Hello and thank you for downloading our history program witness from the BBC World Service with me Louise Adaggo.

On November 4, 1965, the American war photographer Dickie Chappelle was killed in Vietnam.

Dickie Chappelle had made her name covering some of the greatest conflicts of the 20th century,

at a time when war reporting was almost exclusively the territory of men. I've been talking to a journalist who

knew her and to her biographer.

When you say combat reporter it usually brings to mind the picture of a battered

unshaven weary correspondent trudging through the mud. Now it may surprise you

but this lady beside me here is a combat reporter too.

She is a woman who has covered seven wars in the past five years, and her name is Dickie Chappelle. Is a woman's place Dickie at the front and jumping out of airplanes the way that you've done

and winding up in solitary confinement?

Is that a woman's job, no foolin?

It is not a woman's place. There's no question about it. There's only one other species on

earth that for whom a fighting front or any of the other situations you described is no place and that's men.

And as long as men continue to fight wars, why I think observers of both sexes will be sent

up to see what happened.

She was small.

She wore spectacles and she wore camouflage uniform and boots and she went with the Marines wherever they went and she

didn't ask for any favors. She had a certain iron spirit, I would say.

You didn't mess with Dickie.

Joe Galloway was a young Cub reporter in Vietnam for the news agency UPI

when he first met fellow reporter dickey chappelle she seemed to me at

the ripe old age of twenty three to be impossibly old not knowing that that she was maybe all of 45, 44, something like that.

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