photo essay vietnam war

Sudden Death in Vietnam: ‘One Ride With Yankee Papa 13’

Vietnam War, LIFE Magazine, Yankee Papa 13

Larry Burrows Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Written By: Ben Cosgrove

In the spring of 1965, within weeks of 3,500 American Marines arriving in Vietnam, a 39-year-old Briton named Larry Burrows began work on a feature for LIFE magazine, chronicling the day-to-day experience of U.S. troops on the ground and in the air in the midst of the rapidly widening war. The photographs in this gallery focus on a calamitous March 31, 1965, helicopter mission; Burrows’ “report from Da Nang,” featuring his pictures and his personal account of the harrowing operation, was published two weeks later as a now-famous cover story in the April 16, 1965, issue of LIFE.

Over the decades, of course, LIFE published dozens of photo essays by some of the 20th century’s greatest photographers. Very few of those essays, however, managed to combine raw intensity and technical brilliance to such powerful effect as “One Ride With Yankee Papa 13” universally regarded as one of the greatest photographic documents to emerge from the war in Vietnam.

Here, LIFE.com presents Burrows’ seminal photo essay in its entirety: all of the photos that appeared in LIFE are here. (Note: In a picture from the article, Burrows mounts a camera to a special rig attached to an M-60 machine gun in helicopter YP13 a.k.a., “Yankee Papa 13.” At the end of this gallery, there are three previously unpublished photographs from Burrows’ 1965 assignment.]

Burrows, LIFE informed its readers, “had been covering the war in Vietnam since 1962 and had flown on scores of helicopter combat missions. On this day he would be riding in [21-year-old crew chief James] Farley’s machine and both were wondering whether the mission would be a no-contact milk run or whether, as had been increasingly the case in recent weeks, the Vietcong would be ready and waiting with .30-caliber machine guns. In a very few minutes Farley and Burrows had their answer.”

The following paragraphs lifted directly from LIFE illustrate the vivid, visceral writing that accompanied Burrows’ astonishing images, including Burrows’ own words, transcribed from an audio recording made shortly after the 1965 mission:

“The Vietcong dug in along the tree line, were just waiting for us to come into the landing zone,” Burrows reported. “We were all like sitting ducks and their raking crossfire was murderous. Over the intercom system one pilot radioed Colonel Ewers, who was in the lead ship: ‘Colonel! We’re being hit.’ Back came the reply: ‘We’re all being hit. If your plane is flyable, press on.’

“We did,” Burrows continued, “hurrying back to a pickup point for another load of troops. On our next approach to the landing zone, our pilot, Capt. Peter Vogel, spotted Yankee Papa 3 down on the ground. Its engine was still on and the rotors turning, but the ship was obviously in trouble. “Why don’t they lift off?’ Vogel muttered over the intercom. Then he set down our ship nearby to see what the trouble was.

“[Twenty-year-old gunner, Pfc. Wayne] Hoilien was pouring machine-gun fire at a second V.C. gun position at the tree line to our left. Bullet holes had ripped both left and right of his seat. The plexiglass had been shot out of the cockpit and one V.C. bullet had nicked our pilot’s neck. Our radio and instruments were out of commission. We climbed and climbed fast the hell out of there. Hoilien was still firing gunbursts at the tree line.”

Not until YP13 pulled away and out of range of enemy fire were Farley and Hoilien able to leave their guns and give medical attention to the two wounded men from YP3. The co-pilot, 1st Lt. James Magel, was in bad shape. When Farley and Hoilien eased off his flak vest, they exposed a major wound just below his armpit. “Magel’s face registered pain,” Burrows reported, “and his lips moved slightly. But if he said anything it was drowned out by the noise of the copter. He looked pale and I wondered how long he could hold on. Farley began bandaging Magel’s wound. The wind from the doorway kept whipping the bandages across his face. Then blood started to come from his nose and mouth and a glazed look came into his eyes. Farley tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but Magel was dead. Nobody said a word.”

In his searing, deeply sympathetic portrait of young men fighting for their lives at the very moment America is ramping up its involvement in Southeast Asia, Larry Burrows’ work anticipates the scope and the dire, lethal arc of the entire war in Vietnam.

Six years after “Yankee Papa 13” ran in LIFE, Burrows was killed, along with three other journalists Henri Huet, Kent Potter and Keisaburo Shimamoto when a helicopter in which they were flying was shot down over Laos in February, 1971. He was 44 years old.

Vietnam War, LIFE Magazine, Yankee Papa 13 Larry Burrows Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

LIFE_unpublished_slide

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The Vietnam War, Part I: Early Years and Escalation

• Alan Taylor
• March 30, 2015

Fifty years ago, in March 1965, 3,500 U.S. Marines landed in South Vietnam. They were the first American combat troops on the ground in a conflict that had been building for decades. The communist government of North Vietnam (backed by the Soviet Union and China) was locked in a battle with South Vietnam (supported by the United States) in a Cold War proxy fight. The U.S. had been providing aid and advisors to the South since the 1950s, slowly escalating operations to include bombing runs and ground troops. By 1968, more than 500,000 U.S. troops were in the country, fighting alongside South Vietnamese soldiers as they faced both a conventional army and a guerrilla force in unforgiving terrain. Each side suffered and inflicted huge losses, with the civilian populace suffering horribly. Based on widely varying estimates, between 1.5 and 3.6 million people were killed in the war. This photo essay, part one of a three-part series, looks at the earlier stages of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, as well as the growing protest movement, between the years 1962 and 1967. Be sure to also see part 2 and part 3 . Warning: Several of these photographs are graphic in nature.

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Hovering U.S. Army helicopters pour machine gun fire into a tree line to cover the advance of South Vietnamese ground troops in an attack on a Viet Cong camp 18 miles north of Tay Ninh, near the Cambodian border, in March of 1965. #

An American officer serving with the South Vietnam forces poses with group of Montagnards in front of one of their provisionary huts in a military camp in central Vietnam on November 17, 1962. They were brought in by government troops from a village where they were used as labor force by communist Viet Cong forces. The Montagnards, dark-skinned tribesmen numbering about 700,000, live in the highlands of central Vietnam. The government was trying to win their alliance in its war with the Viet Cong. #

Vietnamese airborne rangers, their two U.S. advisers, and a team of 12 U.S. Special Forces troops set out to raid a Viet Cong supply base 62 miles northwest of Saigon, on August 6, 1963. As the H-21 helicopters hovered six feet from the ground to avoid spikes and wires and under sniper fire, the troops jumped out to attack. #

A South Vietnamese Marine, severely wounded in a Viet Cong ambush, is comforted by a comrade in a sugar-cane field at Duc Hoa, about 12 miles from Saigon, on August 5, 1963. A platoon of 30 Vietnamese Marines was searching for communist guerrillas when a long burst of automatic fire killed one Marine and wounded four others. #

Napalm air strikes raise clouds into gray monsoon skies as houseboats glide down the Perfume River toward Hue in Vietnam on February 28, 1963, where a battle for control of the old Imperial City ended with a Communist defeat. Firebombs were directed against a village on the outskirts of Hue. #

Thich Quang Duc, a Buddhist monk, burns himself to death on a Saigon street on June 11, 1963, to protest alleged persecution of Buddhists by the South Vietnamese government. President Ngo Dình Diem, part of the Catholic minority, had adopted policies that discriminated against Buddhists and gave high favor to Catholics. #

Flying low over the jungle, an A-1 Skyraider drops 500-pound bombs on a Viet Cong position below as smoke rises from a previous pass at the target, on December 26, 1964. #

Partially covered, a dying Viet Cong guerrilla raises his hands as South Vietnamese Marines search palm groves near Long Binh in the Mekong Delta, on February 27, 1964. The guerrilla died in a foxhole following a battle between a battalion of South Vietnamese Marines and a unit of Viet Cong. #

As U.S. "Eagle Flight" helicopters hover overhead, South Vietnamese troops wade through a rice paddy in Long An province during operations against Viet Cong guerrillas in the Mekong Delta, in December of 1964. The "Eagle Flight" choppers were loaded with Vietnamese airborne troops who were dropped in to support ground forces at the first sign of enemy contact. #

A father holds the body of his child as South Vietnamese Army Rangers look down from their armored vehicle on March 19, 1964. The child was killed as government forces pursued guerrillas into a village near the Cambodian border. #

Marines wade ashore with heavy equipment at first light at Red Beach near Da Nang in Saigon on April 10, 1965. #

With the persuasion of a Viet Cong-made spear pressed against his throat, a captured Viet Cong guerrilla decided to talk to interrogators, telling them of a cache of Chinese grenades on March 28, 1965. He was captured with 13 other guerrillas and 17 suspects when two Vietnamese battalions overran a Viet Cong camp about 15 miles southwest of Da Nang air force base. #

Thousands attend a rally on the grounds of the Washington Monument in Washington on April 17, 1965, to hear Ernest Gruening, a Democratic senator from Alaska, and other speakers discuss U.S. policy in Vietnam. The rally followed picketing of the White House by students demanding an end to Vietnam fighting. #

A nurse attempts to comfort a wounded U.S. Army soldier in a ward of the 8th army hospital at Nha Trang in South Vietnam on February 7, 1965. The soldier was one of more than 100 who were wounded during Viet Cong attacks on two U.S. military compounds at Pleiku, 240 miles north of Saigon. Seven Americans were killed in the attacks. #

Flag-draped coffins of eight American Servicemen killed in attacks on U.S. military installations in South Vietnam, on February 7, are placed in transport plane at Saigon, February 9, 1965, for return flight to the United States. Funeral services were held at the Saigon Airport with U.S. Ambassador Maxwell D. Taylor and Vietnamese officials attending. #

Injured Vietnamese receive aid as they lie on the street after a bomb explosion outside the U.S. embassy in Saigon, Vietnam, on March 30, 1965. Smoke rises from wreckage in background. At least two Americans and several Vietnamese were killed in the bombing. #

Four "Ranch Hand" C-123 aircraft spray liquid defoliant on a suspected Viet Cong position in South Vietnam in September of 1965. The four specially equipped planes covered a 1,000-foot-wide swath in each pass over the dense vegetation. #

A Vietnamese battalion commander, Captain Thach Quyen, left, interrogates a captured Viet Cong suspect on Tan Dinh Island, Mekong Delta, in 1965. #

A strategic air command B-52 bomber with externally mounted, 750-pound bombs heads toward its target about 56 miles northwest of Saigon near Tay Ninh on November 2, 1965. #

General William Westmoreland talks with troops of first battalion, 16th regiment of 2nd brigade of U.S. First Division at their positions near Bien Hoa in Vietnam, in 1965. #

Flares from planes light a field covered with the dead and wounded of the ambushed battalion of the U.S. 1st Cavalry Division in the Ia Drang Valley, Vietnam, on November 18, 1965, during a fierce battle that had been raging for days. Units of the division were battling to hold their lines against what was estimated to be a regiment of North Vietnamese soldiers. Bodies of the slain soldiers were carried to this clearing with their gear to await evacuation by helicopter. #

A Viet Cong fighter in Vietnam in an undated photo #

A U.S. Marine, newly arrived in South Vietnam on April 29, 1965, drips with perspiration while on patrol in search of Viet Cong guerrillas near Da Nang air base. American troops found 100-degree temperatures a tough part of the job. General Wallace M. Greene Jr., a Marine Corps commandant, after a visit to the area, authorized light short-sleeved uniforms as aid to troops’ comfort. #

In Berkeley-Oakland City, California, demonstrators march against the war in Vietnam in December of 1965. #

A Vietnamese litter bearer wears a face mask to keep out the smell as he passes the bodies of U.S. and Vietnamese soldiers killed in fighting against the Viet Cong at the Michelin rubber plantation, about 45 miles northeast of Saigon, on November 27, 1965. #

Pedestrians cross the destroyed Hue Bridge in Hue, Vietnam, in an undated photo. #

Wounded and shocked civilian survivors of Dong Xoai crawl out of a fort bunker on June 6, 1965, where they survived murderous ground fighting and air bombardments of the previous two days. #

A U.S. Air Force Douglas A-1E Skyraider drops a white phosphorus bomb on a Viet Cong position in South Vietnam in 1966. #

A Vietnamese girl, 23 years old, was captured by an Australian patrol 30 feet below ground at the end of a maze of tunnels some 10 miles west of the headquarters of the Australian task force (40 miles southeast of Saigon). The woman was crouched over a World War II radio set. About seven male Viet Cong took off when the Australians appeared—but the woman remained and appeared to be trying to conceal the radio set. She was taken back to the Australian headquarters where she told under sharp interrogation (which included a "waterprobe"; see her wet clothes after the interrogation) that she worked as a Viet Cong nurse in the village of Hoa Long and had been in the tunnel for 10 days. The Australians did not believe her because she seemed to lack any medical knowledge. They thought that she may have possibly been the leader of the political cell in Long Hoa. She was being led away after interrogation, clothes soaked from the "waterprobe" on October 29, 1966. #

Left: Pilot Leslie R. Leavoy in flight with other jets in the background above Vietnam in 1966. Right: Army nurse 2nd Lieutenant Roberta “Bertie” Steele in South Vietnam, on February 9, 1966. #

Women and children crouch in a muddy canal as they take cover from intense Viet Cong fire at Bao Trai, about 20 miles west of Saigon, on January 1, 1966. Paratroopers, background, of the U.S. 173rd Airborne Brigade escorted the South Vietnamese civilians through a series of firefights during the U.S. assault on a Viet Cong stronghold. #

A napalm strike erupts in a fireball near U.S. troops on patrol in South Vietnam in 1966. #

A Marine, top, wounded slightly when his face was creased by an enemy bullet, pours water into the mouth of a fellow Marine suffering from heat during Operation Hastings along the demilitarized zone between North and South Vietnam on July 21, 1966. #

Left: A Vietnamese child clings to his bound father who was rounded up as a suspected Viet Cong guerrilla during “Operation Eagle Claw” in the Bong Son area, 280 miles northeast of Saigon on February 17, 1966. The father was taken to an interrogation camp with other suspects rounded up by the U.S. 1st air cavalry division. Right: The body of an American paratrooper killed in action in the jungle near the Cambodian border is raised up to an evacuation helicopter in War Zone C, Vietnam, in 1966. #

The singing group the "Korean Kittens" appear on stage at Cu Chi, Vietnam, during the Bob Hope USO Christmas show, to entertain U.S. troops of the 25th Infantry Division. #

A grim-faced U.S. Marine fires his M60 machine gun, concealed behind logs and resting in a shallow hole, during the battle against North Vietnamese regulars for Hill 484, just south of the demilitarized zone, on October 10, 1966. After three weeks of bitter fighting, the 3rd battalion of the 4th Marines took the hill the week of October 2. #

Lieutenant Commander Donald D. Sheppard, of Coronado, California, aims a flaming arrow at a bamboo hut concealing a fortified Viet Cong bunker on the banks of the Bassac River, Vietnam, on December 8, 1967. #

A U.S. Marine CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter comes down in flames after being hit by enemy ground fire during Operation Hastings, just south of the demilitarized zone between North and South Vietnam, on July 15, 1966. The helicopter crashed and exploded on a hill, killing one crewman and 12 Marines. Three crewmen escaped with serious burns. #

A man brews tea while a U.S. Marine examines a pinup in Vietnam in September of 1967. #

A trooper of the U.S. 1st cavalry division aims a flamethrower at the mouth of cave in An Lao Valley in South Vietnam, on April 14, 1967, after the Viet Cong group hiding in it were warned to emerge. #

Sergeant Ronald Payne, 21, of Atlanta, Georgia, emerges from a Viet Cong tunnel holding his silencer-equipped revolver with which he fired at guerrillas fleeing ahead of him underground. Payne and others of the 196th light infantry brigade probed the massive tunnel in Hobo Woods, South Vietnam, on January 21, 1967, and found detailed maps and plans of the enemy. The infantrymen who explored the complex are known as “Tunnel Rats.” They were called out of the tunnels on January 21, and nauseating gas was pumped in. #

Military police, reinforced by Army troops, throw back anti-war demonstrators as they tried to storm a mall entrance doorway at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., on October 21, 1967. #

Rick Holmes of C company, 2nd battalion, 503rd infantry, 173rd airborne brigade, sits down on January 3, 1966, in Vietnam. #

U.S. Navy Douglas A-4E Skyhawks from Attack Squadrons VA-163 Saints and VA-164 Ghost Riders attack the Phuong Dinh railroad bypass bridge, 10 kilometers north of Thanh Hoe, North Vietnam, on September 10, 1967. Note the attacking Skyhawk in the lower right and one directly left of the explosions on the bridge. #

U.S. soldiers of the 3rd Brigade, 4th Infantry Division, look on a mass grave of enemy combatants after a day-long battle against the Viet Cong 272nd Regiment, about 60 miles northwest of Saigon, in March of 1967. U.S. military command reported 423 Communist forces dead, with American losses at 30 dead, 109 wounded, and three missing. #

U.S. troops of the 7th and 9th divisions wade through marshland during a joint operation on South Vietnam's Mekong Delta, in April of 1967. #

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Educator Resources

The War in Vietnam: A Story in Photographs

The war in Vietnam has been described as the first "living room war"—meaning combat was seen on TV screens and newspapers on a daily basis. Newspaper and television crews documented this war much more intensely than they did earlier conflicts. This willingness to allow documentation of the war extended to the military's own photographers—who captured thousands of images that covered every aspect of the conflict between 1962 and 1975.

Photographs

Links go to DocsTeach, the online tool for teaching with documents from the National Archives.

Marines on an M-48 Tank

Company A Gathers Around a Guitar

Operation "Oregon" Search and Destroy Mission

Keeping Track of Time Left on His Helmet

Soldiers Carry a Wounded Comrade Through a Swamp

A Marine Walks Through a Punji-staked Gully

A Marine Keeps a Battery Pack Dry Through Mud

A Marine Stands Watch in an Observation Tower

Home is Where You Dig It

Navy Seal Team One Moves Down the Bassac River

Red Cross Volunteer Playing Cards with Marines

Aboard the Hospital Ship USS Repose off South Vietnam

Intensive Care on the Hospital Ship USS Repose

Teaching Activities

The War in Vietnam - A Story in Photographs asks students to analyze the photographs from the Vietnam War shown above. After analysis, students will categorize the photos by topic and write captions in preparation for a photography exhibit about the war that "tells the story of the young men and women who fulfilled their duty to their country by serving in the war in Vietnam."

The Vietnam War Page on DocsTeach  includes primary sources and document-based teaching activities related to the Vietnam War.

Philip Jones Griffiths Foundation

Vietnam inc.

Vietnam at war.

First published in 1971, Vietnam Inc. played a crucial part in changing public attitudes in the United States, turning the tide of opinion and ultimately helping to put an end to the Vietnam War. Philip Jones Griffiths’ classic account of the war was the outcome of years of intensive reporting and is one of the most detailed surveys of any conflict in twentieth-century history. Showing us the true horrors of the war as well as a study of Vietnamese rural life, the photographer and author creates a compelling argument against the de-humanizing power of the modern war machine and American imperialism. Rare and highly sought-after, Vietnam Inc. became one of the enduring classics of photojournalism.

His portraits of soldiers in action or, as often, at ease, have an insider’s conviction. The result is a work of extremes in which horror alternates with humanity: the soldiers on the point of raping a Vietnamese girl or the wounded civilian so swathed in bandages her identification is reduced to a label reading “VNC female”. Griffiths had an enduring sense of compassion for the Vietnamese people and their land, but also for the U.S troops, particularly those individuals who had been drafted. The real ‘bad guys’ are rarely the people with their boots on the ground.

Not since Goya has anyone portrayed war like Philip Jones Griffiths.

Henri cartier-bresson.

I decided to be the one to show what was really going on in Vietnam. Here was something of profound importance.

