Close-Up on War: The Story of Pione

The inspiring and fascinating true story of Catherine Leroy, one of the few women photographers covering the Vietnam War who gave a human face to the conflict, told by award-winning journalist and children's book author Mary Cronk Farrell.

Close-Up on War tells the story of French-born photographer Catherine Leroy, who documented some of the fiercest fighting in Vietnam's 20-year conflict. Although she had no formal photographic training and had never traveled more than a few hundred miles from Paris before, Leroy left home at age 21 to travel to Vietnam and document the faces of war. Despite being told that women didn't belong in a “man's world,” she was cool under fire, gravitated toward the thickest battles, went along on the soldiers' slogs through the heat and mud of the jungle, crawled through rice paddies, and became the only official photojournalist to parachute into combat with American soldiers.