It seems churlish to mourn the passing of an admired colleague by thinking of my own life; if I was religious, it would probably be a sin. Since I’m not, it’s simply a strange epitaph I offer to Kate, a single, childless woman who left on Mother’s Day after 64 years of hard living, heroic work and exemplary kindness.

Kate Webb’s obituary appeared on the front pages of newspapers around the world --The International Herald Tribune, The Independent, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and on Eons -- as benefits a journalist who considered its entirety her stomping grounds as she shined her reporter’s light into its darkest and most dangerous corners. She died of bowel cancer May 13, 2007, in Sydney, Australia, six months after she was diagnosed; her ever-constant sister, Rachel Miller, and brother, Jeremy Webb, were with her at the end.

Born in New Zealand and raised in Australia, Kate was orphaned at 18 when her parents died in a car crash. Following graduation from Melbourne University, she became a journalist. The details are colorful -- she’d been working as a stained glass artist and had to get a job to pay for a window she’d shattered -- and the timing was right when she was hired by the Sydney Daily Mirror.

In 1967, she became a global gypsy when the paper sent her to Indonesia to cover the fall of President of President Sukarno and, soon afterward, she paid her own way to Saigon, where she was hired as a staff reporter by United Press International.

A year later, when I was a cub reporter with The Associated Press in Miami, “Kate Webb” was a familiar front page byline from the battlefield. I never missed an opportunity to tear out Kate’s stories from the Miami Herald, circle her name with a bright red grease pencil, and scrawl “THIS BYLINE COULD BE MINE IF AP WOULD SEND ME” across the front. I’d then mail the clipping to AP President Wes Gallagher in New York. He was not amused, but eventually became intrigued; after four years of badgering him with Kate’s scoops, he gave up trying to defend his oft-repeated Maginot Line of defense that “war is no place for women” and sent me to Saigon on a round-the-world ticket.

Kate’s success got me to Vietnam and set me on my life’s path. By then she was legendary, a beautiful gamin with short dark hair and searching eyes who’d earned the nickname “high pockets” from GIs because of the combat pants into which she stuffed film cans, notebooks, and whatever else she needed to cover the war.

As the Phnom Penh bureau chief for UPI, she’d survived 23 days in North Vietnamese captivity after she and five colleagues were captured in Cambodia. When she emerged from the jungle after their miraculous release, Kate read her own obituary in The New York Times and discovered her family had held a memorial service.

Ever after, she suffered from malaria. She also kept going to wars. In Afghanistan, she was almost scalped by a militiaman who dragged her up a flight of stairs by her hair. In India, half her face was torn off and she almost lost an arm in a motorcycle accident.

As much as I admired Kate as a professional who set the bar to which the rest of us aspired, our personal paths diverged as I watched her solitary progression through her 30s, 40s and 50s. I chose to give up the road to Samarkand and Somalia in favor of marrying and driving a Subaru to my reporting life. While Kate sheltered Afghan refugees in her house, then paid for them to emigrate to Australia and paid for their children’s college education, I acquired a mortgage and a dog.

I don’t believe Kate was lonely -- there were, according to various obituary accounts, a brief engagement to an American soldier in 1969, and a host of lovers on four continents – but I believe she was a loner. She apparently lived as hard as she worked, finding relaxation for her restless spirit in classic journalistic style, but choosing to share herself permanently with only her beloved family back in Sydney, where she retired in 2002.

By then, chain smoking and alcohol had pitted her soft voice with a pea-gravel huskiness, and her waif-like features had matured into strong character lines and piercing glances. Just as a Kate Webb byline stood for no-nonsense hard news, a Kate Webb observation could cut like a scalpel; having been exposed to so many in her career, she did not suffer fools.

When I finally got to spend a brief week in 2002 in the presence of this woman who had been of such importance to me for half my life, I noted first her Old World manners and fastidious grooming. She liked to iron; her tailored shirts were always starched and there were knife-creases in her slacks. She moved with the deliberateness of a person who’d once been seriously hurt, and didn’t want to hurt again. She was a listener, not a talker.

We were two of nine women reporters who’d collaborated on “WAR TORN: Stories of War from the Women Reporters Who Covered Vietnam” (Random House) (www.wartorn.net) who’d gathered in Boston and New York for a brief book tour. It would be our only reunion as Saigon Sisters -- a sobriquet disliked by most of us, but nonetheless a shorthand way of acknowledging “We few, we happy few, we band of sisters…”

None of us knew all of us, but each of us had an emotional attachment to the whole. The week I spent watching Kate, and listening to her during the few times we had to kick back and tentatively connect because of our shared war experiences, confirmed my hunch that Kate was our first among equals. She had kept at it the longest, worked the hardest, made the most difference. Around her, I was humble.

I learned two months ago that she was dying of bowel cancer. Our mutual friend and Saigon Sister, Denby Fawcett, had visited her in Sydney at Christmas and broke the news to the rest of us in an email when Kate decided it was time.

Ever since, I’ve thought of her every day, several times a day. She wasn’t supposed to go first; Ann Mariano is in the last stages of Alzheimer’s disease.

In Kate’s last days she was surrounded by her family. She fed exotic birds that trusted her enough to come to the hand that had written so many important, influential stories. She dozed in a flower garden. She watched the antics of her cat. And she planned her memorial service.

Her former Agence France-Presse colleague Marc Lavine reported to us that it was held in a Victorian stone church in the shadow of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. A Maori farewell song was among the music played in honor of the woman described as marvelous, complex, courageous, contradictory, and an inspiration.

Friends and colleagues paid tribute. Her devoted siblings spoke. Her remains were borne from the church by relays of family members to the recorded strains of “Je ne regrette rien” sung by Edith Piaf, as Kate had requested.

“A special prayer was also said for the other ‘War Torn’ authors whose names were read out, I believe, at Kate’s request,” Lavine added in his 2 a.m. email, after the wake Kate would have loved.

I keep wondering: What is it like to hear my name read aloud in a church at a memorial service? I keep wondering: Will the next time that happens be at my own memorial service? I keep wondering: Will I have measured up, as Kate did, when the bell tolls for me?

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