Philip jones griffiths.

Related work

Vietnam Leng Xuyen Bars

Vietnam Le Van Duyet’s tomb at Tet

Vietnam Flower Market at Tet

Buddhist Pagoda near Saigon, etc.

Publications.

Dark Odyssey

Vietnam Inc.

Agent Orange:

VIETNAM. South Vietnam. Saigon. 1967

VIETNAM. Older soldiers who missed their families befriended dogs and children. The canines proved more congenial. More dogs than wives were taken back to the U.S. 1967

VIETNAM. South Vietnam. 1970

VIETNAM. South Vietnam. MACV headquaters, Tan Son Nhut Airport. These are MACV (MIlitary Assistance Command, Vietnam) personnel who were lectured monthly on the progress of pacification. 1970

VIETNAM. This operation by the 1st Cavalry Division to cut the Ho Chi Minh trail failed like all the others but the U.S. military were shaken to find such sophisticate weapons stockpiled in the valley. Officers still talked of winning the war, of seeing "the light at the end of the tunnel." As it happened there was a light, that of a fast-approaching express train. 1968

VIETNAM. South Vietnam. The vietnamese village. Rise is traditionally threshed by walking a buffalo over it. This costs nothing and is a pleasant way to spend an evening.1970

VIETNAM. The parents of young children were rarely present in the village of Vietnam. Americans often wondered where all the children came from. The fathers were often away fighting for one side or the other, and the mothers had jobs servicing the G.I.'s. Whether officially called cleaning, laundering, shoe-shining, or even car-washing, "servicing" usually meant prostitution. 1970

VIETNAM. Delta and My Tho. 1967

VIETNAM. South Vietnam. Ben Tre. 1970

VIETNAM. Quang Ngai. This guerrilla fighter had just thrown a grenade, killing one member of the platoon and wounded two others. In the resulting fracas, he too was killed. The incident occurred in what had once been a quiet hamlet in central Vietnam, probably in the very field in front of his home where he'd spent his youth tilling the soil. 1967

VIETNAM. A CIA-organized demonstration of "spontaneous" anger against those favouring a negotiated settlement of the war. 1967

VIETNAM. Mortuary Vehicle. 1967

VIETNAM. 1967.

VIETNAM. South Vietnam. Danang. 1967

VIETNAM. The battle for Saigon. 1968

CAMBODIA. Car salesmen used to follow soldiers into the field to make their sales ("so the boys will have a real reason for wanting to get home in one piece"). As the fighting intensified, they found it safer to send catalogs. 1970

CAMBODIA. Prisoners of war were afforded very different treatment by each side. Americans were treated reasonably (the ranting of the MIA movement in America aside), whereas captured Vietcong were tortured, raped, and killed. Some ended in the tiger-cages of the U.S. administered Con Son prison, where conditions would have staggered a Spanish Inquisitor. 1970

CAMBODIA. His lack of equipment is a constant source of wonder to the GI's. Surrounded, this Vietcong "defected", in the best Maoist tradition. Caught in the wires of an "automatic ambush", he produced a Chieu Hoi (safe conduct) pass to classify himself as a "rallier" to the GVN side. 1970

VIETNAM. Quang Ngai. Peasants. 1967

VIETNAM. US 9th Division troops on patrol in the Mekong Delta during a conversation with a peasant boy. 1967

VIETNAM. South Vietnam. Ba Cho. 1971

VIETNAM. 1968. Innocent peasants take the brunt of the U.S. military drive.

VIETNAM DU SUD. Phu Quoc. 1967

VIETNAM. South Vietnam. Operation "Cedar Falls". 1967

VIETNAM. South Vietnam. Hospital. 1968

VIETNAM. South Vietnam. Song Tra. 1967

VIETNAM. During the Vietnamese New Year celebrations of the Tet, the city of Hue an ancient Mandarin walled city which stood on the banks of the perfumed river and near to the demilitarised zone, a force of 5000 Vietcong and NVA (North Vietnamese Army) regulars took siege of the citadel. The American sent in the Fifth Marine Commando force to dislodge them. 1968

VIETNAM. Hue. US Marines inside the Citadel rescue the body of a dead Marine during the Tet Offensive. 1968

The battle for the Cities. U.S. Marines. 1968.

VIETNAM. Hue. Refugees flee across a damaged bridge. Marines intended to carry their counterattack from the southern side, right into the citadel of the city. Despite many guards, the Vietcong were able to swim underwater and blow up the bridge, using skin-diving equipment from the Marines.

VIETNAM. The battle for Saigon. Refugees under fire. Confused urban warfare was such that Americans were shooting their staunchest supporters. 1968

VIETNAM. Called a "little tiger" for killing two "Vietcong women cadre" - his mother and teacher, it was rumored. 1968

VIETNAM. The battle for Saigon. U.S. policy in Vietnam was based on the premise that peasants driven into the towns and cities by the carpet-bombing of the countryside would be safe. Furthermore, removed from their traditional value system they could be prepared for imposition of consumerism. This "restructuring" of society suffered a setback when, in 1968, death rained down on the urban enclaves. 1968

VIETNAM. The battle for Saigon. Refugee from US Bombing. 1968

VIETNAM. The American policy of Annihilating as many Vietnamese as possible while claiming to be saving them from the "horrors" of Communism could be confirmed by visiting any hospital. 1967

VIETNAM. Quang Ngai. 1967

VIETNAM. South Vietnam. Quin Hon. U.S. Soldiers with a group of captured Vietcong suspects. 1967

VIETNAM. South Vietnam. Quin Hon. 1967

VIETNAM. Quang Ngai. This was a village a few miles from My Lai. It was a routine operation - troops were on a typical " search and destroy" mission. After finding and killing men in hiding, the women and children were rounded up. All bunkers where people could take shelter were then destroyed. Finally the troops withdrew and called in an artillery strike of the defenseless inhabitants. 1967

VIETNAM. Refugee camp. In this camp, the "Psy-Ops" officer discovered he'd forgotten to order "indigenous reading material" for the inmates, so he dished out Playboy magazine instead. 1967

VIETNAM. The battle for Saigon. The problem with "close" artilery support was that it was often too close. on this occasion shells called in by these troops had landed among them. The officer's desperate message to halt the bombardment were not recieved; he had taken up refuge inside an armoured personnel carrier where his frenzied transmissions could not penetrate the metal hull. 1968

VIETNAM. This boy was killed by U.S. helicopter gunfire while on his way to church - a Catholic church - whose members were avid supporters of the government, who were in turn pro-American. The result was a disillusioned urban population, reluctant to believe in or support their discredited leaders. 1968

VIETNAM. In Quang Ngai Province everything that moved was a target. It had been strongly Communist for thirty years and in practice U.S. policy was genocide. Each morning, a few lucky survivors of the previous night's carnage made it to the province hospital. The newly developed antipersonnel weapons caused a problem - their plastic darts did not show up on X-rays. 1967

VIETNAM. South Vietnam. Danang. A U.S. Marine demonstrates how to bathe a child to bored Vietnamese mothers. 1967

VIETNAM. Nha Be. In a society where women are traditionally revered for their poise and purity, the wartime conditions effectively dehumanized them. This girl was dancing for a group of U.S. Navy personnel on a makeshift stage (the officer's reviewing stand) when she was joined by two unwelcomed spectators. 1970

VIETNAM. Long Binh. Discarded equipment collects in stockpiles as the ground war draws to a close. 1970

VIETNAM. Radar Control at Tan Son Nhut. 1970

VIETNAM. Can Tho. 1970

VIETNAM. Leng Xuyen Bars. 1970

VIETNAM. South Vietnam. Saigon. 1970

VIETNAM. South Vietnam. Phu Me. As a Young child, this boy had been in the arms of his fleeing mother as she was hit by machine-gun fire from a helicopter outside their home. He survived, but went insane and spent his life chained up to his hospital bed. When helicopters passed overhead he went berserk trying to shut out their sound. 1970

VIETNAM. South Vietnam. Cam Ranh. 1970

As part of the techno-war concept, the idea of an automated battlefield was widely touted. Aircraft carriers - floating airstrips, secure from the attack - would respond to requests for bombing. The pilots never saw the faces of those they killed and maimed. It was considered important to protect men from sights that could produce emotional reactions.

VIETNAM. South Vietnam. Quang Ngai. This group was not recovering from surgery so, to free up scarce beds, they transferred to an outbuilding to die. The determination was made by the hospital's solitary Spanish surgeon. There was no way he could operate on everyone; he explained with tears in his eyes, "Every morning I have to play God - deciding who will die and who I will give a chance to live." 1967

VIETNAM. Hue. US Marines inside the citadel in Hue during the Tet offensive. 1968

VIETNAM. South Vietnam. The levelled village of Ben Tre in the delta after the Tet offensive. 1968

VIETNAM. South Vietnam. Quang Ngai. 1967

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7 Iconic Photos From the Vietnam War Era

By: Dave Roos

Updated: May 3, 2024 | Original: June 8, 2022

Many of the reporters and photographers who covered the conflict in Vietnam  came from a new generation of journalists. Coverage of earlier wars was heavily influenced by the government, says Susan Moeller, a journalism professor and author of Shooting War: Photography and the American Experience of Combat , but in Vietnam, the journalistic mission was different.

“There was no longer that expectation that they should speak the government’s line,” says Moeller. “In Vietnam, journalists saw their remit as calling into question some of the statements and assertions of the White House and Pentagon.”

Stark photographs of dying soldiers and wounded civilians provided a striking counter-narrative to official reports that America was winning the war in Vietnam. As the conflict dragged on and the death toll of American soldiers mounted, these iconic images added fuel to the growing anti-war movement and shook the halls of power.

1. Buddhist Monk Self-Immolates

On June 11, 1963, a Buddhist monk named Thich Quang Duc sat calmly in a busy intersection near Siagon’s Presidential Palace as a fellow monk doused him with gasoline. After saying a short prayer, Thich Quang Duc lit a match and dropped it into his lap, instantly engulfing his body in flames. Images of the monk’s stoic self-immolation, taken by AP journalist Malcolm Browne , sent shockwaves around the world.

Thich Quang Duc gave his life in protest of the brutal, anti-Buddhist policies of the South Vietnamese president, Ngo Dinh Diem, a staunch Catholic. Browne’s unforgettable photographs called into question America’s growing support for the South Vietnam regime. President John F. Kennedy is reported to have said, “No news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one.” But it didn’t change Kennedy’s mind on America’s position on Vietnam.

2. Shocking Execution

More than 50 years later, this image still has the power to startle and sicken. It was published on the front page of newspapers like The New York Times in February 1968, days into the Tet Offensive, massive coordinated attacks by the North Vietnamese government. In the photo, a South Vietnamese police chief calmly executes a Vietcong fighter in the streets of Saigon. The image, which won a Pulitzer Prize for photographer Eddie Adams, caused many Americans to openly question the morality of the war.

3. Deadliest Year for American Soldiers in Vietnam

1968 was the deadliest year for American soldiers in Vietnam, and this image, captured by freelance photographer Art Greenspon , summed up the tremendous cost being paid by young men fighting in what increasingly felt like a futile war.

The sense of brotherhood in the photo is palpable, as is the sense of anguish and desperation. Nearly half of the company had been killed in a firefight and the survivors waited two days for a medevac helicopter to arrive. The First Sergeant raised his arms in the air to signal the chopper, but he might as well have been lifting them in prayer.

Greenspon’s indelible image landed on the front page of The New York Times and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

4. LBJ and Family Watching Protests

Yoichi Okamoto was the very first chief White House photographer, hired by President Lyndon Johnson . Okamoto was given unfettered access to the president, as shown in this incredibly intimate moment captured inside the Johnsons’ bedroom at their family ranch in Stonewall, Texas.

The president and First Lady Ladybird Johnson are watching coverage of the anti-war protests outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

5. Kent State Shootings

On April 30, 1970, President Richard Nixon authorized the American invasion of Cambodia , a neutral country bordering Vietnam. Americans were deeply divided over the war, and Nixon’s decision sparked angry protests on college campuses, including Kent State in Ohio, where protestors burned down the ROTC building.

On May 4, 1970, National Guard troops ordered the Kent State protestors to disperse, but the crowd of roughly 3,000—composed of students and outside protesters—refused, with some throwing rocks at the Guardsmen. No one expected what happened next. The National Guard troops opened fire, sending a 13-second volley of bullets into the mass of protesters.

Four Kent State students were killed that day and nine more were injured. Student photographer John Filo won a Pulitzer Prize for his gripping photo of 14-year-old Mary Ann Vecchio crying out next to the fallen body of Jeffrey Miller. The shootings at Kent State cast a pall over the Nixon presidency and brought the violence of the Vietnam War home in a whole new way.

6. 'The Terror of War'

The title of this photo says it all, “The Terror of War.” Vietnamese-American photographer Nick Ut won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1972 image of innocent children fleeing an accidental napalm attack on their village. Front and center is nine-year-old Kim Phuc, naked and badly burned by the American chemical weapon. When Ut realized the extent of her injuries, he and others came to Phuc’s aid. They’re still close friends.

"That picture will always serve as a reminder of the unspeakable evil of which humanity is capable," Phuc wrote in a guest essay published in the New York Times 50 years later on June 6, 2022. "Still, I believe that peace, love, hope and forgiveness will always be more powerful than any kind of weapon."

7. Airlift Operation After Fall of Saigon

On April 29, 1975, the fall of Saigon was imminent. Panic engulfed the streets of the South Vietnamese capital as North Vietnamese troops encircled the city. American diplomats and journalists were ordered to evacuate Saigon immediately, and scores of South Vietnamese citizens crowded outside the U.S. Embassy in hopes of boarding one of the Marine helicopters carrying people to safety.

This iconic image, taken by Dutch journalist Hubert van Es, perfectly captured the desperate and ignominious withdrawal from Saigon, but the helicopter wasn’t perched atop the U.S. Embassy as most people think. It was an apartment building housing American CIA officers. Only about a dozen of the crush of people on the rooftop were able to squeeze on the helicopter before it lifted off, never to return.

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Narrative Strategies of the Vietnam War Coverage by German War Photographer Horst Faas from 1964 - 1971 – An analysis of four selected pictures by Anton J. Hansen

It’s the early morning of June 5 th , 1972 and Huỳnh Công Út, professionally known as Nick Ut, joins a team of journalists, photographers and soldiers towards Trang Bang. The village is located about 25 miles northwest of Saigon and heavy fighting has been going on for a couple of days. Nick, only 21 years old at this time, is armed. Not with a rifle, but with a tool that plays an important role in ending this war. A war which has killed more than two million Vietnamese civilians, more than one million Vietnamese soldiers and more than 58 000 US-American soldiers (Lewy, 1980; Spector, 2020). A war, which has left millions traumatized. Since Vietnam gained its independence in 1946, it constantly had martial conflicts with its former colonizers France, and the United States of America which tried to set up a deeply corrupted regime in South Vietnam (Bradley, 2009, p.118). When Ho Chi Minh, the leading politician of North Vietnam who dreamed of reuniting his mother country, started to increase the political and martial pressure on South Vietnam, the United States of America started to send more and more military personnel to South Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh, who was looking for support by the United States, shortly after Vietnams independence in 1946, was rejected by the USA due to its diplomatic ties with former colonizing power France (Lawrence, 2008, p.27). Therefore, Ho Chi Minh switched sides and found the Soviet Union and China as allies. Fearing that Vietnam would reunite and become a Communistic country, which would pressure American alleys in South East Asia, including Cambodia, Malaysia, Taiwan and Thailand, the United States increased their military engagement in South Vietnam in 1964 (Bradley, 2009, p.109). In 1968 already, more than 500.000 US-American soldiers fought one of the bloodiest, most brutal wars of the 20st century. Furthermore, three times the number of bombs were dropped by the USA until 1975 on that tiny South East Asian nation than were dropped by all parties in World War II combined (Bradley, 2009, p.115). The atrocities committed to Vietnamese civilians by US-American soldiers are widely compared to the holocaust committed by Nazi Germany (Lawrence, 2008, p. 159).

For Nick Ut, this morning is just as many mornings in the war. A local village has been bombed with napalm bombs, there are dead bodies, fleeing villagers and a lot of pain and misery. Nick, holding his camera ready, walks on a highway with his colleagues and suddenly, he sees them.

A group of children, horribly burned by napalm, running crying towards him while US army soldiers and journalists walk quietly besides them, minding their own business. Nick lifts his camera, his powerful tool, and takes photos, one after the other, before he runs towards the children to carry out first aid. The photo that he took of the fleeing children this morning will win the Pulitzer price and plays an important role in the anti-war movement. It narrates the cruelties that are committed by the US-troops to Vietnamese citizens and a good example of the strong appeal that imagery has on the minds of people.

But the photo almost didn’t get published. Horst Faas, a German journalist, stationed in Saigon at the time, mobilized all his contacts to get the photo out of Vietnam and published. Associated Press was very critical of publishing a photo of a naked girl, but Faas directly realized the strong effect that publishing such a photo would have on public opinion worldwide. He knew, that this photo could have major contributions of ending this war. Horst Faas, working for Associated Press in Saigon, was also Nick Ut’s mentor and encouraged him to document the war in Vietnam for Associated Press. Horst Faas lend Nick and other young Vietnamese photography talents camera equipment and helped tremendously to get their work published. Apart from his role as recruiting young talents, Horst Faas also photographed and his photos are just as famous as Nick Ut’s “Accidental Napalm” is. The photos by Horst Faas are considered some of the best photos that were shot during the Vietnam war. Considering his role as a supporter for young Vietnamese talents and Faas’ journalistic impact by taking and publishing world-class photos of the war, one can say that Horst Faas was a central figure in shaping the photographic narrative that was told about the Vietnam war by media worldwide. Therefore, the question arises:

What are the uses of narrative in the photographic work of Horst Faas’ documentation of the Vietnam war?

To answer this question, I have selected four iconic photos, taken by Horst Faas between 1964 and 1971. Narrative refers to the succession of events, real of fictitious, that are the subjects of the discourse and has temporality (Casadei, 2015, p.30). But “photographic image stops, holds, fixes, immobilizes, highlights and separates duration, capturing a single moment of it” (Dubois, 1993, p.161). As “the flow, the race, the time has no validity in photography’s point of view”, photography is a figure without duration (Dubois, 1993, p.163). Never the less, we, the viewers of images constructs the temporality of images, by putting them into a context, into a historical frame through which we interpret them and their narratives (Stocchetti & Kukkonen, p.30). Consequently, the photojournalistic narrative says something about who looks at the picture

It is widely argued which impact the media had on the outcome of the Second Indo-China war, also known as the Vietnam war (Bradley, 2009; Griffin, 2010; Lewy, 1980). Horst Faas himself once said in an interview in 1997: “I don’t think we influenced the war at any time […] I don’t think we helped to win it or helped to lose it. We didn’t work on the outcome of the war.” However, he said that documenting a war is better than not documenting a war (Vitello, 2012). The control of narratives is key in establishing power relations and legitimizing the power of an authority. Controlling the mediazation of reality and the stories that are told about reality is part of it (Stocchetti & Kukkonen, p.16). Governments and political or economic interests work conscientiously to control, channel, limit, or delay image production and circulation that influences opposing narratives of war (Griffin, 2010, p.8).

