Nebraska Authors

Beverly Deepe arrived in South Vietnam in early 1962 just as President John Kennedy was increasing American involvement in the conflict with the communists. For the first seven and a half months of her stay, she worked as a free-lance reporter, submitting stories on speculation to the Associated Press and other news outlets. Her free-lance status meant that unlike the seven other resident Western correspondents—all male—she was not tethered to Saigon and she chose to spend much of that time in the countryside. That experience, and her gender, which made it easier for her to talk to a wider range of informants, including the women in villages, gave her reporting an anchor outside of the conventional narratives of the war. In time she would report for the New York Herald Tribune, The Christian Science Monitor, and Newsweek. She left Vietnam after seven years of continuous reporting, as America withdrew. She was by then a very distinguished reporter and, in fact, the longest serving Western news correspondent of the war. And she had been one of the first reporters to suggest that America might lose that war.

After leaving Vietnam, she began what became a 29 year career teaching journalism and communications at the University of Hawaii. Her widely admired memoir of her reporting on the war, written in retirement, is based on unusually good source material, as she managed to save all of her original published and unpublished news stories and her reporters notebooks and correspondence from those seven years. The memoir was made even more intriguing by the discovery, years later, that two close friends, men she had employed as interpreters and fixers, had served as spies for opposite sides, one for the Viet Cong, the other for the CIA.

Death Zones & Darling Spies: Seven Years of Vietnam War Reporting was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and received recognition as a One Book, One Nebraska (2015) winner, and Nebraska 150 Books honor, 2017.

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