Photojournalist Dickey Chapelle is Killed

November 4, 1965

Overview

Photojournalist Dickey Chapelle, a correspondent for the National Observer, Reader’s Digest, and other publications, is killed by a landmine while accompanying a U.S. Marine platoon on a search-and-destroy operation near Chu Lai. Six Marines are wounded in the blast. Chapelle was one of the first woman war correspondents in American history. She covered both World War II and postwar Europe before arriving to work in Southeast Asia.¹

¹Jack Shulimson and Charles M. Johnson, The Landing and the Buildup, 1965, U.S. Marines in Vietnam (Washington, D.C.: History and Museums Division, 1978), 94, 239; Mary S. Mander, Pen and Sword: American War Correspondents, 1898–1975 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 90, 116, 141–142; Hilary S. Crew, Women Engaged in War in Literature for Youth (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield), 115; Joyce Hoffman, On Their Own: Women Journalists and the American Experience in Vietnam (Philadelphia, PA: Perseus Books Group, 2008), 7–8, 56–59, 80, 96. “Dickey Chapelle,” Wisconsin Historical Society, https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/topics/chapelle/ (link is external) (accessed 4/2/14).