Picture 1 – War is Hell

In the example of the Vietnam war, journalists challenged the narrative that was communicated by the US-army of brave man that defend the free world order in Asia (Griffin, 2010). This photo, taken on June 18, 1965 by Horst Faas challenges this narrative. The soldier, maybe 18-22 years old, is looking with a light smile into the camera. On a band around his helmet, it is written war is hell . Images that are communicated without the context, out of their historical, empirical linkage with agents, interests, media, circumstances, times and spaces, etc., stand for nothing, like a jellyfish taken out of the ocean or a snowflake taken from the air before it lands on the ground (Stocchetti & Kukkonen, 2011, p.30). When understanding the narrative of images, it is crucially important

to be familiar with the context of them. This photo portrays the feelings of thousands of US-American soldiers and the situation they found themselves in. Many were just fresh out of high school and have never been to a foreign country, let alone another US-state, before. Completely opposing the narrative of brave, experienced fighters, this photo shows the misery of a young man in hell . Seen in the context of young men that fight a war which can’t be won, the social establishment of the photograph is a cultural icon, a narrative maker of collective memory (Griffin, 2010, p.8). In addition to that, the narrative of the photo amplified the American sympathy with US army soldiers who seemed caught in a war for which national commitment was faltering (Oliver, 2006). American Television, which communicates a narrative through its implemented temporality, can be seen as a stream of under selected images, each of which cancels its predecessor. Photographs like this one on the contrary, are a “privileged moment”, turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again (Sontag, 2010).

Picture 2 – Women and children crouch in muddy water

According to Oliver (2006), the American public had greater sympathy with US army soldiers than with Vietnamese civilians, even though pictures such as the one below was published. Horst Faas took this photo on January 1 st , 1966, when the GI-unit, that he joined for a patrol was attacked by North Vietnamese forces. The photo’s main character are the woman and the girl in the front, they are in focus, hiding in the muddy water. Behind them, is another woman and her baby, and even further behind are soldiers. The narrative of the photo shows the suffering of Vietnamese civilians, who have worried faces. They are brought to the center of the image, as if the photographer wanted to show the victims of the war as being the Vietnamese civilians. In contrast to them are the soldiers in the background who are unfocused and who’s faces aren’t visible, hidden by grass. The framing of the image deliberately excludes the American soldiers and includes the suffering of the Vietnamese villagers. Images as such offer viscerally exciting and voyeuristic glimpses into theaters of violence that, for most viewers, are alien to everyday experience (Taylor, 1998). Images are alternative strategies for the competition over the distribution of values in society and independent war photography challenges the narratives that are communicated by dominant powers (Butler, 2009). This dynamic of images is quite independently of the nature of the political regime in which images are taken and shared (Stocchetti & Kukkonen, 2011, p. 33). But even in democratic countries, such as the USA, reporters and photographers who attempted to publish pictures of victimized Vietnamese civilians in the late 1960s and 1970s met resistance from the mainstream US media and were even blacklisted or banned (Griffin, 2010).

Picture 3 – Father holding dead child

When accompanying American and South Vietnamese soldiers, Horst Faas often documented atrocities that were committed to civilians during the war. In the photo below, taken on March 19, 1964, a father holds his dead child, which was killed when South Vietnamese government forces pursued gorillas into a village near the Cambodian border. The structure of the photo communicates the narrative of a helpless victim against an overpowered enemy. Soldiers, sitting on a heavily armed vehicle are looking down on the father. They are above the cruelty, they are safe. The meaning of the photo relates to the general patterns it reveals about what war is. But the meaning is not simply located in the photo, it is produced by the observer and his or her assumptions, worldviews and prior narratives (Mayer, 2014, p.10). An extreme passion is captured in the photo that takes urgent claims on the viewer’s attention (Brothers, 1997). The narrative of the South Vietnamese troops, which were supported by the USA, as the overpowering force that kills children creates an alternative dimension of the political. The interpersonal and the intersubjective quickly turns into a matter directly affecting the competition for the distribution of values in society (Stocchetti & Kukkonen, 2011, p. 33). Those values might be human rights or democracy, for US-American viewers, and the space of uncertainty that the narrative of such a photo creates, invites for a reconsideration of the Vietnam war and its political aims. The angle from which the photo is taken and how it is framed, contribute greatly to this interpretation, as the military vehicle is visible as this big, overwhelming mass, against which the father and his dead son appear small and helpless.

Picture 4 – Dead Bodies

As the Vietnam war went on, more and more people were killed and the public opinion in the United States changed, opposing the war and American involvement in it. A reason for this was the rising number of American soldiers that were killed in the war and the media presentation of those losses (Griffin, 2010). Horst Faas documented this process with photos as the one below which was taken on November 27, 1965. Dead bodies are laying near a rubber plantation in South Vietnam before they are transported to be properly buried. In the front stands a South Vietnamese soldier, who looks in the camera and has his face covered against the rotting smell. The viewer is forced into a situation in which interpretation of the photo’s narrative is necessary but at the same time arbitrary and therefore ambiguous (Stocchetti & Kukkonen, p. 30). From an American perspective, the narrative of the photo describes the hopelessness of the war. The view of the man in the front is in despair, while dead bodies cover the dirt road behind him.

Horst Faas’ work encompasses many more than those photos, for which he won the Pulitzer Price twice. The communicated narratives tell stories about the people of the war. About suffering civilians, about young Americans killing and dying in a war initiated by white, old men, such as Richard Nixon or Lindon B. Johnson and about the cruelties of war. But the willingness to accept the premises of Faas‘ communicated narratives depends on the viewers of his images to evaluate the truth of narrative in terms of its precise correspondence with the real world. To grasp those narratives, viewers need to open their minds up and let go of a photo’s conformity with their general conceptions about the way the world works (Mayer, 2014, p.10). Photographs act on us and the analyzed photos communicate the suffering of individuals in war in such a way that viewers were prompted, and are still, to alter their political assessment of war (Butler, 2009, p.68). Even though, it is argued whether war photographs communicate a narrative, they definitely capture atrocities around which viewers construct narratives (Butler, 2009; Casadei, 2015; Dubois, 1993). Faas’ photos are known around the whole world and shape the memory of millions of people by documenting and telling the war in Vietnam.

Bradley, M. (2009). Vietnam at war . Oxford University Press.

Brothers, C. (1997). War and Photography: A Cultural History . London: Routledge.

Butler, J. (2009). Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?. London: Verso.

Casadei, E. B. (2015). Can still images tell stories? Symptom and temporality in photojournalism narrative theory. Brazilian Journalism Research , 11 (1), 28-43.doi:10.25200/bjr.v11n1.2015.804

Dubois, P. (1993). O ato fotográfico e outros ensaios. Campinas: Papirus.

Griffin, M. (2010). Media images of war. Media, War & Conflict, 3(1), 7–41. doi:10.1177/1750635210356813

Lawrence, M. A. (2008). The Vietnam War: A Concise International History . Oxford University Press.

Lewy, G. (1980). America in vietnam (Ser. A galaxy book, gb 601). Oxford University Press.

Mayer, F. (2014). Narrative politics : stories and collective . Oxford University Press.

Oliver, K. (2006) The My Lai Massacre in American History and Memory . Manchester University Press.

Sen. (2018, November 20). After Hell and Hollywood, Nick Ut basks in peace. VN Express.  https://e.vnexpress.net/news/travel-life/after-hell-and-hollywood-nick-ut-basks-in-peace-3835521.html

Sontag, S. (2010). On photography. London: Penguin Books Ltd.

Spector, R. H. (2020). Vietnam War. In Encyclopaedia Britannica.         https://www.britannica.com/event/Vietnam-War/The-Diem-regime-and-the-Viet-Cong

Stocchetti, M., and Kukkonen, K. (Eds.). (2011). Images in use: Towards the critical analysis of visual communication .

Taylor, J. (1998) Body Horror: Photojournalism, Catastrophe and War . New York: New York University Press.

Vitello, P. (2012, March 12). Horst Faas, Photographer Who Showed Horrors of War, Dies at 79. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/world/asia/horst-faas-vietnam-war-photographer-dies-at-79.html

Zelizer, B. (2010). About to Die: How News Images Move the Public . Oxford University Press.

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39 Photos That Captured the Human Side of the Vietnam War

I n March 1965, 3,500 U.S. Marines landed in South Vietnam. By year’s end, there were 200,000 of them. When LIFE dispatched Associate Editor Michael Mok and Photographer Paul Schutzer to spend six weeks with them, the two men found the Marines mired in a world of ambiguity: They were at once dispatching lives and saving them, hailed as heroes and decried as villains.

Mok and Schutzer risked their lives to bring LIFE’s readers a 22-page photo essay on the “blunt reality” of the war—one that, Mok wrote, vividly called to mind scenes from Saipan in World War II and Inchon in the Korean War. “Only the locale is different, and this observer, now a generation older. No one used to call him ‘Pop’ or ‘Sir’ in the old days.”

The scenes the men captured, in images and words, reflect a world in which bullets and bandages were doled out in equal measure. The Marines carried out their missions, killing and capturing Viet Cong soldiers, but they also undertook a broader mission to win the hearts and minds of the people whose world they occupied. Treating the Vietnamese with dignity was as much a matter of human decency as it was a strategy to win the war: To acquire crucial intelligence from villagers, the Marines needed first to earn their trust.

The essay’s most enduring images are not those that portray scenes of battle and warfare, but those that capture the humanity of people embroiled in a situation not of their own making. There’s the Vietnamese mother carrying her wounded baby through her besieged village, and the U.S. Marine who scoops him up to get him to a medic, to no avail. There are Marines handing out dolls to children who have nothing, and children ripping them limb from limb, preferring the disembodied head of a doll to no doll at all.

The magazine chose a face to encapsulate the humanitarian side of American forces, and that face belonged to Hospitalman Second Class Josiah Lucier, 29. Nicknamed “The Doc,” Lucier’s primary job was to keep the Marines healthy. But, Mok wrote, “then there is the job he does because he wants to, which is holding sick call for all the villagers within walking distance.” Lucier treated his patients, especially the children, with a tenderness that’s palpable in photographs.

But he wasn’t Pollyannaish about the world he’d been living in for three years. Lucier carried a gun when he made house calls, never knowing where the enemy lurked. “I am a humanitarian and all that jazz,” he said, “but I am not completely out of my ever-lovin’ mind.”

For wartime readers, these images matched images of the faceless enemy with universal pictures of love and loss. They show another side to the soldier who might return home to be spit upon and scorned, a recipient of misplaced hatred.

The Marines, for their part, didn’t need to be greeted with protest signs to grapple with the gray area in which they lived each day. They had already internalized it. Said one, “Sometimes I feel like one of the bad guys … When we go into these villes and the people look at you in that sad kind of way they have, it’s pretty hard for me to imagine I’m wearing a white hat and riding a white horse.”

Liz Ronk, who edited this gallery, is the Photo Editor for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk .

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The Agent Orange Syndrome

In the 1960s, the United States blanketed the Mekong River delta with Agent Orange, a chemical defoliant more devastating than napalm. Thirty years after the end of the Vietnam War, the chemical is still poisoning the water and coursing through the blood of a third generation. From Ho Chi Minh City to the town of Ben Tre—and from Greensboro, North Carolina, to Hackettstown, New Jersey—the photographer James Nachtwey went in search of the ecocide’s cruelest legacy, horribly deformed children in both Vietnam and America. Nachtwey, arguably the most celebrated war photographer of his generation, sees the former conflict in Southeast Asia as a touchstone for his work. “My decision to become a photographer,” he says, “was inspired by photographs from the Vietnam War.” This expanded photo essay from the land of Agent Orange—part of which appears in the August V.F. —makes clear, according to Nachtwey, that “the effects of war no longer end when the shooting stops.”

James Nachtwey/VII Photo

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How to Create a Photo Essay

The photographic essay, also called a photo essay or photo story, is a powerful way for photographers to tell a story with their images. If you are interested in creating your own photo essay, this article will guide you through the whole process, from finding a story to shoot to the basics of crafting your first visual narrative.

Table of Contents

What is a photo essay.

A photo essay tells a story visually. Just like the kind you read, the photo essay offers a complete rendering of a subject or situation using a series of carefully crafted and curated images. Photo stories have a theme, and each image backs up that overarching theme which is defined in the photo essay’s title and is sometimes supported with text.

From documentary to narrative to essay, photo stories are designed to move their audience, to inspire a certain action, awareness, or emotion. Photo stories are not just a collection of cool photos. They must use their visual power to capture viewers’ attention and remain unforgettable.

History of the Photo Story

In the “old days”, that is, before 1948, magazines ran photo stories very different from what we know today. They were staged, preconceived by an editor, not a truthful observation of life. Along came a photographer named W. Eugene Smith, who worked for Life magazine.

Deciding to follow a rural doctor for six weeks, he gathered material for a photo essay that really showed what it was like to be in that doctor’s shoes, always on the go to help his scattered patients. Smith’s piece, “ Country Doctor ,” shook other photographers out of their scripted stupor and revolutionized the way photographers report what they see.

From then on, photojournalism gained life and an audience through the lenses of legends like Robert Capa, Dorothea Lange, David “Chim” Seymour, Gordon Parks, Werner Bischof, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. The Vietnam War provided many examples for photo stories as represented by Philip Jones Griffiths, Catherine Leroy, and many more.

More recently, photo stories have found a sturdy home online thanks to the ease of publishing a series of photos digitally versus in print. Lynsey Addario, Peter Essick, and Adam Ferguson represent a few of the photographers pushing visual storytelling today.

Ways to Find Photo Stories and Themes

Photo stories exist all around, right in the midst of everyday life and in the fray of current events. A good place to begin developing a photo essay is by choosing a general theme.

Topics that Interest You

The best expression comes from the heart, so why not choose a topic that interests you. Maybe it’s a social issue, an environmental one, or just something you’re curious about. Find what moves you and share that with the world.

Personal Experiences

The more you’ve lived, the more you have to tell. This doesn’t necessarily mean age, it can also refer to experiences, big and small. If you know a subject better than most, like what it’s like to recover from a car crash, you’re an expert on the matter and therefore you have a story to tell. Also, consider the things you read and see or watch, like news or history, and incorporate that into your search for a story.

Problem/Solution

Problems abound in the world. But so do solutions. Photojournalists can present either, or both. Have a look at something that’s wrong in society and show why it’s a problem. Or find a problem that’s been resolved and show the struggle it took to get there. Even better, take your time shooting your story — sometimes it can take years — and document how a wrong is righted.

Day-in-the-Life

One of the most popular formats, day-in-the-life photo stories present microcosms of life that relate to the bigger picture. In a similar vein, behind-the-scenes photo stories show viewers what life is really like for others, especially in situations that are difficult or impossible to access. Events represent another simple yet powerful theme for documenting and storytelling with a camera.

Types of Photo Stories

Most photo stories concern people. If it’s about something like the environment, for example, the photo story can showcase the people involved. In either case, the impactful photo story will present the challenges and dilemmas of the human condition, viscerally.

There are three general types of photo stories.

Narrative Story

Narrative deals with complications and their resolution, problems, and solutions. If there appears to be no resolution, at least the struggle to find one can provide material for a photo essay. Some sort of narrative thread must push the story from beginning to middle to end, just like what you see in a good movie.

A good story also requires action, which in this case must be visual. Good stories are page-turners, whether they’re a Kerouac tale or a series of photos demonstrating the difficulties of single parenting. Adventure stories are one good example of photographic narrative storytelling.

The term “photo story” is generally used interchangeably with “photo essay”, but some photographers hold that there are subtle differences between the two. The essay type of photo story implies opinion, they argue. Essays make a point. They are the opposite of facts-only news. A photo story essay makes a case for something, like showing the danger and consequences of illegal fireworks or advocating for the preservation of a forest.

Documentary

On the other hand, documentaries lack opinion. Their purpose is to inform without adding judgment. Documentaries present the facts and let viewers decide. They illustrate something that’s occurring but they don’t always include a narrative story or an opinionated approach. Historical places, current events, and unique lifestyles always make for good documentary photo stories.

How to Craft a Photo Essay

Several elements come into play when putting together a photo essay. Once you’ve found a theme, it’s time to give your project a name. While out shooting, jot down titles that come to mind. Consider the title a magazine headline that explains in few words what the whole story is about.

Choose your photos according to whether or not they relate to and support the photo essay’s title. Reject those photos that don’t. If your collection seems to suggest a different angle, a different title, don’t be afraid to rename it. Sometimes stories develop organically. But if your title can’t assemble and define your selection of photos, maybe it’s too vague. Don’t rush it. Identify the theme, take the photos and the photo essay will take shape.

Certain techniques help tell the photo essay.

A photo essay is composed of a diversity of views, angles, and focal lengths. While masters like Henri Cartier-Bresson could capture a photo essay with a single prime lens, in his case a 50mm, the rest of us are wise to rely on multiple focal lengths. Just like what we see in the movies, a story is told with wide shots that set the scene, medium shots that tell the story, and close-ups that reveal character and emotion.

Unique angles make viewers curious and interested, and they break the monotony of standard photography. Consider working black-and-white into your photo essay. The photo essay lends itself well to reportage exclusively in monochrome, as the legends have demonstrated since W. Eugene Smith.

Visual Consistency

The idea of a photo essay is to create a whole, not a bunch of random parts. Think gestalt. The images must interact with each other. Repetition helps achieve this end. Recurring themes, moods, styles, people, things, and perspectives work to unify a project even if the photos tell different parts of the story.

Text can augment the impact of a photo essay. A photo may be worth a thousand words, but it doesn’t always replace them. Captions can be as short as a complete sentence, as long as a paragraph, or longer. Make sure to take notes in case you want to add captions. Some photo stories, however, function just fine without words.

Tell a Story as a Photographer

Few genres of photography have moved people like the photo essay. Since its inception, the art of visual storytelling has captivated audiences. Photo stories show viewers things they had never seen, have moved masses to action, and have inspired video documentaries. Today, photo stories retain their power and place, in part thanks to the internet. Every photographer should experiment with a photo essay or two.

The method of crafting a photo essay is simple yet complicated, just like life. Careful attention must be paid to the selection of images, the choice of title, and the techniques used in shooting. But follow these guidelines and the photo stories will come. Seek issues and experiences that inspire you and go photograph them with the intention of telling a complete story. The viewing world will thank you.

Image credits: Header photo shows the May 13, 1957 story in LIFE magazine titled, “ The Tough Miracle Man of Vietnam .” Stock photos from Depositphotos

Vietnam War: 6 personal essays describe the sting of a tragic conflict

The Vietnam War touched millions of lives. Within these personal essays from people who took part in the filming of The Vietnam War , are lessons about what happened, what it meant then and what we can learn from it now.

Long ago and far away, we fought a war in which more than 58,000 Americans died and hundreds of thousands of others were wounded. The war meant death for an estimated 3 million Vietnamese, North and South. The fighting dragged on for almost a decade, polarizing the American people, dividing the country and creating distrust of our government that remains with us today.

In one way or another, Vietnam has overshadowed every national security decision since.

We were told that our mission was to prevent South Vietnam from falling to communism. Very lofty. But the men I led as a young infantry platoon leader and later as a company commander weren’t fighting for that mission. Mostly draftees, they were terrific soldiers. They were fighting, I realized, for each other — to simply survive their year in-country and go home.

I had grown up as an “Army brat.” To me, the Army was like a second family. In Vietnam, the radio code word for our division’s infantry companies was family . A “rucksack outfit,” my company would disappear into the jungle, moving quietly, staying in the field for weeks. We all ate the same rations and endured the same heat, humidity, mosquitoes, leeches, skin rashes, jungle itch. We were like pack animals, carrying upwards of 60 pounds of gear, water, ammunition — and even more for the radio operators and machine gunners. I was impressed by how the men endured it all, especially the draftees who had answered the call to service.

I learned much about leadership. I was once counseled by a senior officer “not to be too worried about your men.” Incredible. I was concerned about my men’s safety at all times. Even though my company lost very few, I remember each of those deaths vividly. They were all good men, in a war very few understood.

On both of my combat tours, in 1968 at Huê´ during the Tet Offensive and in 1969-70 in the triple-canopy rainforests along the Cambodian border, we fought soldiers of the North Vietnamese army. They were good light infantry; I had respect for their determination and abilities. But they were the enemy; our job was to kill or capture them.

