Yet when Sydney Schanberg of The New York Times wrote nearly the same story a week later, he didn’t cite her scoop. His front-page article was treated as an exclusive that changed American policy. Schanberg waited 32 years to admit in print that Sylvana had written the story first.

Some exceptional men championed us; there were bosses who took a chance and hired us, and who made us look good. Foremost was Horst Faas, the photo editor of The Associated Press in Saigon. He made the careers of several women with his simple policy of buying great photographs no matter who shot them.

Since we were often the only women covering a story, we partnered with men we could trust. It is stressful enough covering a battle — you don’t want to have to worry that a guy would make a pass at you. I was lucky. Koki Ishiyama, the resident Kyodo News correspondent, became my first war buddy on the battlefield and in classes learning the Khmer language. Thanks to Koki I broke the story that Solath Sar, better known as Pol Pot, was the real leader of the Khmer Rouge. Trying to dive deeper into the story, Koki was killed by the Khmer Rouge.

James Fenton, a precocious English poet, became my next war buddy. When we were in a foxhole on Christmas he celebrated by singing an improvised carol with the line “I saw three rockets sailing in on Christmas Day, on Christmas Day.” Now one of England’s finest poets, James wrote extraordinary verse during the war. His “In a Notebook” is the best poem of the Vietnam War.

Did it make a difference having women report a war? Absolutely. Considering our small numbers — a few dozen, over the course of more than a decade, spread across three countries — we had an outsize impact.

We wrote two of the standard histories of the war. Frances Fitzgerald of The New Yorker wrote “Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam,” still a popular book on the war. She was the first to explore the history of the country and its people to understand the American war, winning the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. I wrote “When the War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution,” which has become a classic history of Cambodia and the genocide. Because of the research in my book — including rare interviews with Pol Pot and other Communist leaders — I was called 30 years later to testify as an expert witness in the war crimes tribunal of the Khmer Rouge.

And while the role of female reporters was often overlooked, individual correspondents won accolades then and later. Gloria Emerson, the only woman sent by The New York Times to Vietnam, won the George Polk Award for her coverage focusing on the suffering of the Vietnamese people rather than the military story. Françoise DeMulder gave up her career as a model in Paris and took up war photography in Vietnam and Cambodia, creating a portfolio that captured the rich and often exotic story on the fringes of the battlefield. In 1977 she became the first woman to win the World Press Photo of the Year Award for her images from the war in Lebanon. Sylvana became the first woman to be foreign editor at U.P.I. and later was the first spokeswoman for the United Nations secretary general.