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FEATURE
BEING WHERE THE ACTION IS ...
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Reading your own obituary is a rarity, but veteran Agence France-Presse
correspondent Kate Webb had the last laugh on
the grim reaper in Cambodia in 1971. After a career in journalism
spanning four decades, Webb retired in August. She talked about her
life on the frontlines with Vaudine England.
Kate Webb set out in seamed stockings and miniskirts to learn journalism
in Sydney then took herself to war at the age of 23. Now she's not
even 60, but is stepping out, retiring from journalism.
Perfectionist to the core, she thinks she's slowing down.
Most of us think we know the dramatic moments in her extraordinary
career. But only after a few soothing unguents one late night in
Jakarta did we get to the nub of it all:
"People always think I must be so tough to survive all this.
But I'm a real softie. But maybe that's what it takes - you have
to be soft to survive. Hard people shatter."
Getting into the details of her desperate moments, it's clear
she's right. When she was captured by North Vietnamese forces in
1971, aged 28, with five others at a battle for Highway Four, tearful
colleagues around the world wrote her obituaries and mourned the
loss of not only "a babe" but, more importantly, a "darn
good reporter". Friends
and contacts the world over lobbied from Beijing to Paris for her
release.
Unlike every other group captured and killed in those times, her
group survived. Why?
"We all said, take all of us or none. If you don't release
the Cambodians we're not going... [And] one of the North Vietnamese
helped me. He was obviously very tired and sick, but he kept
questioning me and I thought, 'he's a professional'. And I suddenly
remembered that I was a professional too, and I stopped feeling
like a victim.
"None of us talked about the others. The Cambodians had families
and could have easily dobbed me in as CIA and got an award, but
they didn't.
"So you see what people have given me in life.
"Me giving money to people is nothing compared to that,"
says Kate, asked why she's so generous to the disadvantaged she
meets when she has no nest egg to call her own.
When she staggered back to Phnom Penh to the astounded delight of
the press corps, friends such as the late great Donald Wise took
her aside, warned her of what it would take to get over the trauma
of captivity and helped her through.
Just as threatening to her life was the motorbike accident in Delhi
which left her at risk of losing an arm. She was taking horse-sized
tranquillisers, encased in a cast. Half her face had been wiped
off. For three weeks she couldn't see, couldn't move. Her nerves
were crushed, she was screaming with the white pain. Instead of
running to Bangkok, she trusted the Indian doctors who said if she
could stand it, they could save her arm.
It so happened that at the time, Kate was giving shelter to a family
of Afghan refugees in her house. (How many "tough" hacks
would do that?) It is to the Afghans she ascribes her survival.
"And suddenly there was no sense of obligation on the Afghan
family's part, which was super," she says.
Her worst moment was in Kabul, when militia bashed her head on the
floor and tore a chunk of her hair out. "That rattled me, really
spooked me. It took a while to stop looking over my shoulder. There's
something very humiliating about having your head bashed."
And when she was facing death from malarial fever in New York, it
was friendship (and beer) which pulled her through. She'd arranged
to meet John Wheeler of AP one day for a beer and failed to appear.
Wheeler, saying "she wouldn't pass up a beer", called
on Bill Landry, UPI's foreign editor, and together went to find
her.
"I was in a coma on the floor of the hotel in New York. Everything
was aching, I was throwing up and passing out. They came and just
frog-marched me out of there in a sarong and a field jacket, down
to the hospital," says Kate.
With a temperature of 108 degrees, they put her in a bucket full
of alcohol and ice up to her neck and inserted drips into each arm,
all the while thinking she was brain-dead.
She was in New York as the second woman after Germaine Greer invited
to address the Washington Press Club. But the honours seem to mean
little to self-effacing Kate. [ctd]
 Next ...
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Tributes
to Kate Webb 
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