Leroy was born in the suburbs of Paris on August 27, 1944. She attended a Catholic boarding school and, to impress her boyfriend, earned a parachutist's license at the age of 18. After being moved by images of war she had seen in Paris Match, she decided to travel to Vietnam to "give war a human face." At the age of 21 she booked a one-way ticket to Laos in 1966, with just one Leica M2 and $200 in her pocket.
Career
Upon her arrival in Saigon in 1966, Leroy met the photographer Horst Faas, bureau chief of the Associated Press. A year later she became the first accredited journalist to participate in a combat parachute jump on February 23, 1967, joining the 173rd Airborne Brigade in Operation Junction City. She was so small and thin that she had to be weighed down so as not to be blown away during the jump. She had her press credentials temporarily suspended after she swore at a Marine officer whom she felt was condescending in denying her request to jump shortly after Operation Junction City. Two weeks after documenting the battle for Hill 881 with her photography published in Life, she was wounded with a Marine unit near the demilitarized zone on May 19, 1967. Leroy would later credit a camera with saving her life by stopping some of the shrapnel. After convalescing for six weeks aboard USS Sanctuary, she returned to the field. In 1968, during the Tet Offensive, Leroy was captured by the North Vietnamese Army. She managed to talk her way out and emerged as the first newsperson to take photographs of North Vietnamese Army Regulars behind their own lines. The subsequent story made the cover of Life. Her most famous photograph, was one of three taken in quick succession portraying U.S. Navy Corpsman Vernon Wike. In the pictures the sailor is crouched in tall grass during the battle for Hill 881 near Khe Sanh. He is cradling his buddy who has been shot while smoke from the battle rises into the air behind them. In the first frame Wike has two hands on his friend's chest, trying to staunch the wound. In the second, he is trying to find a heartbeat. In the third frame, "Corpsman In Anguish", he has just realised the man is dead. Leroy returned to Paris from Vietnam in 1969 and covered conflicts in several countries, including Northern Ireland, Cyprus, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Libya, and Lebanon. After her experiences in Beirut she swore off war coverage. Leroy originally sold her work to United Press International and The Associated Press, and later worked for Sipa Press and Gamma. In 1972, Leroy shot and directed Operation Last Patrol, a film about Ron Kovic and the anti-war Vietnam veterans. Leroy co-authored the book God Cried, about the siege of West Beirut by the Israeli army during the 1982 Lebanon War.
Retirement
She lived in the Hotel Chelsea in the late 1980s. Later in life, she founded and ran a vintage clothing store, Piece Unique, with a website. Piece Unique also hosted an online gallery of images from the Vietnam War, entitled "Under Fire: Images From Vietnam". She died in Santa Monica, California, following a battle with lung cancer.