Though we were conducting a war of attrition, we were actually fighting the enemy’s birth rate. He was prepared and determined to keep fighting as long as he had the manpower to send south.

In terms of strategy, it seemed a war out of “Alice in Wonderland.” The Ho Chi Minh Trail, the enemy’s major supply line and infiltration route, ran through Cambodia and Laos. Yet until May 1970, both of those countries were off limits to U.S. ground forces. We bombed the trail incessantly, but the enemy’s ability to move troops and equipment south never seemed to slack. We never invaded North Vietnam. As demonstrated during Tet in ’68, the enemy could control the tempo of the war when he wished. We, on the other hand, would use unilaterally declared “truce” periods and would halt bombing to signal something never clearly defined — a willingness to talk, I imagined, which the enemy ignored.

Looking back, if our strategy was intended to force the enemy to say “enough,” resulting in a stalemate situation like that at the end of the Korean War, would the South Vietnamese have been able to defend themselves, independently? Unlikely.

Would the U.S. have been willing to commit and maintain American forces in South Vietnam indefinitely? Also unlikely.

Did we learn anything from that experience, which left such an indelible mark on our national psyche? History is a harsh teacher; there are still no easy answers.

Hal Kushner

When I deployed to Vietnam in August 1967, I was a young Army doctor, married five years, with a 3-year-old daughter, just potty trained, and another child due the following April. When I returned from Vietnam in late March 1973, I saw my 5-year-old son for the first time, and my daughter was in the fifth grade. In the interim, we had landed on the moon; there was women’s lib, Nixon had gone to China; Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy had been assassinated.

I was the only doctor captured in the 10-year Vietnam War. I was back from the dead.

We prisoners endured unspeakable horror, brutality and deprivation, and we saw and experienced things no human should ever witness. Our mortality rate was almost 50% — higher even than at the brutal Civil War prisons at Andersonville or Elmira a century earlier. I cradled 10 dying men in my arms as they breathed their last and spoke of home and family; then we buried them in crude graves, marked with stones and bamboo, and eulogized them with words of sunshine and hope, country and family. The eulogies were for the survivors, of course; they always are.

On the Fourth of July in five successive years, we sang patriotic songs, but very softly, so our captors couldn’t hear the forbidden words, and we cried. One of us had a missal issued by the Marine Corps, our only book, but our captors had torn out the pages with the American flag and The Star-Spangled Banner .

At my release in Hanoi, I was shocked by the hair and dress of the reporters there. Once home, I saw television and movies with frank profanity and sex. When I left, Lucy and Desi slept in twin beds. I left Ozzie and Harriett and returned to Taxi Driver . What had happened to my country? Why did we suffer and sacrifice?

When my aircraft crashed on Nov. 30, 1967, I collided with one planet and returned to another. The Vietnam War, which had about one-fifth of the casualties of World War II but had lasted three times as long, had changed the country as much as the greatest cataclysm in world history. It had changed forever the way we think of our government and ourselves. The country had lost its innocence — and, for a time, its confidence.

This war, which had such a great impact on my life, is a dim memory today. There are 58,000 names on that wall, and it rates but a few pages in a high school history book.

I am dismayed by how little our young people know about Vietnam, and how misunderstood it is by others. The Vietnam War is as remote to them as the War of 1812 or the War of Jenkins’ Ear. Now, 40 years later, we must try to understand.

Hal  Kushner joined the Army and served as a flight surgeon in Vietnam. In 1967, he was captured by the Viet Cong after surviving a helicopter crash. He spent nearly six years as a prisoner of war. He lives in Daytona Beach, Fla.

p.p1{margin:0px;font:19px Times;-webkit-text-stroke:#000000}span.s1{font-kerning:none;background-color:#e0ebf6}span.s2{font-kerning:none} Mai Elliott

Having lived through war and seen what it did to my family and to millions of Vietnamese, I feel grateful for the peace and stability I now enjoy in the United States.

In Vietnam, my family and I experienced what it was like to be caught in bombing and fighting, and what it was like to flee our home and survive as refugees.

During World War II, in my childhood, we huddled in shelters as Allied planes targeting Japanese positions bombed the town in the North where we lived.

In 1946, when French troops returned to try to take Vietnam back from Ho Chi Minh’s government, French soldiers attacking the village where we were taking refuge almost executed my father (who had earlier worked for the French colonial authorities).

In 1954, fearing reprisals from the communists about to enter Hanoi, we fled to Saigon with only the clothes on our backs.

In 1955, we fled again when we found ourselves caught in the fighting between the army of President Ngo Dinh Diem and the armed group he was trying to eliminate, leaving behind our home, which was about to burn to the ground in the onslaught.

In April 1975, American helicopters plucked my family out of Saigon at the last minute as communist rockets exploded nearby.

The fear we felt paled in comparison to the terror that Vietnamese in the countryside of South Vietnam experienced when bombs and artillery shells landed in their villages, or when American and South Vietnamese soldiers swept through their hamlets; or the terror my relatives in North Vietnam felt when American B-52s carpet bombed in December 1972. Yet, our brushes with war were terrifying enough.

As refugees, we could find shelter and support from middle-class friends and relatives, while destitute peasants had to move to squalid camps and depend on meager handouts and help from the government in Saigon. But we did find out, as they did, that losing everything was psychologically wrenching, and that surviving and rebuilding took fortitude of spirit.

Only those who have known war can truly appreciate peace. I am one of those people.

Bill Zimmerman

I graduated from high school in 1958, thinking myself a patriot and aspiring to be a military pilot. Thirteen years later, I sat in a jail cell in Washington, D.C., after protesting what military pilots were doing in the skies over Vietnam.

My patriotism wilted in the South in 1963, after a short stint with the civil rights movement. Simultaneously, as the U.S. slid into war in Vietnam, skepticism nurtured in Mississippi led me to discover that we were stumbling into a quagmire.

The war escalated in 1965, and I became an ardent protester over the next six years. I was fired from two university teaching positions. But my sacrifices were trivial compared with those of young Americans forced into war, or Vietnamese civilians dying under bombs and napalm. With other antiwar activists, I anguished over them all, and seethed with rage at our inability to stop the killing. In our fury, we became more forceful, committing widespread civil disobedience.

That’s how I landed in jail in 1971, trying unsuccessfully to block traffic to shut down the federal government. But our failure that day became a turning point. Antiwar leaders realized that while we had finally convinced a majority of Americans to oppose the war, our militant tactics kept them from joining us.

We changed course. Large demonstrations ended. New organizations sprang up to educate the public and lobby Congress. The work was confrontational but did not ask participants to risk arrest. Millions took part. Richard Nixon escalated the war, but he also felt the heat from a much broader antiwar coalition. In January 1973, his administration signed the Paris Peace Accords, and over the next two years, our intense lobbying persuaded Congress to cut funding for the corrupt South Vietnamese government, leading to its collapse in 1975.

We learned that in matters of war and peace, presidents regularly lie to the American people. Every president from Truman to Ford lied about Vietnam. We learned that two presidents, Johnson and Nixon, cared more about their own political survival than the lives of the men under their command. Both sent thousands of Americans to die in a war they already knew could not be won.

We learned that our government committed crimes against humanity. Agent Orange and other chemicals were sprayed on millions of acres, leaving a legacy of cancer and birth defects.

Most important, Vietnam taught us to reject blind loyalty and to fight back. In doing so, we meet our obligation as citizens … and become patriots.

Bill Zimmerman is a Los Angeles political consultant and the author of Troublemaker: A Memoir from the Front Lines of the Sixties (Anchor Books, 2012).

Roger Harris

When I think about the Vietnam War, I am torn by personal emotions that range from anger and sadness to hope. The Vietnam War experience scarred me but also shaped and molded my perspective on life.

As a 19-year-old African American from the Roxbury section of Boston, I voluntarily joined the U.S. Marine Corps, willing to fight and die for my country. I had experienced the tough neighborhood turf battles too often prevalent in the inner city. I had a gladiator’s heart and no fear. My father, all of my uncles, including a grand-uncle who rode with Teddy Roosevelt, all served in the military. I believed that it was now my turn, and if I were to die, my mom would receive a $10,000 death benefit and be able to purchase a house. I saw the war in Vietnam as a win-win situation.

In Vietnam, I served with G Company, 2nd Battalion, 9th Marine Regiment of the 3rd Marine Division. We were called the “Hell in a Helmet” Marines. We operated in I Corps, Quang Tri Province, mainly north of Dong Ha at the Demilitarized Zone, in hot spots called Con Thien, Gio Linh, Camp Carroll and Cam Lo. I vividly remember trembling with fear from the incoming shells in the mud-filled holes at Con Thien, wishing the shelling would stop and we could fight hand-to-hand. I remember those feelings like it was yesterday.

I, along with others, witnessed deaths unimaginable. We picked up the pieces of Marine bodies obliterated by direct hits. We stacked green body bags. I often wondered why others died and I lived.

I become angry when I think about the very young lives that were lost in Vietnam and the Gold Star families who have suffered. I am saddened by the sacrifices of true heroes and the disrespect that was shown to those who were fortunate enough to come home.

When I returned from Vietnam it was March 1968 in the midst of the civil rights movement. I landed at Boston’s Logan Airport in my Marine Corps Alpha Green uniform, with the medals and ribbons I had earned proudly displayed. I approached the sidewalk to catch a taxi, hoping that I wasn’t dreaming and would not awaken back at Camp Carroll to another bombardment.

Six taxicabs passed me by and drove off. I didn’t realize what was happening until the state trooper stepped in and told the next driver, “You have got to take this soldier.” The driver, who was white, looked up at us through the passenger side window and said, “I don’t want to go to Roxbury.”

That was my initial welcome home.

I now have an appreciation for the gift of life. Since returning home and completing college, I have devoted 42 years working in Boston schools. I see it as a tribute to my fellow Marines who paid the ultimate sacrifice.

I am very proud to have served my country as a United States Marine.

I am also very proud of the young men and women who continue to volunteer to join the armed services of our country.

Roger  Harris enlisted in the Marines and served in Vietnam in 1967 and 1968. Afterward, he worked in the Boston public school system for more than 40 years. He lives in New York and Boston.

p.p1{margin:0px;font:19px Times;-webkit-text-stroke:#000000}span.s1{font-kerning:none;background-color:#e0ebf6}span.s2{font-kerning:none} Eva Jefferson Paterson

This summer, I attended the 50th reunion of my high school class in Mascoutah, Ill., across the Mississippi River from St. Louis. My dad was a career Air Force man and was stationed at Scott Air Force Base nearby in 1960.

During dinner, before we rocked out to the Beach Boys and Stevie Wonder, a group of us talked about the war in Vietnam. The men remembered the draft system that required all young men to register to serve in the military. While I was in college at Northwestern from 1967 to 1971, a draft lottery was established. Numbers were drawn out of a big bin — similar to the one used for weekly state lotteries — corresponding to the days of the year. If your birthday corresponded to the first number drawn, your draft number was 1, and you were virtually certain to be drafted and sent to war. Most men from that period remember their number.

Some at our reunion had felt that it was their patriotic duty to serve; others were just delighted that their lottery numbers were above 300 and they were unlikely to be drafted. Few of us were anti-war at that time; I fully supported the war. My dad was sent to Cam Rahn Bay and Tan Son Nhut air force bases in Vietnam in 1966, my senior year in high school.

I remember being a freshman in college and actually saying to classmates who opposed to the war, “We have to support the war because the president says the war is good, and we must support the president.” Yikes! I changed my views as I got the facts.

Much of the fervor of the anti-war movement was fueled by the slogan “Hell no, we won’t go!” There was righteous indignation about the war, but fear was a strong motivator.

Now the burden of serving in wars falls on a very small percentage of the population, one that likely mirrors the patterns in the Vietnam era, with predominantly poor white, black and Latino men and women along with those who come from military backgrounds. It would be great to have a national discussion about this, but I fear our country is quite comfortable letting poor men and women and people of color and their families bear the burden of war.

Eva  Jefferson  Paterson grew up on air force bases and enrolled in Northwestern University in 1967, where she became student body president and politically active against the war. A civil rights attorney, she now runs the Equal Justice Society in Northern California.

U.S. general on Vietnam War: ‘This was some enemy’

Vietnam War: A timeline of U.S. entanglement

These Emotional Pictures Show How People First Reacted To The Vietnam Veterans Memorial

In 1981, a 21-year-old undergraduate student won a national contest to design what would become one of the most iconic war memorials in the country.

BuzzFeed News Photo Essay Editor

Introducing the BuzzFeed News newsletter JPG — t his weekly newsletter will feature the most powerful images from around the internet, as well as behind-the-scenes exclusives from renowned photographers and our hard-hitting photo stories.

In 1980, seven years after the formal end of US involvement in Vietnam, Congress authorized a national competition to design a new memorial in Washington, DC, that would honor those who served in the war. Approximately 1,421 submissions were reviewed anonymously until a single design was chosen.

The winner of the competition was a 21-year-old undergraduate student named Maya Lin. Her design featured a large wall of black granite inscribed with the 57,939 names of those who died during the war. Lin described the memorial as "taking a knife and cutting into the earth, opening it up, and with the passage of time, that initial violence and pain would heal."

This bold design was not without controversy; some people viewed the wall as shameful and morbid, while others took aim at Lin's ethnicity and age. In November 1982, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated before a crowd of thousands of people. The emotional response from the public was overwhelming as veterans, friends, and families turned out to pay their respects to those who sacrificed their lives during the Vietnam War.

These pictures show how Americans first responded to the dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in 1982.

A Vietnam War veteran searches the wall for the name of a fallen comrade in the days preceding the dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

From left: Jan C. Scruggs, president of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, Maya Lin, and Project Director Bob Doubek display the final design for the memorial, May 6, 1981.

Left: The original design submission by Lin. Right: Lin stands at the site where she wants the memorial to be placed, 1981.

Construction workers proceed with the building of the memorial near the Washington Monument, July 2, 1982.

A ceremony takes place during the dedication of the memorial, 1982.

Left and right: Scenes from the 1982 dedication ceremony.

A group of Vietnam veterans embrace after the dedication ceremony, 1982.

A crowd is gathered at the memorial, 1982.

Left: A crowd of people with a sign thanking veterans during the 1982 dedication of the memorial. Right: A pair of cowboy boots are left in honor of a fallen soldier.

A veteran in a World War I uniform holds up a folded US flag during the memorial's dedication ceremonies.

Gen. William Westmoreland (center) on the day of the memorial's dedication.

Veterans parade down the street on the day of the memorial's dedication.

A Vietnam veteran looks for familiar names on the memorial wall, 1982.

A wreath and flag are placed on the memorial's wall on the day of the dedication ceremony.

People trace the name of a loved one who died during the war, 1983.

People display signs of support for Vietnam veterans during a dedication ceremony, 1982.

A Vietnam veteran hugs a woman and holds a sign praising the memorial, 1982.

Lin stands during the dedication ceremony, 1982.

A US flag is reflected in the memorial's black granite surface, 1982.

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Studying the Vietnam War

How the scholarship has changed..

Two American soldiers in Pleiku, South Vietnam, home to an American airbase in May 1967.

—Everett Collection / Alamy Stock Photo

These are boom times for historians of the Vietnam War. One reason is resurgent public interest in a topic that had lost some of its salience in American life during the 1990s. At that time, the end of the Cold War and surging confidence about U.S. power seemed to diminish the relevance of long ago controversies and the need to draw lessons from America’s lost war. But then came the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: grueling conflicts that, in key respects, resembled the war in Southeast Asia three decades earlier. Critics complained that George W. Bush had mired the nation in “another Vietnam,” and military strategists focused anew on the earlier war for clues about fighting insurgents in distant, inhospitable places. For their part, historians seized the opportunity to reinterpret Vietnam for a younger generation and especially to compare and contrast the Vietnam conflict with America’s new embroilments.

Soldiers of The Army of the Republic of Vietnam in 1968.

—Gado Images / Alamy Stock Photo

Marine D. R. Howe treats PFC. D. A. Crum's wounds during the battle for Hue on June 2, 1968.

—US Marines Photo / Alamy Stock Photo

More recently, intense public interest in the war has been sustained by fiftieth anniversaries of the war’s most harrowing years for the United States. Publishers have used these occasions to release high-profile histories, including Mark Bowden’s widely reviewed  Hue 1968 , a sprawling account of the largest battle between U.S. and Communist forces during the 1968 Tet Offensive. The media are taking part as well. During 2017 and early 2018, the  New York Times  is publishing an online series of approximately 130 op-eds focused on the events of 1967. The biggest moment of all is due in late September: the premiere of the much anticipated 18-hour documentary on the war from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, an event certain to inspire new waves of commentary about Vietnam and to rekindle debate in living rooms across the nation.

But there is another, less noticed reason for renewed attention to the Vietnam War: Spectacular new source material has transformed the possibilities for writing about the subject. Some of this new documentation has emerged from U.S. archives as a result of declassification in the last decade or so. Records from the Nixon and Ford presidencies (1969–1977), especially, are making it possible for historians to write with more confidence and in greater detail about the final stages of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, long a relatively neglected era of the war.

Indeed, the last phase of U.S. military operations has recently spawned an especially contentious debate on one of the most fundamental controversies about Vietnam: Could the United States and its South Vietnamese allies have won the war if the American public had not turned against it? Provocative new works by Lewis Sorley and Gregory Daddis lead the way in arguing for and against, respectively, the notion that the U.S. military could have secured overall victory, if not for crumbling political support within the United States.

Meanwhile, writing about every phase of American decision-making has been enhanced by the release of audio recordings that U.S. presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Richard Nixon made of important meetings, telephone conversations, or both. Because these often convey the mood and emotions of senior policymakers, they are invaluable in helping historians gain a richer understanding of the motives that underlay decision-making about the war. It is now possible, for example, to hear Lyndon Johnson’s anguish about escalating the U.S. role in 1964 and 1965. LBJ’s doubts, along with his obvious awareness of the problems that would beset U.S. forces if he escalated the war in Vietnam, have led many historians to scrap the once dominant idea that leaders in Washington, ignorant of Vietnamese politics and blinded by Cold War assumptions about the dangers of communism, walked step-by-step into a “quagmire” that no one had anticipated. The old question—How could Americans have been so ignorant?—has been replaced by a new one: Why did U.S. leaders commit the nation to war despite abundant doubts and accurate knowledge of the obstacles they would confront?

The most impressive new source material, however, has emerged from countries other than the United States. As recently as 30 years ago, historians were limited to U.S. and West European sources, making it impossible to write with authority about Vietnam itself or decision-making by North Vietnam’s allies, China, the Soviet Union, and Eastern European nations. Everything changed with the end of the Cold War. East European nations went furthest in opening their archives to researchers. For its part, the Russian government opened some Soviet-era records, most notably the records of the Communist party. China and Vietnam, where the end of the Cold War did not produce dramatic political change, lagged behind, yet even those governments gradually permitted access to some records from the Cold War years. Most strikingly, the Vietnamese government opened troves of material amassed by the defunct regime in Saigon that ruled below the seventeenth parallel during the heyday of U.S. involvement.

The result has been a large and growing body of new work by ambitious and linguistically skilled scholars eager to explore fresh dimensions of the war. Historians Mark Philip Bradley, Robert K. Brigham, William J. Duiker, Christopher Goscha, David S. Marr, and Sophie Quinn-Judge led the way in examining Vietnam’s experience, drawing on newly available Vietnamese sources to produce pathbreaking studies around the turn of the century. A younger generation of scholars, most of whom wrote dissertations rooted in extensive research in Vietnam, has built on those accomplishments and even, for the first time, begun delving into decision-making by the Communist government in Hanoi. Meanwhile, historians of Soviet and Chinese foreign policy, most notably Ilya Gaiduk, Chen Jian, and Qiang Zhai, have used new documentation to examine the complex relationships between the Vietnamese Communists and their superpower patrons.

