WASHINGTON - Ann Bryan Mariano, who was one of the first female combat correspondents covering the Vietnam War and who sued the Pentagon to keep her publication on military-base newsstands, died Feb. 25 of complications from Alzheimer's disease at Belmont Manor Nursing Home in Belmont, Mass. She was 76.
In 1965, Mariano - then Ann Bryan - was sent to Saigon to start an Asian edition of Overseas Weekly, a scrappy German-based tabloid that saw itself as an irreverent alternative to the semiofficial Stars and Stripes. The paper took particular delight in uncovering the misdeeds of military brass and offered its readers, most of them GIs, 12 pages of color comics and a weekly buffet of bosomy beauties.
Mariano exported Overseas Weekly's iconoclastic exuberance to Vietnam and "added a lot of depth to it," said Tracy Wood, who reported from Vietnam for United Press International. Under Mariano's leadership, the newspaper reported on war profiteers, officers involved in the black market, pot smoking among soldiers and racial prejudice in the Army. It also carried articles on doctors and relief workers assisting refugees and orphans and broke a story about U.S. soldiers at Long Binh Army base, outside Saigon, complaining that they didn't have enough rifles and ammunition.
The Defense Department barred Overseas Weekly from newsstands in Vietnam and post exchanges throughout Asia.
"Our only recourse was a lawsuit," Mariano recalled in a chapter she contributed to "War Torn: Stories of War From the Women Reporters Who Covered Vietnam" (2002).
In 1966, the paper filed suit in U.S. District Court in Washington, accusing Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara of violating the First Amendment by banning distribution of the newspaper in the Pacific region. While the suit was pending, Mariano arranged for the paper to be published in Hong Kong and flown in to Saigon. Vietnamese newsboys hustled it on the streets and outside military barracks. Local authorities began confiscating copies.
"As it became clear the troops could trust us, soldiers began calling our office directly with tips and information, by-passing official channels," Mariano recalled in "War Torn." "We began getting stories that ran counter to the rah-rah military point of view, which, of course, kept us often at odds with the Pentagon."
Overseas Weekly lost its suit against the Pentagon but won on appeal in 1967.
Mariano also had to fight the Pentagon for battlefield access, not because she reported for Overseas Weekly but because she was a woman. The Pentagon eventually lifted its ban against female correspondents.
She left Overseas Weekly in 1971 and lived briefly in San Francisco with her new husband, Frank Mariano, an Army helicopter pilot and information officer who later worked as a correspondent for ABC News.
The couple returned to Vietnam two years later, and she worked as a freelance reporter for the Associated Press and the Daily Express of London.
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