Bad luck was a virus among foreign correspondents in Cambodia. Unlike in Vietnam - where Webb arrived four years earlier at age 23 with a philosophy degree, a one-way ticket from Australia, a Remington typewriter, $200 in cash and a whiskey-and-cigarette voice so soft people leaned in to hear her - there were no reliable phone lines in Cambodia to call your editor in an emergency. There were no American military hospitals to sew up your bullet wounds; no helicopters to evacuate you when things got bloody. By April 1971, several years before the Killing Fields, at least 16 foreign correspondents were missing and 9 were dead.
On April 7th, it was Webb's turn. A 28-year-old Bureau Chief for United Press International (UPI), Webb was covering a clash on Highway 4, south of Phnom Penh. As bullets flew from every direction between North Vietnamese and United States-backed Cambodian troops, Webb and her Cambodian interpreter plunged into a ditch. By the time they eventually belly-crawled their way out, four other refugees from the attack had joined them: a Japanese photojournalist and his Cambodian interpreter along with a Cambodian newspaper cartoonist and a Cambodian photographer.Throughout that afternoon and night, the six of them crept through the wooded foothills of Cambodia's Elephant Mountains, holding their breath as they stood within inches of chatting North Vietnamese soldiers. At 11:30 the next morning, tired, thirsty, their clothes and skin shredded by branches, they were crouching in the underbrush when they looked up to see two skinny North Vietnamese soldiers with AK-47's. The soldiers bound Webb's arms behind her back with wire, vine, and tape and roped all of the captives together in a single line. They confiscated their notebooks, their ID cards, their cameras, their watches. Then they took one thing that Webb held dear: a gold Chinese charm that she wore around her neck. She had clung to that charm in foxholes and always came out alive. Now without it, she felt naked.
Kate was interrogated by an older man, who said, "Do you realize you are a prisoner of war, and that one shot through the head could finish you, just like that?" "That's up to you now," Kate told him. "I can do nothing about it. Besides, I don't consider myself a prisoner of war, I'm not a soldier." "Then consider yourself an invited guest," said her interrogator, and they all laughed.
After a soldier tossed her and other prisoners' shoes into the trees, laughing, Webb was forced to walk barefoot on the hot asphalt and through woods littered with bamboo splinters and stones, until another soldier brought Webb a pair of thongs. She winced, knowing they had been stripped from a dead Cambodian paratrooper.Following a week of night marches, they arrived at a military camp where Webb slept in a hammock and alternated between stretches of numbing boredom and piercing fear. Why she wondered, hadn't they shot her? Did they believe her during the interrogations when she said she wasn't an American, wasn't with the CIA, wasn't a soldier? Maybe they would turn her over to the Khmer Rouge, where death - perhaps preceded by starvation - was almost certain. Maybe they planned to march her to the Hanoi Hilton, where United States pilots were being brutally tortured. There are worse things than a single bullet to the head.
As Webb would later write in her memoirs, "On the Other Side: 23 Days With the Viet Cong," there wasn't all that much that separated soldier from prisoner. Both subsisted on two meals a day of rice and pork fat in a salted broth and wrestled with hunger, malaria, homesickness. Webb and a soldier she nicknamed Li'l Abner compared their scarred feet (his were worse) and, in French, discussed the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Napoleonic Wars. Three weeks into captivity, Webb had lost 25 pounds - down to 105, on her 5-foot-7-inch frame - and shook with fever from two strains of malaria. She longed to take a bath, to shave her legs, to eat an orange.
She was not, however, dead. On April 21, 1971 - while Webb was suffering in the jungles of Cambodia - the first obituaries began to appear. Time magazine reported that near Highway 4, two Cambodian officers had found a white woman they believed was Webb with a bullet in the head and another in the chest. In accordance with Cambodian military procedures, they cremated the body. "Webb is the 10th journalists known to have died in Cambodia," the magazine reported. The Times remembered her both as a soft-voiced young "waif" in a striped dress and sandals on the streets of Saigon, and as a cool, incisive reporter when she put on combat boots, helmet, and flak jacket to go on missions with troops.
