Gnat of Hill 881

"My God, I don't believe it," said a gawking Marine. "What's a broad doing here?" The broad--if an 85-lb. twiglet of a female qualifies as a broad--was doing the same thing he was. She was getting ready to storm South Viet Nam's Hill 881. Cathy Leroy may have looked ludicrous with her size-4 feet swimming around in size-6 combat boots. But the little French girl is a tough freelance photographer; and for Americans looking at their front pages last week, her A.P. pictures of Marines headed up 881 North evoked ghosts of Iwo Jima and Pork Chop Hill.

Moving in with the second wave of attacking troops, Cathy dodged machine-gun fire, clicked off frame after frame as she and the men scurried up the hill. She stopped long enough to record one particularly poignant sequence--a corpsman bending to help a wounded buddy, jerking upright in anguish when the man died, and plunging away, yelling "I'll kill them! I'll kill them!" At the summit she flopped into a bomb crater, kept on aiming her camera. At 22, Cathy is used to such scenes. She spends more time at the front--three weeks a month--than any other woman in the Saigon press corps. Despite her diminutive figure, she has a reputation as one of the most stubbornly persistent, bullheaded photographers covering the war.

Learning & Doing. Her nicknames run the gamut from "gnat" to "bear cat." Equipped with a Gallic temper, Cathy chews out anyone in her way with a remarkably complete selection of four-letter G.I.-English words seasoned with a few choice five-letter French specialties. Once she used them a bit too freely with Marine brass and was banned from the I Corps area for six months. The ban was lifted only two weeks before the 881 assault.

It was Cathy's stubbornness that got her to Viet Nam in the first place. Despite the disapproval of her factory-manager father, she worked 18 hours a day for six months as an interviewer in a Paris employment agency to save the money for the trip. Her professional photographic experience was nil. Buying new equipment to supplement the single Leica she arrived with, Cathy has doggedly progressed from barely competent to the point where A.P. Photographer Horst Faas says, "She is one of the best four or five freelancers here."

Luck plays some part in making a reputation, she admitted last week, but persistence pays the rent. "My aim," she adds, "is to have at least one excellent story each month." She can take the rest of May off.

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