Unquestionably, archival openings in Russia and China, just as in Vietnam, remain partial and selective, leaving studies rooted in newly accessible material—stunning as it may be—highly susceptible to debate and revision as more documentation becomes available. Yet, measured against the near impossibility of doing this kind of work just three decades ago, historians have made remarkable progress toward rethinking the Vietnam War as an episode not just in U.S. history but also in Vietnamese and world history. Historians, in short, increasingly appreciate the war for what it was at the time: a multisided conflict involving numerous Vietnamese and international actors and driven by extraordinarily complicated and shifting motives. 

What precisely has this new research in non-U.S. sources revealed thus far? Three examples point to the variety and significance of the new discoveries. First, studies of Chinese foreign policy have revealed details of North Vietnam’s dependence on its mighty neighbor to the north in the years before the Cultural Revolution, which greatly diminished China’s ambitions abroad. Despite historical tensions between Vietnam and China, newly available sources show definitively that Chinese military helped train and advise Vietnamese Communist forces from as early as 1950 and played an especially pivotal role in the 1954 Battle of Dien Bien Phu, the Vietnamese victory that ended French colonialism and dealt a major blow to the West in the Cold War.

More strikingly, new documents clarify the vast amounts of equipment and even manpower that China provided to North Vietnam during the later fighting that involved U.S. combat forces. According to historian Qiang Zhai, China sent everything from military gear and weapons to table tennis balls, playing cards, sewing needles, and vegetable seed under a series of agreements with North Vietnam. At the same time, Qiang Zhai asserts, a total of 320,000 Chinese soldiers served in North Vietnam between June 1965 and March 1968, peaking at 170,000 during 1967. To be sure, Chinese forces were not assigned combat roles. But Zhai observes that they enabled North Vietnam to send more of its own forces to southern battlefields by performing valuable functions such as repairing bridges and rail lines, building and relocating factories, and manning antiaircraft guns. Such tasks could, of course, be hazardous, not least because of U.S. bombing of some parts of North Vietnam. According to Zhai’s sources, 1,100 Chinese soldiers died in North Vietnam and another 4,200 were wounded.

President Lyndon B. Johnson visits with U.S. troops on his trip to Vietnam in October 1966.

—LBJ Library

Second, new sources from Vietnam are exposing the complexity of decision-making among Communist leaders in Hanoi. For many years, historians assumed that North Vietnamese leaders marched in lockstep and permitted no dissent. This view was sustained in part by the belief that the regime in Hanoi was totalitarian to its core and utterly subservient to its most powerful leaders, above all Ho Chi Minh. Recent discoveries have, however, called all of this into question. For one thing, historians Lien-Hang Nguyen and Pierre Asselin have revealed that Ho Chi Minh—long assumed to have been the preeminent North Vietnamese leader all the way to his death in 1969—in fact, lost a great deal of influence around 1960.

The pivotal figure thereafter was Le Duan, a Southern-born revolutionary who remained relatively obscure to Western historians until recent years. Thanks to recent publications, though, it’s clear that Le Duan, a firebrand eager to throw enormous blood and resources into the effort to reunify his country under Communist leadership, dominated decision-making in Hanoi during the peak years of American involvement. Understanding the importance of Le Duan and the hawks who surrounded him helps enormously to appreciate the escalatory pressures that operated on the Vietnamese side, even as Lyndon Johnson and his aides stepped up the American commitment in the mid 1960s. We can now see that leaders on both sides rejected diplomacy and banked on military victory, a tragic convergence of hawkishness that fueled escalation.

The dominance of the hawks in Hanoi does not mean, though, that there were no contrary voices once they were in the driver’s seat. Scholars working with Vietnamese sources have discovered evidence of substantial factionalism within the Hanoi regime throughout the late 1950s and 1960s. Broadly speaking, some high-ranking North Vietnamese leaders, including Ho Chi Minh, prioritized consolidation of Communist rule above the seventeenth parallel and were wary of major expenditures of lives and treasure to bring about reunification. Others, including Le Duan, strongly favored reunification—even at the cost of a major war likely to draw in the United States—over all other North Vietnamese priorities. New studies of the war show that North Vietnamese policy flowed from the interplay of these two points of view. During the late 1950s, the moderate faction held sway, and the result was a period of relative peace in Vietnam. With the triumph of the hawks, however, Hanoi embraced a new war and transformed North Vietnam into a full-fledged police state in order to keep the skeptics at bay.

Third, the new scholarship has shed valuable new light on the nature of the South Vietnamese state that endured from its beginning in 1954 to its collapse in 1975. Was South Vietnam merely a puppet of the United States, an artificial creation doomed to fall apart whenever Washington withdrew its economic and military assistance? Or was it a viable nation with a legitimate government that, absent the onslaught by northern Communists, could have endured as a stable, pro-Western entity into the indefinite future? For many years, the debate was more a matter of polemics than historical inquiry. Opponents of the war argued that the United States hitched itself to a hopeless Potemkin experiment led by venal, authoritarian leaders, while supporters saw South Vietnam as a beleaguered young nation that, for all its faults, was doing its best to resist Communist aggression.

Unsurprisingly, much of the new scholarship rooted in Vietnamese sources has argued for a gray area between these two extremes. Historians such as Edward Miller and Jessica Chapman focus especially on the late 1950s and early 1960s, suggesting that the South Vietnamese government headed by Ngo Dinh Diem possessed a degree of legitimacy and popular support unrecognized by Diem’s critics at the time or since. To be sure, they also point out the government’s inability to expand its base further among the South Vietnamese population. But they show that the South Vietnamese state possessed a remarkable amount of agency that its leaders might have exercised differently. All in all, these historians have helped restore the Vietnamese to the center of their own history.

What do all these revelations mean for how we should understand the Vietnam War in its totality? Clearly, the new work in non-American sources holds implications for primordial questions about the U.S. role in Vietnam. Was the U.S. commitment to Vietnam justified by any genuine security interests in the region? Why did the United States fail to achieve its objectives despite monumental effort? Might different decisions by American leaders have led to a different outcome? Knowing more about the international and Vietnamese contexts makes it far more possible than ever before to form authoritative opinions about questions that cannot logically be answered fully on the basis of U.S. sources alone. But the new work also underscores the possibility of addressing questions that transcend the American experience and viewing the Vietnam War within the context of, for example, decolonization, the international Communist movement, and the Sino-Soviet split. The good news is that, given the range of new and still-to-be-released source material and robust interest in the war four decades after it ended, historians are sure to move forward energetically on both tracks. The boom times may stick around for a while.

Mark Atwood Lawrence teaches at the University of Texas in Austin. He is author of Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam and The Vietnam War: A Concise International History .

Funding information

In addition to a  $1 million production grant  to GWETA for  The Vietnam War , NEH has supported, with a  $300,000 grant , public discussions nationwide of this difficult subject and the epic documentary from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. NEH has also funded numerous projects on the Vietnam War as a subject of ongoing scholarship, including the work of two scholars mentioned in this article: Edward Miller, a professor at Dartmouth who received a  summer stipend  supporting research and writing based on field work conducted in Vietnam, and Lien-Hang Nguyen, who received a  Public Scholar grant  to support work on a book for a general audience about the Tet Offensive of 1968. As major anniversaries of the Vietnam War appear on the calendar, NEH has also supported a number of projects documenting oral histories of the Vietnam War, including a project at the  Catawba County Library  in North Carolina interviewing Hmong immigrants who were refugees from Laos during the Vietnam War and a project with the Maryland Humanities Council working with students who learn to take oral histories from Maryland veterans of the Vietnam War. “LBJ’s War,” a series of podcasts from Public Radio International that has been praised recently in the media, was supported by a  $150,000 grant .

Republication statement

This article is available for unedited republication, free of charge, using the following credit: “Originally published as 'Studying the Vietnam War: How the Scholarship Has Changed' in the Fall 2017 issue of  Humanities  magazine, a publication of the National Endowment for the Humanities.”  Please email us  if you are republishing it or have any questions.

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Photos of Vietnam War Dissertation

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Introduction

Reflexive-dialogic introduction, literature review, analytic section, conclusions, reference list.

Experiences of journalists in the Vietnam War changed media reporting of wars today. The media reported uncensored events of the war to the public. These stories and photographs changed the public’s opinion about the war. The War took place between 1957 and 1975 in South Vietnam.

The Vietnam War claimed over 60,000 American soldiers and over 2 million Vietnamese. These figures are estimates as the exact number of casualties are extremely difficult to know. Arguably, this was the most unpopular war among Americans.

Critics and veterans believed that explicit and negative coverage of the war changed public opinion about it. Media have the capacity to shape opinions i.e. they can change the way we “think, feel, and react about situations and events” (Altheide, 2009).

This explains why the two iconic photos changed Americans view about the War. The first one depicts napalmed child ( Accident Napalm of 1972). The second is the execution of an alleged Viet Cong soldier by an American marine in the street of Saigon ( Tet Execution of 1968).

The review of literature and analysis shall show effects of the mass media on viewers and their views regarding the war. The analysis shall also involve common themes that emerged during the war due to media involvement and iconic photos that changed reporting style of subsequent wars.

These two photos reflect moments of horrors during the Vietnam War. Critics considered these images iconic because of emotions they created among American viewers.

In order to understand image representations of the Vietnam War, this study shall rely on semiotic analyses of photos through identifications of central ideas. We shall explore meanings behind photographs using signs and expressions, and how they relate to cultural aspects of society. Semiotic analyses enable us to understand meanings attributed to images and viewers’ perceptions of images in a given social context.

Different aspects of these photos can have different meanings to different people based on their cultural orientations. These iconic photos reveal the importance of photojournalism in reporting war events.

It is not possible to explain why the US government did not regulate media coverage of the Vietnam War. Americans watched all events of the war and viewed photographs obtained during the war. The media raised public concerns about the war and the rising number of casualties of the US soldiers.

The question is whether events of the Vietnam War created better opportunities for media reporters, photographers and commentators to question Americans involvement in the War.

The role of the media in the Vietnam War also raises issues of what the media ought to censor and report to the public. For instance, issues of Tet Offensive, Accidental Napalm, and other gruesome events that showed death and massive destruction created impressions that the Vietnam War was like that in Saigon and other areas.

It could be that media representations of the war angered soldiers. Soldiers believed that media had biased reporting especially in the Tet Offensive where the media portrayed that the US was losing the battle, and the only way out was to withdraw from the war. This is because a section of the media portrayed dead US soldiers killed during the war. This kind of reporting gave critics opportunities to accuse mass media of bias.

On the other hand, the media also claimed that they were reflecting perception of Americans regarding the war. Many issues could have changed Americans’ opinions about the war.

These could have been increases in taxes to cater for costs of the war and the rising number of casualties. These issues were influential during the war than media reporting. Critics wonder whether media undermined activities of soldiers and the government in the Vietnam War.

The clash between the military and the media is inevitable. The media need to report events as they are while the military focuses on winning the war and minimizing the number of casualties. Reporting these events means freedom, complete access to news, no censorship and rapid communications of news to the audience by media. Conversely, the military wants restricted access and control of information.

The media believe that attempts by the military to restrict access only aim at protecting their mistakes and enhancing their public image. These issues and differences remain crucial to relationships between the media and the military.

The media and military can work together. However, there is always a strange sense of animosity that can ruin such efforts of working together. This happens due to lack of understanding between the media and the military. Based on their opposing objectives and missions, the relationship between the media and military shall remain strained.

In the beginning of the Vietnam War, many correspondents expressed their supports for the war. At the time, the media did not question the US involvement in the Vietnam War. In fact, the media roles were to inform the US public and portray positive sides of the war. However, this trend changed with the Vietnam War as reporters and photographs started questioning the US government intentions and its roles in the war.

The media focused on doubts and growing numbers of war casualties. As a result, the public changed its opinion about the war. Reporters and photographers portrayed sad pictures and horrifying scenes of the Vietnam War. According to Allen and Seaton, wrong representations of war by photojournalists can create confusion and misunderstanding among audience (Allen and Seaton, 1999).

These authors argue that media coverage is responsible for misunderstanding due to lack of adequate information. For instance, media portrayed that the US was losing the war and that there were increasing casualties and atrocities. Scholars have noted that this happened because of total freedom the media got in covering the Vietnam War and reporting what they wished.

This is how the media bias influenced Americans against the war. On the other hand, Allan highlights how the Vietnam War changed war reporting today.

This is what he refers to as objective reporting in the mass media (Allan, 2010). Allan looks at factors like cultural dynamism, racism, and sexism, and how they shape news reporting. The author also takes into consideration the role of various institutions, viewers, and practices of the media in reporting news.

As the media started to report atrocities of the war and its politics, the public confidence changed. Americans doubted the government’s account about the war. The media resorted to investigative journalism in order to ascertain facts behind news the government released to the public.

Before then, Allen and Seaton noted that media portrayal of wars fuelled hatred and ethnic loyalties. They also depicted how relying on vague and unfounded claims could trigger negative perceptions about the war (Allen and Seaton, 1999).

Photographs and reports played significant roles in changing the public opinion against the government and the war. Misrepresentation of information by the media led the public to believe that the US soldiers had lost the war. The media acted as crucial sources of information for the public. On this note, Altheide notes that mass media can shape the content and form of war experiences (Altheide, 2009).

Altheide focuses on mass media and their effects on propaganda, war on terrorism, and events after the 9/11 twin attacks. The author argues that it is fear that is responsible for the changing discourse and social meanings of wars. The author further looks at intervention strategies and how media stories influence future responses.

Following claims that the US could not win the War at Tet Offensive , the US government decided that the public should receive optimistic news. This marked the regulation of contents the public could access.

Since the US government did not censor news reporting, the public could receive photographs and live horrors of the war. People made films and accessed brutal images of the war. Photographs of the war shocked the general public and significantly shifted the people’s opinion against the war.

At the same time, “power of photography came to light, and how it could show brutality and assaults of the war” (Allan, 2010). Both still and moving pictures had significant influences about the horror of the war.

Whereas the Vietnam War representations in motion pictures took new turns with symbols, images, and metaphors, still pictures remained factual representations of the war. Consequently, scholars have studied major themes relating to social, political, and cultural meanings of these films (Auster and Quart, 1988).

The famous photo where General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executes a Viet Cong soldier in the street of Saigon ( Tet Execution ) has gained recognition over time. The General shot the soldier in a street before cameras. This photograph was responsible for increasing resentment among Americans about the war. This execution helped people change their opinions about the war and the role of the US government in the Vietnam War.

Another photograph of interest is the photo of “a nine-year-old girl fleeing naked and shouting after sustaining serious burn from the napalm” ( Accidental Napalm 1972 ). There were also other photographs of massive influence. These included a photo of a Buddhist monk protesting against the war by burning himself to death, and at home, the Kent State University protest.

These photographs played crucial roles in bringing real images of the war to the public. Americans did not like what they saw on televisions and read on newspapers. Cottle observes that news and reporting are not neutral among different cultures. As a result, messages have cultural meanings and assumptions about various societies (Cottle, 2004).

Photographs are best forms of representations. However, in the modern time, influences of photographs representation in wars have stirred different political and ideological concerns. We cannot separate photograph representations from the culture of journalism and the public they serve.

Allen and Seaton note that media reporting should go behind ethnicity and relations to cultural context when reporting events (Allen and Seaton, 1999). They note that due to lack of sufficient information, the media may create misunderstanding. According to these authors, ethnicity is dynamic and has different constructions.

Contemporary society has come with methods of regulating access to information, pictures and films through rating their contents to different viewers. This is a way of creating and enhancing preferred values and ideologies among viewers.

However, restrictions of representations can achieve limited result. This is because images can have their own lives before the audience. In addition, they cannot have fixed and concrete meaning. Representations of images always create a gap between intended meanings and realized meanings.

From the above observation, we can note that representations may create errors, misunderstanding, and inconsistency. Thus, we cannot guarantee factual representations based on interpretation of signs in various cultures. According to Andersen, the relationship between the media and war is deep. She notes that the focus is on the public’s perception (Andersen, 2006).

Therefore, reporting helps in justification of wars and influence future wars. The author argues that war consists of “death and suffering, protest and pain, guilt and abuse and struggle for representation” (Andersen, 2006). However, this representation has changed over time as methods of reporting have changed, and censorship and propaganda have acquired new meanings.

The author argues that technology has transformed representation of war as the film industry has changed wars into forms of entertainment. On war and propaganda, Hammond notes that changes have occurred. He concludes that Western military operation has acquired new dimensions of representation using new technologies that promote propaganda (Hammond, 2007; Cottle, 2004).

In this view, Hammond notes that the media only serves to accelerate wars due to diverse misconceptions and political interests. The author also observes that power is at the central, and its projection leads to a lack of cohesion and orientation at home.

Anderegg and Grey looked at various films representing the Vietnam War and noted that such representations used myths and metaphors in order to reflect glamorised standards of Hollywood (Anderegg, 1991; Grey, 1992). Anderegg also noted that later representations of the Vietnam War strived to capture real events but with new twists and myths.

The author was keen on representations of issues regarding “power and powerlessness of victims and soldiers, gender roles, and racial views these films captured” (Anderegg, 1991). He also noted how teaching of the Vietnam War changed regarding contents and the intended audience.

Photographs acted as means of representing the war in Vietnam to Americans. The US public believed that photographs had accurate representations of the war. The reasons for the US withdrawal from the war may not be certain. However, it is clear that photos and live reporting of events significantly swayed the public opinion about the war.

Gilboa takes a cross-cultural look in an attempt to understand the relationship between media and wars. The author notes that media reporting is necessary in conflict management, resolution and transformation. In this case, the media influence conflict representation particularly with identity and ethnicity (Gilboa, 2002).

According to Der Derian, technology and video game industry have created flawed systems in real wars and responses (Der Derian, 2009; Franklin, 2000). According to the author, the US has blundered due to over reliance on technology, virtue, and threats of terror. He also notes that technological representations of wars depict a low risk affair. Representations of the Vietnam War took different aspects.

Hixson portrays various ways in which people have kept memories of the war (Hixson, 2000). However, these representations deviated from actual events as films begun to produce motion pictures for commercial purposes.

According to Sturken, representations of the Vietnam War and AIDS epidemic have transformed the US culture. The author looks at effects of camera images on cultural memory, media fantasy, trauma that survivors experience and how healing processes can smooth tensions. Scholars portray a culture of amnesia among Americans when it comes to recalling events of war (Sturken, 1997; Buzzanco, 1999).

From the Vietnam War, we can note three significant events. First, photojournalism changed the history of war reporting. Second, the media attempts to reveal the truth led Americans to doubt their government. Finally, televisions and photographs were significant in shaping the public’s perceptions about the war.

Critics believe that the media had a negative impact on Americans regarding the outcome of the Vietnam War. The media reporting portrayed images of horror that the public could not withstand. We must understand that the media supported this war during early stages of the US involvement.

However, television coverage and photographs changed Americans perception about the war. The biased reporting only concentrated on actions of the US soldiers and ignored atrocities that North Vietnam committed. As a result, the anti-war demonstrations gained the media attention.

Journalists and media pundits have debated the war reporting and its impacts on the public for many years. However, critics believe that it is only veterans who can give true accounts of the war.

This is because media main concerns are reporting events without understanding their meanings. As a result, war veterans believed that the television reporting distorted news by misrepresentation. For instance, they made the public believe that the US had lost the war while reality at the field was different.

Critics also believe that the media portrayed anti-war demonstrators as traitors. The media claimed that anti-war demonstrators were sympathizers of the US enemies. In addition, the media only concentrated on violet aspects of the anti-war demonstrations.