Around that same time, the North Vietnamese were telling Webb about their plans to free her. They figured out a drop-off spot where Cambodian forces might rescue them. And on April 30th - following what Webb would call a "Mad Hatter's" farewell party with tea, cigarettes, candy and bananas - Webb and the other captives made their final night march, this time with their possessions returned, save for their notebooks and cameras. In the predawn darkness, the soldiers and their former prisoners said fast farewells and Webb and the others walked onto Highway 4 waving a small piece of white cloth. "Miss Webb," said a Cambodian officer who spotted her on the roadside, "you are supposed to be dead!"Born in Christchurch, New Zealand, and given the first name Catherine, which she detested. She was the daughter of academics who moved the family to Australia in 1951, settling in the federal capital Canberra, where her father was chairman of the political science department at the Australian National University.
At age 15, she was charged with the murder of Victoria Fenner, the adopted daughter of Frank Fenner in Canberra. She supplied a rifle and bullets to Fenner and was present when Fenner committed suicide by shooting herself in the head. After a Children's Court hearing the charge was dropped.
After her parents were killed in a car crash when she was eighteen, Webb paid her own way through university. She graduated with an honors degree in symbolic logic from Melbourne University and began working as an artist, making stained glass windows and painting.
Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported that she stumbled into journalism when she was forced to pay for a stained glass window she shattered while working on it. She got a job as a secretary at The Sydney Daily Mirror, then became a reporter.
Later in 1967, she resigned from the Sydney Daily Mirror and went to Saigon on her own and became a part-time correspondent for UPI, which hired her as a full-time staff member within several months. She was soon on the battlefield earning a reputation as a hard-drinking, chain-smoking war correspondent.
Armed with notebook and pen she accompanied United States, Australian and South Vietnamese troops on operational patrols, and was the first wire correspondent to reach the United States Embassy on the first morning of the
1968 Tet Offensive. Later that year Webb survived an American rocket attack on a Saigon military building that killed everyone around her.She also spent considerable nonworking time investigating the involvement of South Vietnamese officials in the black market, a subject that had not been fully explored. Once, after writing late at her office, she came home to find a .45-caliber bullet hole in her apartment door and the slug embedded in the wall just above her bed.
She worked in Vietnam for more than six years, in those days when reporters in Indochina lived lives straight out of a Graham Greene novel, becoming UPI's bureau chief in Cambodia in 1971. The foreign correspondent Jon Swain recalled that the only time he ever saw Kate out of her usual baggy pants was in Chantal's, the famous Phnom Penh opium den, where clients always changed into sarongs. Kate was such a famous customer that a group photograph of her, Swain and the photographer Kent Potter, shot down and killed in February 1971, was the parlor's sole decoration.
By 1973, following the Paris peace accords, the U.S. was pulling out of Vietnam, during what was called the "Vietnamization" of the war. Kate moved on to Hong Kong. But in April 1975 she was back, as South Vietnam collapsed and the last U.S. personnel were evacuated.After Vietnam, she continued to work across Asia for UPI until 1977 and later spent 17 years with Agence France Press (AFP). She reported on the Tamil Tiger uprising in Sri Lanka and covered Pakistan, the Philippines, East Timor and Nepal. Later while working in India, she nearly lost an arm in a motorcycle accident.
In 1990-91 her work included the first Iraq war and the Soviet withdrawal from that country and was there for the fall of communist the fall Mohammad Najibullah in 1992. She covered Bangladesh's President Ershad and the assassination in India of Rajiv Gandhi. In 1994 she had an exclusive on the death of North Korea's dictator Kim Il-Sung. In 1997 she was there for the end of British rule in Hong Kong. Her last big story came in 1998; reporting on the collapse of President Suharto's regime in Indonesia. She also reported from Afghanistan and later described an incident in Kabul as the most frightening in her career. Following the collapse of Mohammad Najibullah's communist regime, she was captured by a local warlord and brought to a hotel, where she was brutally beaten and dragged up a flight of stairs by her hair. She finally escaped with the help of two fellow journalists, and hid out on a window ledge in the freezing Afghan winter, while the warlord and his men searched the building for her.
