The Last Assignment: A Novel of Dickey Chapelle
Dickey Chappelle (1919-1965) was America’s first female professional war photographer. This fictionalized account honors her life, devoted to showing the brutal human costs of armed conflicts. “I want to get the picture to end all wars,” she says at a late-career speaking engagement. Dickey rises above her peers from early on. MIT offers her a full scholarship; she’s one of the first women admitted there. She quits school to become a pilot, but bad vision blunts that goal. She trains with the US Marines and, though only five feet tall, keeps up with them in most exercises. She is the first American woman to parachute into combat, comes under fire at Iwo Jima and is later imprisoned and tortured by Russians in Hungary. On assignment to Cuba, she meets the young, mesmerizing Fidel Castro at his mountain hide-out and then again after he had turned into a murderous dictator. Many times she risks her own life and career to help victims of war or freedom fighters. On her fifth and last mission to Vietnam, she berates a group of young marines abusing a Viet Cong prisoner.
Robuck takes readers into Dickey’s family life, with a doting mother, devoted aunts, and her husband Tony: overbearing, philandering, and often jealous. A college photography instructor, Tony does help her view and record the world through camera lenses. Dickey remained childless, giving her freedom to go where she pleased and bond with refugee children in many places. Robuck intersperses her own writing with news articles, interview transcripts, and Dickey’s taped recordings. Author notes help sort out where Robuck deviates from verifiable facts. Robuck’s original sources and stunning war settings, combined with prose and dialogue that match Dickey’s intensity, make this a grand must-read. Highly recommended.
