Erika Robuck Brings Female War Correspondent Dickey Chapelle to Life in 'The Last Assignment'

National bestselling author of historical fiction, Erika Robuck, chats with Writer’s Voices to discuss her exciting new historical novel, The Last Assignment: A Novel of Dickey Chapelle. In it, she writes about the life of award-winning combat photojournalist, Georgette “Dickey” Chapelle, who was one of the first female war photographers in U.S. history and whose career spanned from World War II to the Vietnam War. As Robuck describes her, “Dickey vexed her mother from the very beginning. She was not the proper daughter her mother wanted. She used to go with her dad to construction sites and walk across high beams and she wanted to be a pilot, but she had terrible eye sight… she decided if I can’t be a pilot, I will write about pilots and she worked for various publicity agencies, but really became enamored with the American fighting man. She fell in love with the Marines, they fell in love with her, and she decided if I can’t fly the plane, I’ll just jump out of it into combat with them, and she did! …She wanted to be the eyes and ears for the world of what was going on…”

For Dickey, going on dangerous assignments was something she loved and craved because of her reckless and daring spirit. It was this spirit that led her to cover seven major war conflicts. However, her life came to a tragic end when she was killed in action during the Vietnam War. Robuck explained, “She was a little bit about act first, think later… she really didn’t take no for an answer, and so when she would go places that she wasn’t wanted, she would go somewhere else until she found her people. She had a lot of resilience that way… she got hurt quite a bit. Some of the male press correspondents were not kind to her, but she also had the wisdom to understand that they were embarrassed because they weren’t as willing to go to literally jump out of a helicopter into conflict with fighting men… and because of that, she really earned their trust… their love, their protection, and became a den mother to them, so it was interesting to find where she could fit in. She definitely experienced a lot of pushback…”

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