Shooting Vietnam: The War By Its Military Photographers

By Dan Brookes, Bob Hillerby and Joseph L. Galloway

Discover what it was like to be amidst the action as a military photographer during the Vietnam War.
 
Shooting Vietnam takes you there as you read the firsthand accounts and view the hundreds of photographs by men who lived the war through the lens of a camera. From the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, they documented everything from the horror of combat to the people and culture of a land they suddenly found themselves immersed in. Some juggled cameras with weapons as they fought to survive while carrying out their assignments to record the war. Others did not survive. Shooting Vietnam also finally brings recognition to these unheralded military combat photographers in Vietnam that documented the brutal, unpopular, and futile war.
 
Often, during a brief respite from trudging through swamps and rice paddies or jumping from a chopper into a hot landing zone, the photographers would wander the streets of villages or even downtown Saigon, curiously photographing a people and a culture so strange and different to them. It is these photographs, of a kinder, more personal nature, removed from the horror and death of war that they also share with the reader.
  The accounts in this book come from young men thrust into a conflict half way around the world, and all who had their own unique perspective on the war. Some were seasoned photographers before the military, others had only recently held a camera for the first time.
 
“The photography is excellent . . . an essential read to anyone interested in the Vietnam War or conflict photography in general.” —War History Online

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781526744012

Book preview

Introduction

Dan Brookes

"I think the best war photos I have taken have always been made when a battle was actually taking place; when people were confused and scared and courageous and stupid and showed all these things. When you look at people at the moment of truth, everything is quite human."

Horst Faas

This is the first known battlefield photo ever taken. It depicts US Army Major Lucien Webster’s artillery battery after the Battle of Buena Vista, February 22 and 23, 1847, during the Mexican-American War. Who took it is a mystery. The photographer is unknown.

I get to hold history in my hands. These are the first known war photographs ever taken and are from the Mexican-American War of 1846–1848. (Courtesy of the Yale Western Americana Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut)

I was privileged to be able to hold this daguerreotype in my hands.

When you hold an actual daguerreotype, you are holding the same piece of metal that the photographer once held when he inserted it into his camera. It was upon that same piece of metal that the photograph would be captured, developed, and live forever. It was right there, on the battlefield, just like a sword, bullet, or scrap of a uniform, 160-plus years ago.

These first battlefield photographs were taken less than ten years after Daguerre announced his photographic process to the world on January 7, 1839.

One witness to Daguerre’s announcement was the American, Samuel F. B. Morse, in France at the time in order to secure a French patent for his invention, the electric telegraph. Morse also had been experimenting with the photographic process. Excited by Daguerre’s progress, he wrote in an article by the New York Observer that it was one of the most beautiful discoveries of the age.

But in the years to come, that beautiful discovery would be utilized to record the ugliness and horror of war.

Returning to America, Morse set up a studio in New York City in 1840. He also began to teach the photographic process to eager students. One of them was 17-year-old Mathew Brady.

Brady and his staff would eventually go on to record the American Civil War some twenty years later, and it is their work that immediately comes to mind when one thinks about the first war photography. But historians will generally point to Roger Fenton as the first known war photographer, who roamed the battlefields of the Crimean War in a horse-drawn wagon/darkroom during the 1850s.

Actually, if one continues to dig even deeper, it turns out that the first known war photographer was a Romanian artist and photographer named Carol Szathmari. Just a few years before Fenton, he began to photograph the Russian-Turkish War. He captured images of both sides, travelling along the Danube River, photographing Turkish cavalrymen, Russian Cossacks, Austrian lancers, dragoons and infantrymen, as well as gypsies, Romanian merchants, artisans and other local villagers.

Romanian Carol Szathmari, the first known war photographer, recorded pre-Crimean War conflicts between the Russians and Turks as early as 1854.

Only a few dozen of his photographs remain today, but they are enough, I feel, to secure his place in history as the first identifiable war photographer.

An early war photo, claimed to be one of Szathmari’s first from the battlefield, 1854.

The earliest photographs of war were views of battlefields, encampments, soldiers posing, ships at anchor, and other similar static subjects. Photographic plates used to capture images in those days needed long exposure times and required their subjects to remain as still as possible for ten, twenty, even thirty seconds. This obviously ruled out action shots of combat. Films and cameras with that capability were still forty or so years away.

The majority of early war photographers avoided picturing the dead and dying on the battlefields or in camps. Most were out to make a profit, and photographs of carnage weren’t deemed to be best sellers.

Some, however, did photograph such scenes, perhaps driven by the desire to show the power of this new medium to capture war’s reality and place it squarely in front of the viewers’ eyes. They could have been driven by a moral compulsion to show the reality of war, as some of them also recorded their thoughts on paper after photographing the horrors.

Many of the greatest images of the Vietnam War, the most photographed war ever, came from the lenses of a long list of civilian shooters. Horst Faas, Henri Huet, Larry Burrows, and their numerous colleagues produced some of the finest war photographs ever. And then there are also the most iconic of images, like the Eddie Adams photo of a Viet Cong prisoner being executed by the chief of police on a Saigon street, or perhaps the single most memorable image, that of 9-year-old Kim Phúc, running down a road, burned by napalm, taken by Nick Ut; it earned him a Pulitzer Prize.