Critics believed that the media engaged in extremism so as to gain the public’s attention. As a result, the anti-war movement gained popularity through defiant definitions that various media portrayed.

This is manipulation of the media. It created a distant public from the government. The media ignored values and ideas the anti-war movement proclaimed. Instead, it concentrated on portraying violence associated with the protest.

Media scholars also believe that pessimistic war intentions did not originate from the media. This happened because the public did not understand the working style of the media. In fact, people believed that the media were mere transmitters of facts and news as they happened at the battle field.

In this regard, the critical role many scholars attribute to media is beyond their attention. Changes in reporting styles after the Tet Offensive simply reflected changes in events of the war, sources, and the government role in attempts to regulate contents. In addition, the media reporting of the anti-war movement showed that they were not responsible for actions of protestors.

Photographs have remained vital sources of information. Photographs are easier to recall than words. Images can influence or trigger different emotions in people. As a result, such emotions influence interpretation of photos. Influences of photos vary from individuals. However, scholars generally agree that photos have high capacity for memory, are less complex than words, and appeal to majorities.

People may debate on what features make images or photos iconic. The Accidental Napalm photo remains an iconic image of the Vietnam War. This is because the image of a naked running girl cannot easily disappear from Americans’ minds. This image shows cruelty of the war. This photo attained the status of an iconic image because everyone could recognize and understand it.

It captures a moment of history and creates a strong sense of emotions among audience. This photo had the capacity to ignite various views about the war. The media made the image and distributed it within their systems making the photo an icon. It created waves of negative reactions, prominence, subject of the war, and cultural aspects.

Accidental Napalm photo is an image reflecting the nudity of the burning and shouting girl. This photo violated cultural concerns about nudity in order to excite debate about immorality of the war. The public should not have access to this picture. It shows what we should not see and an event that should not have occurred. In views of feminists, the naked girl depicts a victimized female figure during wars.

This is to say it is the women and children who suffer in the event of any war. There is a clear difference between the soldiers walking and children running from terror. The image can also lead to question the responsibility of soldiers to children during times of wars.

The public cannot control their emotions when confronted with this photo. The photo evokes a sense of terror, pain, and pity. This photo remains the significant work of photojournalism in the history of war.

A semiotic analysis reveals that attentions of viewers are on the nude girl. The photo does not provide much detail. However, we can see that the war claimed the innocence of a young girl rendering her nude and powerless before the soldiers and photographers who captured her nudity.

The boy in the photo depicts terror of the war. All the children in this photo depict stiff contrast from the soldiers herding them down the street. It is also significant to note that these children do not have any parents in the photo. It remains unclear whether the war had claimed their parents.

The action of directing these children may show power of the soldiers over the war victims. The photo’s background shows thick and dark smoke. The dark smoke shows an image of threatening and risky situation during the battle.

“The children from left to right are: Phan Thanh Tam, younger brother of Kim Phuc, who lost an eye, Phan Thanh Phouc, youngest brother of Kim Phuc, Kim Phuc, and Kim’s cousins Ho Van Bon, and Ho Thi Ting. Behind them are soldiers of the Vietnam Army 25th Division, June 8, 1972” (Nick Ut/AP Photo).

Another photo of interest is the Tet Execution . The photo shows General Nguyen Ngoc Loan as he shoots a captured Viet Cong enemy at a close range. The national televisions aired this execution. However, it is the still picture that grabbed the viewers’ attention.

The photo highlighted the facial expression of the war captive than did the live coverage of televisions. The photo became an iconic image because of the prominence and instantaneous influence it achieved. Still photos remain the most influential forms of representation in the world. The General and enemy only have a small gun between them.

The photo is simple, but it shows the reality of war i.e. man-to-man confrontation where the aggressor and enemy are face-to-face. This photo shows the real brutality of the Vietnam War. The General does not indicate any emotion. The act of executing enemies is normal to him. On the other hand, Viet Cong’s expression generates feelings of empathy among audience.

DURING: 1 February 1968 the national police chief of South Vietnam, General Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting the enemy suspect in the head (Eddie Adams photo).

The photo of Tet Execution shows how photography achieved influence in the photojournalism. We cannot assume the fact that the General was aware of the presence of the camera. Thus, he turned his back to hide his feelings and purpose.

Conversely, we can see an expression of a man waiting for the unknown in the prisoner. The prisoner’s dress code and hair are the opposite of the General who expresses power in his military attire. The prisoner may not be a military officer after all. Instead, he might be a civilian experiencing the cruelty of the war. The General shows disregard for the normal justice system. This image only depicts hatred that exists among soldiers during wars.

The war depicted a show of power among soldiers (Anderegg, 1991). The General clearly expresses and flexes his muscles as he prepares to shoot his victim. On the other hand, the victim remains powerless since his hands are behind his back, tied thus, denying him the chance to defend himself.

The victim’s acceptance of his fate is evident in his motionless body. The prisoner knows it is pointless in trying to defend himself or escape. There is also a soldier who cannot believe the proceeding event. As a result, he is holding his teeth tightly because of this inhumane act. The soldier has protective helmet, unlike the Viet Cong captive.

This Tet Execution arouses feelings of empathy and portrays the General as a villain and the prisoner as a hero. We cannot completely understand circumstances of the photo. However, we can note that it is inhumane act against a helpless war victim. Therefore, the photo communicates the main act of war, which is to kill an enemy. As a result, viewers could experience atrocities that permeated the Vietnam War.

In the view of Donald and McDonald, the image of Tet Execution can have significant influence on reinforcing masculinity among boys (Donald and MacDonald, 2011).

The General’s victory over the victim can aid in reinforcing the male stereotype associated with combats and winning as these images are responsible for defining manly courage. Such images depicting the apotheosis of the US soldiers in wars are the current representations of the Vietnam War in various media as Slocum portrays (Slocum, 2006; Lembcke, 1998).

Various scholars have expressed their ideas about the relationship between the media and war. From this point, we can understand the impact of iconic images of the Vietnam War through semiotic analysis. These photos show general features of powerlessness, emotions, and innocence that were present in the Vietnam War.

We can now understand why these photos triggered emotions among American audience. The Accidental Napalm and Tet Execution arouse strong emotions of panic, fear, and pain among viewers making them iconic images of the war.

Semiotic analyses of these photos show that they are capable of arousing strong emotions among viewers. Viewers can easily relate these photos to distress, loss of lives, unpleasant experiences, and terror of the war. These photos are icons of outrage and atrocities of the war, and viewers not accustomed to such scenes can easily have negative emotions.

Photographs also captured innocence of the victims. These photos showed how innocent victims lost their lives during the war. The Tet Execution depicts the prisoner as an ordinary citizen and not an army officer. However, we learned that the victim was a Viet Cong soldier. The inhumane execution of this soldier shows disregard for the rule of the law and deviation from the concept of the war.

The Accidental Napalm shows the innocence of the children caught in the middle of the battle. The photo depicts how the war stripped the little girl’s innocence. The absence of any parent in the photo also raises concerns about the fate of these children. The war has left these children to fend for each other.

These photos also depict war victims who have no power to defend themselves. The Viet Cong is unable to defend himself against the General and soldiers. This sense of powerlessness reflects what the war has caused in South Vietnam.

The little girl also remains powerless to events taking place in her country. These photos remain crucial in representations of the Vietnam War. They also mark the role of photojournalism in depicting actual images of the war.

Allan, S 2010, News Culture, Open University Press, New York.

Allen, T and Seaton, J 1999, The Media of Conflict: War Reporting and Representations of Ethnic Violence, Zed Books, New York.

Altheide, D 2009, Terror Post-9/11 and Media, Peter Lang, New York.

Anderegg, M 1991, Inventing Vietnam: The War in Film and Television, Temple University Press, Philadelphia.

Andersen, R 2006, A Century of Media, a Century of War, Peter Lang, New York.

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Buzzanco, R 1999, Vietnam and the Transformation of American Life, Blackwell Publishers, Malden.

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Franklin, B 2000, Vietnam and Other American Fantasies, University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst.

Gilboa, E 2002, Media and Conflict: Framing Issues, Making Policy, Shaping Opinions, Transnational, Ardsley, NY.

Grey, J 1992, Vietnam: War, Myth and Memory: Comparative Perspectives on Australia’s War, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards.

Hammond, P 2007, Media, War and Postmodernity, Routledge, London.

Hixson, W 2000, Historical Memory and Representations of the Vietnam War, Garland Publishers, New York.

Lembcke, J 1998, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam, New York UP, New York.

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Sturken, M 1997, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering, University of California Press, Berkeley.

Bombs with a mixture of napalm and white phosphorus jelly dropped by Vietnamese Air Force Skyraider bombers explode across Route 1, amid homes and in front of the Cao Dai temple on the outskirts of Trang Bang, Vietnam, June 8, 1972. (Nick Ut/AP Photo)

Nick Ut took this image seconds after his famous shot, of Kim Phuc running down the street. Television crews and South Vietnamese troops surround 9-year-old Kim Phuc on Route 1 near Trang Bang, South Vietnam, after she was burned by a misdirected aerial napalm attack, June 8, 1972. (Nick Ut/AP)

Phan Tai Kim Phuc, 9, is comforted by her mother in a Saigon, Vietnam, hospital, two days after she was severely burned during a misplaced napalm attack on her village, June 10, 1972.(Robinson/AP Photo)

From right, Associated Press staff photographer Nick Ut, Phan Thi Kim Phuc and Dr. My Le, who treated Kim Phuc two days after a napalm attack in Vietnam 40 years ago, sit together during a reunion in Buena Park, Calif., June 2, 2012. (Jae C. Hong/AP Photo)

Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II, right, opens the new Welcome Wing of London‘s Science Museum with Associated Press photographer Nick Ut, left and Phan Thi Kim Phuc, centre, June 27, 2000. Ut’s image of Kim is featured in the museum. (Ian Jones/AP Photo)

BEFORE: South Vietnamese forces escort suspected Viet Cong officer Nguyen Van Lem (also known as Bay Lop) on a Saigon street Feb. 1, 1968, early in the Tet Offensive. (AP Photo/Eddie Adams

AFTER: The victim falls dead on the ground and police chief calmly puts the gun back

January 9, 1964 a soldier of the Army of South Vietnam stabs a farmer, assuming that he was lying on the movements of the Viet Cong – North Vietnamese soldiers. (AP Photo/Horst Faas)

• Photography of High-End Art
• The Life and Work of Dorothea Lange
• China's Support for North Vietnam in the Vietnam War
• The Vietnam War Outcomes
• Steve McCurry’s Photographs
• The Description of Nature in Jack Dykinga’ Photographs
• Jack Dykinga's Outdoor Photography
• Daguerreotype and Cyanotype Process
• Photography’s Impact on Society
• Mads Nissen, a Danish Documentary Photographer
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2019, June 27). Photos of Vietnam War. https://ivypanda.com/essays/photos-of-vietnam-war/

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1. IvyPanda . "Photos of Vietnam War." June 27, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/photos-of-vietnam-war/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Photos of Vietnam War." June 27, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/photos-of-vietnam-war/.

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The Vietnam War: The Pictures That Moved Them Most

‘Who is the Enemy Here?’

The vietnam war Pictures That Moved Them Most

While the Vietnam War raged — roughly two decades’ worth of bloody and world-changing years — compelling images made their way out of the combat zones. On television screens and magazine pages around the world, photographs told a story of a fight that only got more confusing, more devastating, as it went on. As Jon Meacham describes in this week’s issue of TIME , the pictures from that period can help illuminate the “demons” of Vietnam.

And, in the decades since, the most striking of those images have retained their power. Think of the War in Vietnam and the image in your mind is likely one that was first captured on film, and then in the public imagination. How those photographs made history is underscored throughout the new documentary series The Vietnam War , from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. The series features a wide range of war images, both famous and forgotten.

But few people have a better grasp on the role of photography in Vietnam than the photographers themselves, and those who lived and worked alongside them. With the war once again making headlines, TIME asked a number of those individuals to select an image from the period that they found particularly significant, and to explain why that photograph moved them the most.

Here, lightly edited, are their responses.

—Lily Rothman and Alice Gabriner

Don McCullin

Don McCullin— Contact Press Images

My picture of the U.S. corpsman carrying an injured child away from the battle in Hué is a rare occasion to show the true value of human kindness and the dignity of man. The child was found wandering the previous night between the North Vietnamese and the American firing lines. His parents had probably been killed.

They took the child into a bunker, cleaned him up and dressed his wounds under candlelight. These hard Marines suddenly became the most gentle, loving persons. It was almost a religious experience for me to record this extraordinary event.

The following morning, this corpsman took the child to the rear of the battle zone where he could be handed over for more medical attention. He carried the child as if it were his own, wrapped into a poncho, because it was quite cold. A naked limb is hanging from the poncho. Looking back today on this picture I took so long ago I can see that there is an echo here of the famous Robert Capa image of the woman whose head had been shaved at the end of WWII because she was considered to be a Nazi collaborator and had a child — whom she hugs to her chest — with a German soldier. I didn’t think of Capa when I pressed the shutter, but I believe both images share an emotional impact because they involve children. Though Capa’s illustrates cruelty, my corpsman illustrates humanity, almost saintliness — a man carrying a child away from the sorrow and injuries of war.

Howard Sochurek

Young guerrillas wear grenades at their belts, preparing to fight the encroaching Viet Minh forces in the Red River Delta , northern Vietnam, 1954. Howard Sochurek—The LIFE Picture Collection

Tania Sochurek, widow of photographer Howard Sochurek:

The conflict in Vietnam spanned almost 20 years. Howard was a staff photographer for LIFE in the early 1950s, when he was first assigned to cover the fighting in what was then Indochina. He was there on the ground for the brutal — and historic — fall of Dien Bien Phu that marked the end of the French involvement in the region.

It’s insane to think that these three young children with grenades were going off to fight the Viet Minh army. Sadly, they probably died quickly in the war. This is a photo that Howard felt was very powerful.

In 1954, Howard was again on assignment in Vietnam when he was called home to Milwaukee to be with his mother, who was terminally ill. The acclaimed photographer Robert Capa came in to take his place and cover the fighting. A short time later, Capa was killed by a land mine while out on a mission with the U.S. troops. Over the years, Howard would often tell this story and recall sadly that Capa had died covering his assignment. He was immensely proud to receive the Robert Capa Gold Medal Award for “superlative photography requiring exceptional courage and enterprise abroad” from the Overseas Press Club in 1955.

Gilles Caron

Gilles Caron —Fondation Gilles Caron

Robert Pledge, co-founder of Contact Press Images:

Who is the enemy here? The soldier, seen from the back, facing a Vietnamese woman hugging a baby, with a half-naked boy by her side? Or is it the young woman and her two children being confronted by an American GI? Are there not always two sides to a coin?

We are in a small hamlet near Dakto late in 1967, barely two months away from the Têt Offensive. The turning point of the five-year-old war, the offensive by elusive Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces failed in military terms but constituted a political victory in the arena of international public opinion. America was losing the war at home; David was defeating Goliath.

Gilles Caron’s atypical vertical image of a face-to-face encounter exposes deep cultural divide and distrust. Fear, tension and uncertainty are visible in the contained defiance of the mother and the awkward posture of the young warrior clutching his automatic rifle. Other locals and American military are nearby; the anxious glance of the child indicates as much. The contact sheets from that day reveal that the straw roofs would be set ablaze and the hamlet burnt down because of the suspicion that the villagers were harboring communist guerrilla forces by night.

In 1970, Caron would be captured by the Khmer Rouge, in neighboring Cambodia, never to be seen again. He had just turned 30.

Still images rarely give straightforward answers but they do offer illuminating clues for those who take the time to delve into them. Caron’s career in photography was very short — 1966 to 1970 — but his exceptional talent, intelligence, commitment and ubiquity leave us with an unmatched visual legacy.

Philip Jones Griffiths

Philip Jones Griffiths—Magnum Photos

Fenella Ferrato, daughter of photographer Philip Jones Griffiths:

Philip Jones Griffiths was born in a small town in the North of Wales in 1936, before the start of the Second World War. When American GIs landed on British shores they exuded generosity to their allies, giving away candy, nylons and cigarettes. I remember him telling the story of being lined up in the playground and being handed a Mars bar by a tall GI. He was instantly suspicious. A Mars bar was a very special thing indeed. Why were these uniformed men just giving them away?

This was Philip’s first glimpse into the efforts of an American army trying to win over “hearts and minds.” When he got to Vietnam he instantly recognized the same tactic being used there. This image perfectly shows the seductive and corrupting influence of consumerism on the innocent civilians of Vietnam.

Katherine Holden, daughter of photographer Philip Jones Griffiths:

This picture was taken by my father, Philip Jones Griffiths, in Vietnam in 1968 during the battle for Saigon. This is not a normal “war” photograph. It is not often you see “enemies” cradling each other. However, the American GIs often showed compassion toward the Viet Cong. This sprang from a soldierly admiration for their dedication and bravery — qualities difficult to discern in the average government soldier.

This particular Viet Cong had fought for three days with his intestines in a cooking bowl strapped onto his stomach. Francis Ford Coppola was so inspired by this image that he included a scene in his 1979 film Apocalypse Now with the famous line, “Any man brave enough to fight with his guts strapped on him can drink from my canteen any day.”

Henri Huet—AP

Hal Buell, former photography director at the Associated Press, who led their photo operations during the Vietnam War:

In all wars, the battlefield medic is often the stopgap between life and death. AP photographer Henri Huet, under heavy enemy fire, saw that role through his lens and captured the uncommon dedication that medic Thomas Cole displayed in this memorable photo. Cole, himself wounded, peered beneath his bandaged eye to treat the wounds of a fallen Marine. Despite his wounds, Cole continued to attend the injured in Vietnam’s central highlands in January, 1966. This photo was only one of several Huet made of Cole that were published on the cover and inside pages of LIFE magazine.

A year later Huet was seriously wounded and was treated by medics until evacuated. In 1971 Huet died in a helicopter shot down over Laos.

War Zone ‘C’ – Ambush of the 173rd Airborne, 1965. Tim Page

It was Larry Burrows who had to teach me how to load my first Leica M3; I got it as a perk having just had this image run as a vertical double truck in a 5-page spread in LIFE in the fall of ’65.

At the same time that Hello Dolly opened at Nha Trang airbase, a company of 173rd Airborne had walked into an ambush in Viet Cong base zone, known as the Iron Triangle. The sign had read “American who read this die.”

A class of prime youth shredded in seconds.

The dust-offs started coming within 30 minutes. I got a ride back to Ton San Nhut and was downtown in Room 401 of the Caravelle in another 30. Mostly, I remember carrying a badly wounded grunt whose leg came off and he almost bled out. The shot was made one-handed as we carried him out of the fire cone.

Dirck Halstead

Dirck Halstead—Getty Images

We rarely see images of Armies in full retreat.

Generally, the photographers who might have shot some of those images have long since bugged out, or have been captured or killed.

In mid-April of 1975, a small group of American journalists were invited to fly into the small provincial capital of Xuan Loc, South Vietnam, 35 miles north of Saigon, by commander Le Minh Dao. A siege by a massive North Vietnamese force was about to take place. The helicopter Dao sent to Saigon to pick us up deposited us just outside the town. Neither we, nor General Dao, had expected the tide of advancing communist forces to so quickly and completely surround the town.

General Dao, however, was full of vim and eager for the battle. Slapping a swagger stick along his leg, he quickly loaded the two journalists who had accepted his invitation, myself and UPI reporter Leon Daniel, into a Jeep and barreled into the town. At first, we thought it was deserted. Then slowly, and one by one, South Vietnamese troopers began to stick their heads out of foxholes they had dug in the streets. Dao yelled that they were prepared to fight the enemy, come what may. However, we noted with more than a little trepidation that none of them were budging from their holes as Dao led us down the dusty street. Suddenly, a mortar shell landed in the dust no more than 10 feet from us. It was followed by a barrage of incoming automatic weapon and artillery rounds.

