First to the Front: The Untold Story of Dickey Chapelle, by Lorissa Rinehart

From 1945 to 1965, Dickey Chapelle covered almost every major conflict from WWII to Vietnam.

She was the only woman on the front lines of Okinawa.

She survived six weeks of solitary confinement in a communist Hungarian prison.  

She marched beside the FLN in Algeria and found her way to Castro’s camp in the Sierra Maestra mountains.

She paratrooped with the 82nd, 101st, and Vietnamese Airborne, embedded herself with Special Forces in Laos and lived for a month with an anti-communist guerrilla army in the Mekong Delta. 

While on patrol with some of the first combat Marines deployed to Vietnam in 1965, she was killed by an improvised explosive. 

Dickey’s writing and photographs chronicle the arc of the Cold War like no other journalist. And yet, her work is almost unknown.

Until now.