Mariano sued the Pentagon to keep her publication, Overseas Weekly, on military-base newsstands but also had to fight for battlefield access because she was woman.
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.
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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).
http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-ann-bryan-mariano9-2009mar09,0,2729696.storyRIP.....
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