Kate was a good writer, but her value for future historians will be that all her best stories were written from the heart of the struggle, in the heat of the battle, in conversation with the major players - whether generals, grunts in foxholes, peasants in their fields, rulers in their palaces or guerrillas in their caves. Those historians will pass over the prognostications and predictions of desk-bound pundits to read Kate - knowing she was really there when it all happened.In 2001, at the age of 58, Kate quit front-line reporting and returned to Australia and settled north of Sydney, on the Hunter River. For her, the only kind of journalism she liked was frontline reporting, and she was too old for it. She tended her garden and sketched nature scenes. And on some nights, with a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other, and a rapt audience of friends and family, she told stories about a few of the places she had seen.
In 2002, Kate Webb wrote about her experiences as a combat reported. An excerpt from her book "War Torn: Stories from the Women Reporters Who Covered Vietnam" follows:
"Out in the field, you were all in the same predicament, with nothing between you and a piece of metal with your name on it except the whim of the Great Classifier in the Sky.
"But back in Saigon, it was different. You got back more than not stinking, sweat-caked, mosquito-bitten, and badly in need of a shower; the images of the last week or the days - the loss, the nerves, the bitterness, the adrenaline, the heart - to lights, booze, laughter, and martinis on the terrace of the Caravelle or the Continental."I would find myself mesmerized by the little pads of butter, the fresh French bread, the clink of ice, the feel of silk underclothes, and the whiteness of the tablecloths. I reveled in it, and I felt guilty and a sham. The people I had been with were still out there.
"It was weird. It was Alice through the looking glass.
"Often only hours before you took that first sip of Ricard or your martini, the ice cold on your tongue, you had been watching a medic give up on a kid of 18 or 19 and flip a cold poncho over this face. Often you could hear the artillery of a battle across the Saigon River."
Diagnosed with bowel cancer in 2006 she passed away on May 13, 2007, aged sixty-four. Despite her reputation for hard-drinking, chain-smoking, and after-hours bravado, Webb described herself as "a real softie," explaining: "Hard people shatter."Agence France-Presse (AFP) established the Kate Webb Journalism Award with a 3,000 to 5,000 euro prize, awarded annually to a correspondent or agency that best exemplified the spirit of Kate Webb.
Take, for example, the case of, an accomplished classical musician who was also a television and stage actor. Werner Klemperer, a native-born German, was forced to leave Germany in 1935 with his family, shortly after Hitler's Nazi Party took power because Klemperer's father was Jewish. 
As a pilot on a B-24 Liberator, Stewart flew 20 successful combat missions over Europe during the war, earning two Distinguished Flying Crosses, the Croix de Guerre, and the Air Medal with three oak leaf clusters. By the time the war was over, he had gone from a Private to a Colonel in just four years.
joining them on Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands in February 1945. From there, he flew missions carrying cargo in and wounded Marines out during the Battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
Their invention was granted a patent on August 11, 1942, filed using her married name Hedy Kiesler Markey. However, it was technologically difficult to implement, and at that time the U.S. Navy was not receptive to considering inventions coming from outside the military. Only in 1962 at the time of the Cuban missile crisis did an updated version of their design appear on Navy ships. The design is one of the important elements behind today's spread-spectrum communication technology, such as modern CDMA, Wi-Fi networks, and Bluetooth technology. 
Military doctors told Blier that he would never play football again.
and it's just another example of true life events that are much more interesting than fictionalized accounts or made-up rumors.
