In a 1968 Associated Press photo from Vietnam by Art Greenspon, a soldier guides an unseen medevac helicopter to a jungle clearing where wounded comrades wait.
Half a century after the nation’s fateful early missteps into the quagmire, what are Americans likely to remember about the Vietnam War?
A Buddhist monk, doused with gasoline, squatting stoically in the street as roaring flames consume his body. An enemy prisoner grimacing as a bullet fired from a pistol at the end of an outstretched arm enters his brain. A 9-year-old girl running naked down the road, screaming as her skin burns from napalm.
Perhaps even more viscerally even than on television, America’s most wrenching war in our time hit home in photographs, including these three searing prize-winning images from The Associated Press newsmen Malcolm W. Browne, Eddie Adams and Nick Ut. They are the subject of retrospectives now, in a new book and accompanying exhibitions. No single news source did more to document the bitter and costly struggle against North Vietnamese Communist regulars and Vietcong insurgents, and to turn the home front against the war, than The A.P.
From 1950 to 1975, this nonprofit news cooperative, founded during the Mexican War in 1846, fielded Saigon’s largest, most battle-hardened cadre of war correspondents and photographers, including several women. Four died. “What we did, we told the accurate story,” said Peter Arnett, one of the last surviving members of the 1960s bureau, who was once berated by the United States Pacific commander, Adm. Harry D. Felt: “Get on the team.” Now, amid a flurry of anniversary commemorations of that tumultuous era and a surge of interest in war photography, The A.P. has, for the first time, culled its estimated 25,000 Vietnam photographs and reprinted some 250 in a book,“Vietnam: The Real War,” with an introduction by Pete Hamill, to be published by Abrams on Oct. 1.
Chuck Zoeller, the agency’s manager of special projects, said the dozens of rarely seen photographs in this collection include color plates of United States prisoners of war in a Hanoi prison in 1972 and historical images from the French colonial period. There is a photo of President John F. Kennedy in Florida, reviewing a commando unit back from action as early as 1962. And there are troubling scenes: Vietcong prisoners being kicked and subjected to water torture by South Vietnamese troops. A Vietnamese family of four, dead on a blanket, killed in a stampede as panicked refugees fled the advancing North Vietnamese in 1975.
On the book’s cover is a grim yet elegaic photo by Art Greenspon showing wounded American paratroopers in a jungle clearing near Hue in April 1968, as one soldier, arms raised as if in prayer, guides to the ground an unseen helicopter that is to be their salvation. A related photography exhibition opens on Oct. 24 at the Steven Kasher Gallery, at 521 West 23rd Street, in Chelsea. And for its own staff, The A.P. is devoting wall space in its headquarters in Manhattan to the work of the photographer of that 1963 Buddhist protest immolation: Mr. Browne, who was later a reporter for The New York Times. He died last year, as did Horst Faas, the longtime A.P. editor in Saigon.
“Three photographs changed public perception of the Vietnam War, and it’s no coincidence the photographers were working for The Associated Press,” said Anne Wilkes Tucker, curator of photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
“It was the agency that consistently brought the clearest and toughest vision to what was happening in Vietnam home to the American public,” said Ms. Tucker, whose show“War/Photography” is at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington through Sept. 29 and opens at the Brooklyn Museum on Nov. 8. Vietnam was a journalistic milestone: according to Daniel C. Hallin, professor of communication at the University of California, San Diego, and author of “The Uncensored War: The Media and Vietnam,” it was “the first war in which reporters were routinely accredited to accompany military forces, yet not subject to censorship.”
Hitching helicopter rides to battle zones while remaining free to write and shoot pictures, journalists made the most of it, recalled Richard Pyle, The A.P.’s Saigon bureau chief from 1970 until 1973. “Vietnam was where photojournalism came into its own, and kind of stayed there,” he said. In one heart-rending 1964 photograph by Mr. Faas from his Pulitzer Prize-winning portfolio, a distraught Vietnamese father numbly holds up the limp body of his dead daughter to a truckload of impassive South Vietnamese Rangers.
“Photographs may be more memorable than moving images, because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow,” Susan Sontag wrote in her book “On Photography.” The photograph of the girl burned by napalm, she wrote, “probably did more to increase the public revulsion against the war than a hundred hours of televised barbarities.” Other celebrated photographers whose harrowing images carried the war home includeLarry Burrows, of Life magazine, killed with The A.P.’s Henri Huet and two other newsmen in a 1971 helicopter crash; David Douglas Duncan; and Philip Jones Griffiths.
Even reporters routinely carried cameras. “We talk about multiformat coverage — we were doing that then,” said Santiago Lyon, vice president and director of photography for The A.P. “The access was extraordinary.” Partly as an official backlash, experts say, journalists never again enjoyed the same combination of military cooperation and freedom to report.
NY Times: Images of the Vietnam War That Defined an Era
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