Dao wisely called an end to his press tour. We tore back to a landing zone that we had arrived at less than an hour later. Dao called in a helicopter to evacuate us, but suddenly, the ARVN troops who had been seated alongside the road broke and ran for the incoming helos. In less time than it takes to tell, the panicked soldiers swarmed into the helicopter, which was to be our only way out. Crewmen tried to turn them back, but the helicopter lurched into the air with two soldiers hanging from the skids.

At that moment, Leon and I had a sinking feeling that we were going to be part of the fall of Xuan Loc. For us, the war looked like it was about to be over.

However, Dao had one more trick up his sleeve, and he called in his personal helicopter behind his headquarters. As we made a run for it, the General grabbed me by the arm, and said, “Tell your people that you have seen how the 18th division knows how to fight and die. Now go — and if you are invited back, don’t come!”

Joe Galloway

Joe Galloway—UPI/Getty Images

I snapped this photo at [the Battle of la Drang], LZ X-Ray, on Nov. 15, 1965. At the moment I hit the button I did not recognize the GI who was dashing across the clearing to load the body of a comrade aboard the waiting Huey helicopter.

Later I realized that I had shot a photo, in the heat of battle, of my childhood friend from the little town of Refugio, Texas. Vince Cantu and I went through school together right to graduation with the Refugio High School Class of 1959 — a total of 55 of us. The next time I saw Vince was on that terrible bloody ground in the la Drang. Each of us was terribly afraid that the other was going to be killed in the next minutes.

When my book about the war, We Were Soldiers Once…and Young, came out in 1992, Vince Cantu was driving a city bus in Houston. His bosses read the papers and discovered they had a real hero pushing one of their buses. So they made Vince a Supervisor and all he did from then to retirement was stand in the door with a clipboard checking buses in and out.

A story with a happy ending.

Larry Burrows

Larry Burrows —The Life Picture Collection

Russell Burrows, son of photographer Larry Burrows:

The fraction of a second captured in most photographs is just that: a snapshot of a moment in time. Sometimes, even in war, that moment can tell a whole story with clarity, but it can be ambiguous too.

The photograph that ran in LIFE in late October 1966 of Gunnery Sergeant Jeremiah Purdie, bleeding and bandaged, helped down a muddy hill by fellow marines, didn’t really need a caption. The written account around the photograph and a dozen others that brought Operation Prairie to LIFE’s readers told of infiltrating troops and of efforts to thwart them — of hills taken and given up. The detail not given was that Gunny Purdie’s commanding officer had just been killed on that hill, the radio operator “cut in half.” Neither did the article mention that the CO had called in artillery fire on his own position. Purdie was being restrained from turning back to aid his CO.

A few frames later, Larry Burrows took another photograph: Purdie is still being held back, but in front of him is another wounded man and Purdie’s arms are outstretched. The scene is as wretched as the other. Purdie, wounded for the third time in the war, was about to be flown to a hospital ship off the Vietnamese coast and leave that country for his last time. This photograph has come to be known as “Reaching Out.”

My father, Larry Burrows, selected that frame himself, but it wasn’t until more than four years later, after he was shot down and killed, that it was published for the first time. The composition of the photograph has been compared to the work of the old masters, but some see it more cinematically: as if you could run a film backwards and forwards to view more of the story. Exhibiting museums have found in it Christian iconography. And at least one psychiatrist treating war veterans has used it in his practice.

My father didn’t know that Jeremiah Purdie had enlisted in a segregated Marine Corps 18 years earlier, that cooking in the mess and polishing shoes were the limits placed on his service. He didn’t know that before Purdie’s persistence finally earned him a transfer to the infantry, he had taken courses at the Marine Corps Institute, confident that the transfer would come and he would be ready. Unknowable then was also the life Purdie would live after his 20 years in the Marine Corps, or how important to him faith would become.

At Jeremiah Purdie’s packed funeral, there wasn’t a man or a woman with a story to tell that didn’t mention how, in some way, he had reached out.

David Hume Kennerly

Long-forgotten photographs sometimes leap out at me and I am stunned by certain moments that I documented that were so routine when I made them, but are now infused with new emotion and meaning. This picture of a haunted-looking young American GI taking refuge under a poncho from monsoon rains in the jungles outside of Da Nang while on patrol in 1972 is one of them. The soldier’s eyes reveal, and you don’t need a caption to explain it, that he most likely experienced hell along the way.

During the time I spent with him and his platoon they didn’t come into direct contact with the enemy, but there was always a common undercurrent that ran through them, a palpable anxiety and fear about what could come their way in a split second. These men had seen buddies cut in half by shrapnel from an incoming round, or watched a friend’s head explode from a bullet between the eyes that earned him a one-way ticket home in a body bag. Many had that intense blaze of realization when a comrade was suddenly, violently, unexpectedly gone, and marveled at still being left intact. Some experienced a flash of guilt when in a starkly honest millisecond they thought, “Glad it was him, not me.” That big ugly candid moment was immediately pushed down, but it would creep back every now and then, especially back in the world when they gave a hug to their new child, the one their dead buddy would never have.

This image of the sheltering soldier is particularly compelling to me for what I don’t know. What was his next act, and what happened after he returned from Vietnam? The photo didn’t win any prizes, might not even been published, but as a flash forward it represents every soldier who returns from any war after the battles were history, guns silenced and the odds of getting killed beaten.

Paul Schutzer

Paul Schutzer—The Life Picture Collection/Getty Images

Bernice Schutzer Galef, widow of photographer Paul Schutzer:

Paul got carried away with all the emotions that happen in war, and he was right in there with the soldiers in battles. He saw everything; he saw the fatigue of the American soldiers, their fear, the prisoner’s fear. There was one photo of prisoners being guarded by an American soldier about 18 years old. The captives were young children and old women and one woman is nursing her baby. Unfortunately the young soldier was later killed but this image conveyed the senselessness and horror of how the human condition was playing out. The soldiers were very sympathetic to the civilians and one medic befriended them. The last photo in the photo essay shows the medic and a child walking away together, holding hands, and the child’s head is burned from napalm. It was the first time that Americans saw and learned that we were using napalm. Paul received many letters saying “thank you for what you showed us.”

David Burnett

David Burnett—Contact Press Images

In the days before “embeds” — this generation’s enforced melding of photographer and military unit — there was a certain sense of freedom we owned as photographers, being able to go directly to where the story was. In Vietnam in the early 1970s, the only real limitation was finding a ride. But nearly until the end of the U.S. war, if a helicopter or truck had a seat available, they would take you along.

We would often “embed” ourselves with a platoon or squad, but it was more of a gentleman’s agreement than any kind of official policy, based in the main on the idea that we, the photographers, were there to tell their story, and they, the soldiers, realized that unlike them, we didn’t have to be there. It was by choice. It created a sense of mutual respect that in many ways is challenged by the new “embed” ethos. That said, it was often a world of anonymous photographers spending time with anonymous soldiers. So while we would talk with the troops about what was happening that day, there were many moments where in the course of making photographs, I would just keep moving along. I usually knew the unit but looking back now, so much I wish I had noted was simply never written down. It was forever a search for a picture, and you never knew, sometimes for weeks, whether you had that picture or not. My film had to make it all the way to New York before it could be processed and edited.

One morning near the end of the unsuccessful Laos invasion of early 1971 (an attempt to cut the Ho Chi Minh trail), I wandered into a group of young soldiers who were tasked with fixing tanks and track vehicles which were regularly being rocketed by North Vietnamese troops just down the road. This soldier and I exchanged pleasantries the way you would in the dusty heat. He went back to work after reading a letter from home, and I moved on to another unit. But for that fraction of a second, in his face, his posture, was all the fatigue and despair of a young soldier who is surely wondering what in the hell he’s doing there, so far from home.

Catherine Leroy

Catherine Leroy—Dotation Catherine Leroy

Fred Ritchin, Dean Emeritus of the School at ICP:

There is something both surreal and strikingly sad in this photograph by Catherine Leroy. An empty helmet — is its owner still alive? — is shown front and center, resting on the ground in the soft gray light like a discarded soup bowl or a cleaved skull. It is photographed as if forming the center of a broken compass, one without arms, pointing nowhere. In the fairly rendered background a soldier, probably wounded, is seen surrounded by comrades who, somehow, form an awkward Pietà. The violent spectacle has temporarily receded, and the reader, in this previously unpublished photograph, is given its remains, both the sacred and the partly absurd.

Leroy went from France to Vietnam in 1966 at the age of 21, with a single camera, no assignments and $150 in her pocket; she would stay until 1968. She managed to get accredited by the Associated Press, covered numerous battles, was seriously wounded by shrapnel that would remain in her body, parachuted into combat (small and thin, she was weighed down so as not to be blown away), was taken prisoner by the North Vietnamese (which she used as an opportunity to produce a cover story for LIFE Magazine), and remained obsessed by the war until her death in 2006.

Consumed by a ferocious anger at the hypocrisies of politics at various levels, in her last years Leroy created a website and then a book, Under Fire: Great Photographers and Writers in Vietnam , paying homage to her colleagues 40 years after the war had ended.

Released prisoner of war Lt. Col. Robert L. Stirm is greeted by his family at Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, Calif. Sal Veder—AP

I had photographed POWs returning home time and again, and been in Vietnam on two tours myself, as a photographer. On that day, There were 30 or 40 photographers boarded on a flat-bed, including TV. I was photographing a different family and out of the corner of my eye saw the action and turned. I was lucky to get a break. It was a great moment for Americans! The joyousness of the reunion and the coming together of the family as a visual is outstanding because it was the end of the war. We were glad to get it over with. I’m thankful that this is my picture. I feel it’s symbolic, but I’m conflicted about it, knowing what I know. The picture is there and it comes back up again. There is no way to avoid it.

My older brother Huynh Thanh My, who was killed covering the Vietnam War for the Associated Press, always told me that an image could stop the war and that was his goal. I was devastated when he died. I was very young. But there and then, I decided to follow in his footsteps and complete his mission. A few years later on that fateful day in 1972 on the Trang Bang road, my brother’s goal was accomplished. No one was expecting people to come out of the bombed-out burning buildings, but when they did, I was ready with my Leica camera and I feel my brother guided me to capture that image. The rest is history.

Yoichi Okamoto

As tens of thousands of anti-war protestors rioted in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, President Johnson and his family watched from the bedroom at his ranch in Stonewall, Texas. Yoichi Okamoto—LBJ Library

Pete Souza, former White House photographer for Presidents Reagan and Obama:

This is truly an incredibly intimate picture. The caption provides pertinent information about the circumstance: the who, what and where. But I’m fascinated by the photograph because of the man behind the camera: Yoichi Okamoto. The first civilian hired as Chief White House Photographer, Okamoto also became the first one to truly document the Presidency for history. It’s obvious looking at this photograph that he had unfettered access to LBJ and that everyone was comfortable with him being in the room — even when the room was the President’s bedroom.

Raymond Depardon

Richard Nixon campaigns in Sioux City, Iowa, October 1986. Raymond Depardon—Magnum

(Translated from the French)

After I photographed the Democratic Convention in Chicago, which was very turbulent and contested, I wanted to photograph the future President. I worked for a little cooperative French agency, Gamma, which we had created a few years earlier. I arrived from Miami on the press plane that accompanied the candidate. We were positioned at a little airport in Sioux City. It was the morning. It was windy. Nixon left the plane.

I almost did not make the photo — the man with the flag and Nixon on top of the aircraft stairs. It was too much.

Art Greenspon

Art Greenspon—AP

Excerpted from a 2013 interview with Art Greenspon by Peter van Agtmael, a Magnum photographer who has covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan:

“As the first medevac chopper hovered overhead I saw the First Sergeant with his arms in the air. I saw the medic shouldering wounded and then I saw the kid on his back in the grass. I have got to get all this in one picture , I thought. My heart was pounding. Was 1/60 fast enough? Screw it. Shoot pictures. I got three frames off, and the moment was gone.

I knew what was in the camera, but when I went to wind back the film, I couldn’t. The film in my Nikon had become stuck to the pressure plate from all the moisture. My Leica was soaked, too, and I wasn’t sure what kind of pictures it was producing.

The weather closed in again. I had given all of my food away so I didn’t eat for two days. I wrapped my cameras in a damp towel and put them in my pack. I guarded that pack like a mother hen.

I flew out with the second chopper loaded with body bags. A kid headed out for R&R and a floor stacked with KIAs [killed in action]. War sucks.”

Alice Gabriner , who edited this photo essay, is TIME’s International Photo Editor.

Lily Rothman is the History and Archives Editor for TIME.

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Vietnam War Essay | Essay on Vietnam War for Students and Children in English

February 13, 2024 by Prasanna

Vietnam War Essay:  The Vietnam War is considered to be one of the most memorable and long-standing conflicts that involved the U.S., with a major role to play in it. The Vietnam War was primarily the consequences of the U.S. anti-communist foreign policy in the year 1960.

It was the military conflict between communist North Vietnam and their allies, against South Vietnam and other countries including America, Australia, Britain, France and New Zealand. Australia’s alliance with the USA was the main reason for the commencement of the Vietnam War. The USA had been a part of the war since 1959 and needed Australia’s assistance. It was a long, costly and divisive conflict. The conflict was intensified by the ongoing cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union.

You can also find more  Essay Writing  articles on events, persons, sports, technology and many more.

Long and Short Essays on Vietnam War for Students and Kids in English

We are providing essay samples to students on a long essay of 500 words and a short essay of 150 words on the topic Vietnam War Essay for reference.

Long Essay on Vietnam War 500 Words in English

Long Essay on Vietnam War is usually given to classes 7, 8, 9, and 10.

The Vietnam War is also known as the Second Indo-China War and in Vietnam as the Resistance War Against America. It was the second of the Indo-China Wars that was fought between North Vietnam and South Vietnam. North Vietnam was supported by the Soviet Union, China and other communist allies.

On the other hand, South Vietnam was supported by the United States, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia, Thailand, and the other anti-communist allies were also there for support. The war lasted 19 years and was also called the Cold War by many. The war had direct U.S. involvement, and it ended in 1973.

During World War II, Japanese forces had invaded Vietnam. To fight it off, both Japanese occupiers and French Colonial administration, the political leader Ho Chi Minh formed the Viet Minh, being inspired by the Chinese and Soviet Communism. The Viet Minh was also known as the League for the Independence of Vietnam.

Following its 1945 defeat in World War II, Japan withdrew its forces from Vietnam leaving the French-educated Emperor, Bao Dai in total control. Seeing this opportunity to seize control, Ho’s Viet Minh forces immediately rose to take complete control over the Northern city of Hanoi and declaring it as the Democratic Republic of Vietnam with Ho as the president.

After Ho’s communist forces took control over the North, armed conflicts between the northern and the southern armies continued until a decisive victory of Viet Minh took place in the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in May 1954. The French loss at the battle and almost ended the French rule in Indo-China.

Vietnam was split along the latitude known as the 17th parallel based on a treaty signed in July in the year 1954, with Ho in control in the North and Bao in the South. The Vietnam War with active U.S. involvement in 1954 was due to the ongoing conflicts that dated back several decades.

You can now access more Essay Writing on Vietnam War and many more topics.

The Vietnam War led to outcomes like economic downturn and political isolation for Vietnam, which was only supported by the Soviet Union and its allies located in Eastern Europe. It also led to the fall of the South Vietnamese government in 1975 that resulted in a unified communist government in the country. The war also led to the death of almost 2 million Vietnamese civilians, 1.2 million Northern soldiers and many service members. Emigration of Vietnam soldiers took place around the late 1970s from Vietnam.

North Vietnam was communist, whereas South Vietnam was not. North Vietnamese communists and South Vietnamese communist rebels known as the Viet Cong wanted to overthrow the South Vietnamese government together and reunite the country.

South Vietnamese troops waded through the water to flush out communist rebels in 1962. The cost and casualties of the war were too much for America to face; thus, the U.S. combat units were withdrawn by 1973, and in 1975 South Vietnam was fully invaded by the North.

Short Essay on Vietnam War 150 Words in English

Short Essay on Vietnam War is usually given to classes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

The Vietnam War (1954-1975) is referred to the period when the United States and other members of the South East Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO) joined forces with the Republic of South Vietnam to contest communist forces that were comprised of South Vietnamese guerrillas and the regular force units called the Viet Cong.

The United States possessed the largest foreign military presence and had directed the war from 1965 to 1968. Thus, for this reason, Vietnam today is known as the American War. It was considered as the direct result of the First Indochina War between France that claimed Vietnam as a colony and the communist forces which were then known as Viet Minh.

The Vietnam War was one of the longest wars in the history of the United States and was extremely divisive U.S., Europe, Australia and elsewhere. The U.S. suffered a casualty of 47000 being killed in action with the addition of 11000 non-combat deaths. Over 150000 were wounded, and 10000 were missing.

10 Lines on Vietnam War Essay in English

1. The Vietnam War was a conflict between the communist and the capitalist countries and was a part of the Cold War. 2. The Vietnam War was a controversial issue in the United States. 3. It was the first war to feature in live television coverage. 4. The war became extremely unpopular in the United States, and President Nixon sent American soldiers home in 1973. 5. Viet Minh waved their flag at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. 6. The French defeat at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu led to the Geneva conference. 7. France began to colonize Vietnam between 1959 and 1962. 8. France also took control over Saigon. 9. Laos was added after the war with Thailand. 10. In 1940 the French Indochina was controlled by Vichy French Government.

FAQ’s on Vietnam War Essay

Question 1. What is the main cause of the Vietnam War?

Answer: Spread of communism during the cold war along with American containment was the main cause of the war.

Question 2. What was the effect of the Vietnam War?

Answer: The most immediate effect was the staggering death toll of almost 3 million people.

Question 3. Why was the Vietnam War fought?

Answer: The USA feared the spread of communism, which led the war to be fought.

Question 4.  When did the military fight occur in the war?

Answer: The fighting occurred between 1957 and 1973.

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The Impact and Design of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial

This essay is about Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial and its profound impact on memorial design and public perception. It discusses Lin’s innovative use of black granite to create a reflective surface, allowing visitors to connect personally with the engraved names of fallen soldiers. The memorial’s design, which descends into the earth and gradually ascends, symbolizes a journey through grief and healing. Initially controversial, the memorial is now appreciated for its emotional resonance and its ability to facilitate personal and collective mourning. The essay highlights how the memorial honors individual sacrifices, fosters national healing, and influences the design of subsequent memorials.

How it works

Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., is a deeply moving tribute to the soldiers who gave their lives during the Vietnam War. Unlike typical war memorials, this one breaks the mold with its design, aiming to stir up reflection and heartfelt connections. The journey of its creation and its lasting impact reveal not just architectural ingenuity but also a profound understanding of the emotional needs tied to a nation grappling with a painful past.

Back in the early 1980s, Maya Lin, then a 21-year-old student at Yale University, clinched a national design contest with her straightforward yet powerful vision.

Her idea? A sleek black granite wall, set into the ground, etched with the names of over 58,000 American service members who either died in action or went missing during the Vietnam War. The wall’s V-shape points towards the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, linking today with America’s historical ideals and struggles.

Choosing black granite wasn’t just about aesthetics. It’s reflective, so when visitors gaze upon it, they see their own faces alongside the engraved names. This setup personalizes the experience, urging people to feel the individual losses and connect on a personal level. The pathway down into the earth and back up as folks walk along the wall symbolizes a journey through sorrow and healing. By keeping things simple, the design strips away distractions, letting all attention fall on the names and the shared loss they represent.

