictures. Finally he spoke, his voice low and gentle.
"You don't have a gun," he said wonderingly, as if it were the most curious thing in the world…"
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completes his work by applying decals, doing a bit of weathering, and coating the minis with a matte-finish.
