Around 150 friends, colleagues, and former students gathered at the Religious Society of Friends Meeting House on Stuyvesant Square last night to remember the life of Gloria Emerson, a brilliant and impassioned war reporter, winner of the National Book Award, and, in the words of Carol Bogart of Human Rights Watch, “a walking Heisenberg effect” who influenced every story she covered.

Emerson was remembered for capturing the human side of a story, especially in Vietnam, where many of those gathered last night had first met her.

Judith Coburn, another of the relatively few women reporters in Vietnam – she was working for the Village Voice – remembered meeting Emerson and, while dodging drops of iced tea from the spoon Emerson used to gesticulate with, being told not to cover combat because, “The real story is what is happening to the people here.”

Emerson supported a home for paraplegic Vietnamese children in Saigon, and in 1971 she convinced CBS News’s John Simon to do a story on it. Only after the segment ran did he learn that Emerson was working with the children and had personally helped finance the place.

“Her advice was always outrageous,” Mr. Simon recalled. “On the very rare occasions I could summon up my courage to follow her advice, my life got interesting.” He also recalled her repeated admonition: “Remember Bob, this is not a dress rehearsal.”

Tom Fox, now publisher of the National Catholic Reporter and author of “Children of Vietnam” among other books, recalled that the first time he met Emerson she walked up behind him and pulled the dispatch he was typing from the platen, threw his copy in the air, and cackled.

“The price of friendship with Gloria was emasculation,” said Mr. Fox, who was then a young reporter at the New York Times Saigon bureau. “But it was worth it.”

Mr. Fox also told of sneaking Emerson into the Saigon Army briefing center late one night so she could scrawl on the wall: “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.”

Ms. Bogart, who said she became close to Emerson only in recent years, said recent political events had contributed to Emerson’s decline, which culminated with her suicide on August 3, at the age of 75.

She suffered from Parkinson’s disease and had a bad leg as a result of an old injury.

“The war in Iraq, the second intifada, the assault on civil liberties at home” were all frustrating to Emerson, Ms. Bogart said.

“Increasingly, the answer to ‘What is to be done?’ was, ‘Nothing.'”