At first, people had mixed feelings about Lin’s design—just like they had mixed feelings about the Vietnam War itself. Some said it was too gloomy and different from the usual grand war monuments. But as time passed, folks came to see its deep emotional impact and innovative style. It’s now a spot where people can quietly remember and pay respects, regardless of their views on the war.

More than just a physical monument, it’s a place of pilgrimage for veterans, families, and anyone who wants to honor the fallen. Touching a name on the wall, leaving keepsakes, or simply standing there in silence—all these actions are powerful acts of remembrance and healing. The design encourages such interactions, making it a living memorial that keeps touching new generations.

Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial has left a mark on how we build memorials and public spaces. Its focus on personal reflection and emotional ties, rather than being flashy, has set a new standard for remembering those lost to war. It reminds us why it’s crucial to remember the human toll of conflict and to have places that help both individual and collective grieving.

This memorial doesn’t just honor the fallen; it also speaks to larger themes like memory, identity, and finding peace. By carving their names into stone, Lin’s design gives each person who served a final recognition and closure. It doesn’t judge the war itself but zeroes in on honoring those who stepped up, fostering a healing sense across the nation.

To sum it all up, Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial shows the power of smart, groundbreaking design in creating spots that hit home with people. Its unique take on honoring the past—focused on thought and personal links—has made it one of the most touching and respected war memorials worldwide. By honoring those who laid down their lives and offering a space for deep thought and healing, this memorial keeps guiding America through its journey to understand the Vietnam War. It’s a strong reminder of how much war costs us as humans and why it’s vital to always remember and honor those who served.

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Essay: The Vietnam War

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Introduction The topic we choose for this assignment is the Vietnam War, because this war has been one of the most influential ones in American history. The war, which lasted from 1955 until 1975, had and still has a great impact on American society. Hundreds of thousands of both soldiers and civilians were killed it a, what later turned out to be, a useless interference in a civil war by the United States. The media had reported on big parts of the war. For the first time, due to the introduction of the television, every American citizen could see the horrible effects of the war live from their living room. Vietnam War Summarized overview The Vietnam War was a proxy war during the Cold War-era that took place between 1955 and 1975. The war was fought between the communist North Vietnam, the South Vietnamese communist force Viet Cong on one end and the non-communist South Vietnam on the other. The Vietnam War followed up the First Indochina War, partially, due to the interference of the United States and the Soviet Union, among other forces. The United States and its allies supported South Vietnam, while the USSR its allies supported North Vietnam. This made the Vietnam War known as one of the few ‘hot’ conflicts of the Cold War. The war represented a successful attempt of the North Vietnamese government, led by Ho Chi Minh, to unite the country under communist flag, since it had been split up by the decolonization. Elections for unification of the country were held in 1956, but South Vietnam ignored them. From this year up until the end of the war the Viet Cong carried out attacks in South Vietnam. The amount of US armed forces in Vietnam had been growing since 1955 but the real interference did not take place until after the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, august 2nd, 1964. This incident, in which two US navy vessels had been torpedoed, led to the Tonkin Resolution. This resolution made it possible for the president of the United States to assist any South East Asian country in a war against communism. Between 1964 and 1968 the US president, Lyndon B Johnson, send over 500.000 troops to Vietnam. The US Army general William Westmoreland was in command during that period, he believed large scale aerial attacks to be the best option for defeating the Viet Cong. On March 28th 1968 the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces began to launch a series of guerrilla-attacks on South Vietnamese cities, the Tet Offensive. Even though the US Army troops were better equipped and larger in number, they could not withstand these attacks. The Tet Offensive later became known as the turning point of the war, as the public opinion on the righteousness of the war shifted. This was due to broad media coverage of all the events and attacks in the Vietnam War. President Johnson was not re-elected and succeeded by Richard Nixon. The Nixon administration was responsible for something called the Vietnamization. This basically meant that, because public opinion about the war had shifted, American troops must be withdrawn and the war handed back to the Vietnamese again. Also, Nixon ‘expanded’ the war into neutral countries such as Cambodia and Laos. This led to big protests in the United States, especially amongst students. In 1973, after peace negotiations in Paris, the last US Army troops leave Vietnam. In the following two years North Vietnamese forces took over large cities in South Vietnam resulting in the surrendering of South Vietnam after the Fall of Saigon on April 30th, 1975. Reception of the Vietnam War The Vietnam War was the first war that was broadly documented and reported on by the media. Almost every day, news about Vietnam was broadcasted on American television. At first the general opinion was positive, but as the war escalated and more American soldiers died, the opinion shifted. This was greatly fuelled by the negative and sometimes inaccurate news reports during the Tet Offensive. The gruesome images of warfare broadcasted by the media caused distrust towards to government felt by the American society. One of the most famous events is the death of a Buddhist monk, who burned himself to death protesting the suppression of Buddhists by Ng”nh Di’m’s administration. Quang Duc, a Buddhist monk, burns himself to death on a Saigon street June 11, 1963 to protest alleged persecution of Buddhists by the South Vietnamese government. (AP Photo/Malcolm Browne) Between 1967 and 1971 the percentage of young men who refused to serve in the US army rose from 8% to 43%. The opposition pointed out that the civilians of both North and South Vietnam became the main victims and that the US were actually supporting a corrupt government in the South. Because the United States lost the Tet Offensive, contrarily to public expectations and the insurances of the White House that victory was near, a big Anti War movement and counterculture was founded. Woodstock Music and Art Festival is the most famous example of this counterculture. The combination of new morals such as free love, recreational drug use and rock music made Woodstock a symbol of the antiwar movement. The anti war movements organized huge demonstrations. Among the demonstrators were a lot of students, clergy’s and African American. Popular anti war slogans were: ‘Hey hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today’? – Chanted by the demonstrators in opposition of Lyndon B. Johnson “Hell, no, we won’t go!” Vietnam War and present day US Some of the things that happened during the Vietnam War have had a huge impact on how the Americans and the rest of the world live today. One of the things that had a huge impact on the Vietnam War is that the American media played a large role in this war. For the first time the citizens of America were able to see exactly what was happening overseas and witness the horrors of true war. This is something that was new then but now reports like that are on the news at least every week. Because the media is more involved then it ever was nowadays, the opinions of the people have changed and not everyone is ‘pro war’ anymore. This new source of information during wars and conflict also sparked distrust amongst the people of America towards their government and other authorities. This is something that can still be seen today. According to a survey carried out by Gallup.com(Gallup) 81% of the American people have a hard time trusting their own government. Another thing that changed is that since this war, the President is no longer able to declare war without consulting first. Congress also changed their army draft to an all-volunteer force and changed the voting age to 18. All of this to give more freedom to the people and give them more influence on the government. The Vietnam War resulted in a loss. America the number one country in the world, with the strongest army, had lost its first war. The citizens lost confidence in their country and its government. But what about the countless veterans who came home from this terrible war. Most of the veterans that came back suffered from physical as well as psychological problems. Because of these problems most of these veterans were unable to get back to their regular lives. This was also known as the Vietnam Syndrome. Up until the 1980’s nobody actually talked about the existence of this trauma and because of this there was almost no care for the veterans who had served their country. A lot of the veterans that returned to the USA could not get jobs and so became homeless. The veterans were also now seen as not only heroes or victims, but also as victimizers. This of course after the citizens of the USA had seen the terrible thing their own soldiers had done. The government, which promised health care and education for the veterans that got an honorable discharge, kept to their promise. The only problem for a lot of veterans was that their discharge had not been honorable and so had no right to any of these things. Because of the poor conditions the veterans had (and some still have) to live in took its toll on a lot of them. Statistics show that almost every 80 minutes a US veteran commits suicide, about 18 a day. They also had to cope with the physical harm caused by Agent Orange or the mental harm; PTSD (Post-traumatic Stress Disorder). They still cope with these problems today as Agent Orange can cause birth defects and PTSD is very hard to overcome, especially since the American government does so little to help these people. Conclusion It depends on from what perspective you look at this war and to what it has brought the world and more important America. We think that the consequences of this war are negative for the most part. America took several hits and still has not recovered from them. One of the most obvious things is that the citizens distrust their own government. Another thing is that more and more people are starting to agree on the fact that the Vietnam War might not have been such a great idea. Over the years people have started to doubt whether it was the right thing to do and in the year 2000, approximately 70% of the American people think that it was a mistake (see graph(Gillespie, 2000) below All of this because of the Vietnam war, but why? Why had this not happened in earlier wars? The biggest reason for this is that the media played a major role in this war. For the first time the American people could follow the war right at home with their television. Not only could they watch broadcasts of the war but there were also a lot more reports coming in every day. This made people look at the war from a whole other perspective. No longer was this war about helping people, honor and glory. People got to see the actual battles that took place, horrific images that one would not forget quickly. For the first time people did not think of America as the savior but as the bad guy.

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Vietnam Communist Party Chief Nguyen Phu Trong Dies at Age 80

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Trong had dominated Vietnamese politics since 2011. Now attention turns to his successor, former security minister To Lam.

General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam Nguyen Phu Trong (right) during a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Hanoi, Vietnam, June 20, 2024.

Nguyen Phu Trong, general secretary of Vietnam’s ruling Communist Party and the country’s most powerful politician, has died following months of ill health, official media said Friday. He was 80.

“General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Party Nguyen Phu Trong passed away at 13:38 on July 19, 2024, at the 108 Central Military Hospital due to old age and serious illness,” the Nhan Dan newspaper said.

Official media said a state funeral would be held.

Trong had dominated Vietnamese politics since 2011, when he was elected party chief. During his tenure, he worked to consolidate the Communist Party’s power in Vietnam’s single-party political system. In the decade before he took the top role in Vietnamese politics, the balance of power had shifted more toward the governmental wing led by then-Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung.

Born in 1944 in Hanoi, Trong was a Marxist-Leninist ideologue who earned a degree in philosophy before becoming a member of the Communist Party at the age of 22. He viewed corruption as the single gravest threat in maintaining the party’s legitimacy.

“A country without discipline would be chaotic and unstable,” Trong said in 2016 after being reelected to the party’s helm. Officially, Vietnam has no top leader, but the Communist Party chief is traditionally seen as the most powerful.

Trong launched a sweeping anti-corruption campaign known as the “blazing furnace” that singed both business and political elites. Since 2016, thousands of party officials have been disciplined. They included former presidents Nguyen Xuan Phuc and Vo Van Thuong and the former head of parliament, Vuong Dinh Hue. In all, eight members of the powerful Politburo were ousted on corruption allegations, compared to none between 1986 and 2016.

Trong studied in the Soviet Union from 1981 to 1983, and there was speculation that under his leadership, Vietnam would move closer to Russia and China. However, the Southeast Asian nation followed a pragmatic policy of “bamboo diplomacy,” a phrase he coined that referred to the plant’s flexibility, bending but not breaking in the shifting headwinds of geopolitics.

Vietnam maintained its traditional ties with its much larger neighbor, China, dispute differences over sovereignty in the South China Sea. But it also drew closer to the United States, elevating its ties with its former Vietnam War foe to its highest diplomatic status, a comprehensive strategic partnership.

As a result, Trong achieved the rare feat of hosting the top leaders of the United States, China, and Russia in less than a year between September 2023 and June 2024. His adroit balancing of the fierce geopolitical rivals was displayed in the outpouring of condolences upon his passing.

The Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party sent its condolences to its Vietnamese counterpart and “deeply mourned” Trong’s death, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported Friday.

The White House also issued a statement of condolences , with President Joe Biden calling Trong “a champion of the deep ties between the American and Vietnamese people whose leadership helped nurture the friendship and partnership our countries enjoy today.”

Likewise, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin said Trong had “earned enormous respect among his fellow country people and a remarkable reputation in the international arena.” In a telegram sent to Lam , and posted on the Kremlin’s website, Putin said, “In Russia, he [Trong] will always be remembered as a true friend of our country, who made a huge personal contribution to the establishment and development of a comprehensive strategic partnership between Moscow and Hanoi.”

Trong’s legacy is mixed, with the unintended consequence of the anti-graft campaign being an erosion of institutions within the Communist Party, said Nguyen Khac Giang, a visiting fellow in the Vietnam Studies Program at Singapore’s ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute. The party institutions were the bedrock ensuring that a balance of power remained among its different factions, he said.

“Vietnam has become more and more like China, where institutions and norms don’t really matter as much as personal power,” Giang said.

Vietnamese President To Lam was appointed the party caretaker on July 18, with the official announcement saying Trong was receiving treatment for his ill health. As Vietnam’s top security official, Lam had led the anti-graft campaign until becoming president in May, when his predecessor resigned after being caught up in corruption allegations.

The party’s Politburo asked Lam to “preside over the work of the Party Central Committee, the Politburo, and the Secretariat,” according to a statement from its central office, which was the first official confirmation of Trong’s poor health.

Rumors about his health have swirled in Vietnamese politics since he was first hospitalized in 2019, and more recently when he appeared extremely frail while meeting visiting Russian President Vladmir Putin.

Trong’s death leaves behind a yawning political vacuum in Vietnam. Although Lam is widely viewed as the likely next party chief, Giang predicted “a very uncertain time” in Vietnamese politics because the norms and institutions governing the country are “very shaky.”

“Now it isn’t only about the rules or norms, but it is also about who holds the most power,” Giang said.

In early 2026, Vietnam’s Communist Party will hold a national congress that will determine who holds the top-most leadership positions for the next five years.

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Henry Kissinger’s mixed legacy in Southeast Asia: from ‘war criminal’ in Vietnam to ‘close friend’ of Singapore

• Many Vietnamese think Kissinger ‘crippled the country’, while a critic accused him of culpability in ‘genocide in East Timor’ by endorsing Indonesia’s invasion
• In Singapore he is remembered as a friend of first PM Lee Kuan Yew, who supported US’ Vietnam war as ‘crucial for the future of a non-Communist Southeast Asia’

To get to “peace with honour” in Vietnam, he orchestrated one of the most intensive bombing campaigns ever seen on North Vietnamese positions, especially on Hanoi.

The bombardment boosted support for the bloodthirsty Khmer Rouge, which eventually swept away the US-backed administration of Lon Nol. The regime killed a quarter of Cambodia’s population.

Despite the campaign, the Communist guerillas of the Pathet Lao emerged victorious in 1975. Their successors still govern today – while unexploded ordnance from that campaign continues to claim lives each year.

“These acts fostered in the collapse of regimes in these two countries, and in the case of Cambodia, the rise of the Khmer Rouge and the genocide perpetrated on the Cambodian population,” said Chong Ja Ian, a political scientist at the National University of Singapore.

But Chong acknowledged Kissinger’s role in managing the complex competing priorities of the Cold War-era.

“There were structural conditions that were coming into place, the US was seeking exit from Vietnam and a means to reach detente with the [then Soviet Union] just as [China] was seeking ways to relieve pressure from the intensifying Sino-Soviet rivalry,” he added.

In Vietnam, Kissinger’s legacy as a peacemaker is derided by many. The nation lost between 1 million and 3 million lives, mostly civilians, in the war with America, which ultimately saw the superpower’s defeat and a hasty, humiliating evacuation in 1975 from the embassy in Ho Chi Minh City, then named Saigon.

Describing him as a “war criminal”, Ho Chi Minh City-based student Anh Nguyen, 23, said she hoped “he died with deep regrets about what he did”, reflecting a history shared through the generations by the Vietnamese Communist Party victors.

Condemning the Nobel award, history graduate Bui Khanh Minh of the Fulbright University Vietnam said Kissinger “crippled the country” during the Christmas bombing campaign of 1972 that pushed the Viet Cong to the negotiating table.

“As someone from Hanoi … that decision by him and Nixon sparks a particularly personal resentment,” she said.

US diplomatic veteran Henry Kissinger visits Beijing ‘as a friend of China’

Many critics, such as the late British journalist Christopher Hitchens, accuse Kissinger of carrying responsibility for the atrocities committed by the Indonesian military against the Timorese people.

In his book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger , Hitchens cites declassified documents, eyewitness testimonies, and human rights reports to make the case that Kissinger should be held culpable for “the incitement and enabling of genocide in East Timor” by giving Indonesia the green light for its invasion, which resulted in a brutal occupation and the killing of around 200,000 people.

Hitchens further accused Kissinger of violating international law; lying to Congress and the public; and authorising the delivery of US weapons he knew would be used on civilians.

He also argues that the famed statesman attempted to suppress or destroy any evidence of his involvement in the invasion – noting that East Timor “holds the distinction of being entirely omitted from Kissinger’s memoirs”.

In his memoir, From Third World to First , Lee recalled meeting Kissinger at a dinner at Harvard University in 1967, when the latter was a faculty member.

“It was pure serendipity that at that dinner where many liberal Americans voiced strong criticisms of the Vietnam war, I took the contrary view and explained that America’s stand was crucial for the future of a non-Communist Southeast Asia,” he wrote.

“Kissinger was circumspect in his choice of words to justify American intervention. Surrounded by doves, he was careful not to appear a hawk,” Lee wrote.

“Speaking slowly in his heavy German-accented English, he gave me the impression of a man who was not going to be swept along by the mood of the moment.

“Shortly afterwards, Nixon’s office announced that Kissinger would be the national security adviser.”

Lee and Kissinger’s “personal and special” relationship contributed to the strong ties between the US and Singapore, political observer Zulkifli Baharudin said.

“We cannot underestimate that in the case of Lee Kuan Yew and Kissinger, the personal relationship really translated into political goodwill and economic opportunities,” he said.

“My father always spoke of Dr Kissinger with the greatest respect and warmth. Their friendship lasted for nearly half a century,” the Singapore leader said. “Dr Kissinger touched many hearts throughout his long life. His legacy will remain with us for a long time to come.”

Kissinger also set the tone for how the rest of the region should deal with China, said Bilveer Singh, a political scientist from the National University of Singapore.

On the city state, Yeo said Kissinger was “fascinated by Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore and said that no other country had a more cold-blooded view of international relations. They were intellectual soul mates and kindred spirits till the end”.

Yeo added: “The world has lost a great statesman and geo-strategist.”

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News Analysis

An Assassination Attempt That Seems Likely to Tear America Further Apart

The attack on former President Donald J. Trump comes at a time when the United States is already polarized along ideological and cultural lines and is split, it often seems, into two realities.

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By Peter Baker

Peter Baker has covered the past five presidents.

• Published July 14, 2024 Updated July 15, 2024

Follow the latest news on the Trump assassination attempt.

When President Ronald Reagan was shot by an attention-seeking drifter in 1981, the country united behind its injured leader. The teary-eyed Democratic speaker of the House, Thomas P. O’Neill Jr., went to the hospital room of the Republican president, held his hands, kissed his head and got on his knees to pray for him.

But the assassination attempt against former President Donald J. Trump seems more likely to tear America further apart than to bring it together. Within minutes of the shooting, the air was filled with anger, bitterness, suspicion and recrimination. Fingers were pointed, conspiracy theories advanced and a country already bristling with animosity fractured even more.

The fact that the shooting in Butler, Pa., on Saturday night was two days before Republicans were set to gather in Milwaukee for their nominating convention inevitably put the event in a partisan context. While Democrats bemoaned political violence, which they have long faulted Mr. Trump for encouraging, Republicans instantly blamed President Biden and his allies for the attack, which they argued stemmed from incendiary language labeling the former president a proto-fascist who would destroy democracy.

Mr. Trump’s eldest son, his campaign strategist and a running mate finalist all attacked the political left within hours of the shooting even before the gunman was identified or his motive determined. “Well of course they tried to keep him off the ballot, they tried to put him in jail and now you see this,” wrote Chris LaCivita, a senior adviser to the former president.

But the Trump campaign seemed to think better of it, and the post was deleted. A memo sent out on Sunday by Mr. LaCivita and Susie Wiles, another senior adviser, instructed Trump team members not to comment on the shooting.

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