For Major General John T. Selden's First Marine Division, Operation Mixmaster meant a move across the width of Korea, from positions near Pohang on Korea's eastern coast to a new location on the extreme left of the 8th Army line in the far west. From its new position on the Kimpo Peninsula west of Seoul on the Yellow Sea, the assigned sector of the 1stMarDiv stretched 32 miles eastward to the Samichon River, where it linked up with its "brother" division, the British Commonwealth Division. Thirty-two miles was an extraordinarily large stretch of front for a division to cover, but it was no coincidence that the two divisions were sited in such a manner. In planning the relocation of his forces, Gen. Van Fleet specifically directed what he termed "the two most powerful divisions in Korea"be positioned to block any Chinese attempt to access the Uijongbu Corridor, the traditional and natural geographic invasion route into South Korea.
Before there was any shooting, however, there was a full ration of plain, old-fashioned, back-breaking work. Not an overpowering hill compared to the heights that confronted 1stMarDiv in the eastern region of Korea, OP 3 boasted an elevation of 400 feet. That, however, was the hill's elevation above sea level. In tactical terms, the hill rose little more than 70 feet above the surrounding terrain. If not overpoweringly tall, the hill covered a good bit of ground, a very good bit of ground to be defended by a platoon, even a reinforced platoon. Nor did the hill possess even the most rudimentary of fighting positions. Every bunker, every weapons emplacement, every inch of trench line had to be dug and dug and dug.
Throughout the day, Dean Morley got his wish. The Chinese continued to be relatively nonconfrontational. On OP 3, the Marines of the 2d Platoon contented themselves with making improvements to their positions, gnawing at C-rations, making small talk and speculating on when the battalion would be withdrawn to regimental reserve and the intriguing possibility that there might be a shower point set up. Two machine-gun squad leaders, Sergeant Arthur G. "Artie" Barbosa and Corporal Duane E. Dewey, made their usual daily checks of ammunition supply and marking stakes for principal direction of fire and final protective lines. In the 60 mm mortar section like routine preparations were undertaken. None of it was lackadaisical, and everything was done competently and professionally. There was no sense in getting caught with your skivvies at half-mast. All in all, though, it was just another day on OP 3.
When the Chinese fire came, it came methodically and deliberately in the form of 76 mm howitzers and 122 mm mortars controlled by forward observers on Taedok-San. The Chinese, who tended to be quite skillful in these matters, raked OP 3 from front to rear and from side to side, concentrating their effort on key positions. The Marines of the 2d Platoon, who had sweated, strained and voiced their displeasure at all the manual labor that went into fortifying the hill, hunkered gratefully in the bunkers they had built as the ground about them rocked like an earthquake, fires lighting up the night sky with the brilliance of a fireworks display.
When the Chinese came, they came in near mechanical waves, as though there were some manner of machine back behind Taedok-San grinding out rank after rank of automatons. If they were automatons, they were well-directed automatons, advancing implacably against the front and both sides of the Marines' defensive positions. The entire perimeter erupted in a blaze of muzzle flashes as the defenders of OP 3 laid into the oncoming tide of Chinese with everything they had. It was a one-sided contest. There were too many Chinese and not enough Marines spread over too large an area.
One among those was platoon leader Lt Morley, who went down hard hit (he would survive) and unable to continue. Lt Bill Maughan, a "short timer" due to depart in only several days, assumed command of the platoon. Maughan, a former enlisted Marine who had served in China before being commissioned, was immediately confronted by a problem, one that had been a disturbing possibility and was now a reality. Outpost 3 was too big an area to defend and there were too few Marines to adequately defend it.
Somehow that ammunition had to be retrieved by whatever means necessary. That was when Stanley "Stan" Wawrzyniak took over. Wawrzyniak, the company gunnery sergeant and no stranger to combat, had volunteered to accompany the platoon to OP 3 just to see if he could "help out."
keep life from being dull and uninteresting, the bulk of the Chinese fires were falling off to the west at the time when they were most needed. Had some Chinese forward observer misread his map? Had the Chinese fire direction center incorrectly calculated elevation and deflection? Had someone erred in plotting the gun- target line?
The Marine Corps felt the same way. For his courage and complete disregard for his own safety, Sgt Artie Barbosa would receive the Navy Cross. Rifleman Bart Dauberman, who lives today in Pennsylvania, still thinks it should have been the Medal of Honor.
There were courageous acts aplenty in a night that was torn apart by explosions and the never ending deadly roar of gunfire. One of the most courageous among those was the action of SSgt Quinton Barlow, the 2d Platoon's platoon sergeant - he was the man who seemed to be everywhere at once. If there was any point at which the Chinese threatened to break through the perimeter, SSgt Barlow was there to pitch in and help beat it back. Moving from position to position amid a whiplash storm of incoming fire, Quinton Barlow went undeterred from one threatened point to another, giving no thought to his own safety, always managing to be in the most dangerous location. Quinton Barlow would become the third defender of OP 3 to receive the Navy Cross.
Bunker Hill, Ungok, the three Nevada Outposts (Reno, Carson and Vegas) and the Hook would all find their way into the record before the guns fell silent at Boulder City on July 27, 1953.
In the wake of his father's death in 1911, York, as the eldest still living in the area, was forced to aid his mother in raising his younger siblings. To support the family, he began working in railroad constructions and as a logger in Harriman, Tennessee.
Camp Gordon in Georgia. The 82nd lives today as the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division.
Promoted to corporal, York took part in the St. Mihiel offensive that September as the 82nd sought to protect the U.S First Army's right flank. With the successful conclusion of fighting in that sector, the 82nd was shifted north to take part in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, a battle that cost 28,000 German lives and 26,277 American lives, making it the largest and bloodiest operation of World War I for the American Expeditionary Force (AEF).
the German machine gunners up the slope turned several of their guns and opened fire on the Americans. This killed six and wounded three, including Sgt. Early, leaving York in command of the remaining seven men. With his men behind cover guarding the prisoners, York moved to deal with the machine guns. Beginning in a prone position, he utilized the shooting skills he had honed as a boy.
Medal of Honor which he received on April 18, 1919. The award was presented to York by American Expeditionary Forces commander. In addition to the Medal of Honor, York received the French Croix de Guerre and Legion of Honor, as well as the Italian Croce al Merito di Guerra. When given his French decorations by Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the supreme allied commander commented, "What you did was the greatest thing ever accomplished by any soldier by any of the armies of Europe." Arriving back in the United States in late May, York was hailed as a hero and received a ticker tape parade in New York City.
York turned his back on quick and certain fortune in 1919, and went home to Tennessee to resume peacetime life and married the love of his life, Gracie Williams. Over the next several years, the couple had seven children. 
In the 1932 election, he changed his party affiliation and supported Herbert Hoover over Franklin D. Roosevelt because FDR promised to repeal Prohibition. Once the New Deal got underway, however, York returned to the Democratic Party and endorsed the president's public work relief programs, especially the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and the Works Progress Administration (WPA). 
Governor Prentice Cooper approved York's endorsement by naming him chief executive of the Fentress County Draft Board, and appointed him to the Tennessee Preparedness Committee to help prepare for wartime.
America First to the general public, Charles Lindbergh. Meantime, the film "Sergeant York" starring Gary Cooper, became one of the top grossing Warner Brothers films of the entire war era and earned Cooper the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1942. 
York died on September 2, 1964 and was buried with full military honors in the Pall Mall cemetery. His funeral was attended by Governor Frank G. Clement and Gen. Matthew Ridgway as President Lyndon B. Johnson's official representative. He was survived by seven children and his widow. 
anything they had ever imagined, and the experience never left them. It was dangerous - one was wounded, and one was captured by the North Vietnamese - but the challenges they faced were uniquely rewarding.