But behind the scenes, and unheralded for their camera work, were hundreds of military photographers, just doing what was expected of them as a part of their day-to-day job description. Unlike their famous civilian counterparts, many had to endure a year-long assignment that constantly placed them in harm’s way. Sometimes it meant dropping the camera and picking up an M-16 or grenade launcher, or manning an M-60 machine gun, or helping to carry the wounded to a medevac dust-off chopper. Like they told us in Basic training, Your primary MOS (Military Occupational Specialty – your ‘job’ in the military) is Eleven Bravo (11B): Infantryman! In other words, regardless of whether you eventually became a cook, mechanic – or photographer, your first duty, and what you were all trained for in Basic, when necessary, was to fire a weapon and kill the enemy.

From 1962 to 1975, military photographers took millions of photographs in Vietnam. Their official mission was to document the war and capture images for the historical record. But more often, their cameras recorded the lives of their fellow soldiers in a sort of self-initiated public relations effort. They photographed the everyday activities in and out of combat, the struggles to cope with the conditions in the field, the battles with a mostly unseen enemy, booby traps, helicopter evacuations of the wounded and dead; anything and everything that went on in the war.

Often, when they showed up in the field to cover a combat operation, they would be greeted with shouts of Hey! You gonna get me in the papers! (Or Life magazine, or on TV, etc.) And often they did. The military saw it as great PR when they could get photos of the troops for their hometown newspapers.

Combat photographer Willy Muchler said during a TV interview about the book, When we got out there and took their pictures, it was like somebody really cared about them.

They not only cared and took their pictures, they slogged through the same mud with them, ate the same C-rations, and wept over lost comrades. And sometimes they too were killed in combat, just like their brothers in arms.

My co-author Bob Hillerby had this to say about his combat missions with the infantry units: We photographed their battles, their hunger, their determination and their misery. Every single aspect of their daily existence was potentially ‘The Shot’ – the one that every photographer dreams of getting. It was the same with the artillery and armored units as well. They just performed slightly different jobs. But their hardships and misery were almost interchangeable.

The photographers and journalists that covered Vietnam had wide-ranging access to the war, the military ones even more so. They were often surprised by their freedom of movement and the priority they were given when they set out to cover a mission. It was not uncommon for a lowly PFC combat photographer to bump a high-ranking officer off a flight when space was limited and they needed to get out into the field.

The lack of overall censorship of the war’s coverage was unprecedented. Nothing from Vietnam was ever prevented from appearing in print or being televised. Many agree the images that came out of the Vietnam war were instrumental in ending it. The daily barrage of film footage and pictures wore down public support; photographs like those from massacre at My Lai finally made it appear morally unjustified.

Photos like this one, with its accompanying caption information, often made it back to the soldiers’ hometown newspapers. Combat photographers were right there, alongside the troops in the field, sharing the same mud, leaky tents, and C-rations. (Photo by Sp.4 Jacob Hawes, USA Special Photo Detachment, Pacific)

The American public’s view of itself as the perpetual knights in shining armor who had always fought only the good fight was shattered. Never before had they been subjected to and forced to share so much bloodshed, suffering, and futility as they watched and read the news so filled with unforgettable images. No one was left untouched. And with My Lai, they would finally see their own military might begin to crumble, its mostly conscripted participants descending into a hell of frustration, anger, and blind revenge.

In a little more than a hundred years, the camera on the battlefield had become a weapon in its own right, a double-edged sword that could move a nation either to support a war or condemn it.

Vietnam changed the way combat photography would be looked upon in the wars that followed. It is doubtful that the likes of the images that poured out of Vietnam will ever be seen again.

The Official US Army Photographer ID granted carte blanche to the combat photographers and gave them mostly unrestricted access and priority treatment for flights. Many even chose where they would go in-country, what units they would accompany, and when they would return. They could even bump higherranking personnel off flights, and generally never missed an opportunity to do so.

The stories in this book are told by the military personnel that lived life in the field, behind the cameras, or in other cases as photo lab technician, or lab rats. I also became somewhat of an archivist and managed to squirrel away hundreds of copies of the prints I and my fellow lab rats made, and managed to bring them home, where today they sit in numerous boxes. Most of the photographers also managed to bring back personal shots of not only the war, but also their views of a country and culture, so new, so strange, so fascinating to them. We’ve included some of their best shots: kids at play, street scenes from villages and cities like Saigon with its beautiful parks, museums, and even a zoo. After all, the place was not just a war – it was also a country, a culture, and people – a simple fact that is often overlooked when one hears the word Vietnam.

Robert Hillerby

Then

US Army Combat Photographer 69th Signal Battalion and 1/9th Cavalry 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) An Khe, Republic of Vietnam.

Now

Hillerby Printing Sherman, Texas.

"I can tell by the bush hat that this was taken when we were getting ready to leave on a mission with the Australian Infantry. I’d traded something to an Aussie for the hat. I still have that hat. This would have been taken in early 1967."

A Life-Changing Experience

Bob Hillerby

Yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring.

What is your life?

For you are a mist that appears for a little time

and then vanishes.

James 4:14 (ESV)

Ionce read that everyone has that seminal experience, the one that changes your life forever. It went on to say that for women that experience occurs almost universally with childbirth. Alice, my wife of forty-five years, confirmed to me that the statement is probably true. For men, it said, it occurs (for those who experience it) in warfare, but can sometimes occur with career or financial achievements. But nothing can even approach that of being in a combat environment.

My life was irrevocably changed at the age of 22 when I reported for duty in the Republic of South Vietnam as a combat photographer. I experienced the trauma, fear, danger and chaos of warfare. On occasion I also had the opportunity to see, photograph and experience the excitement of being in a foreign country and learn about its people and culture. It’s difficult for me to convey in writing how profound that year really was for me, because it didn’t make me who I am; rather, it changed who I was. This story is my small attempt to communicate those feelings and changes.

Like many, I was concerned about the possibility of being drafted and wrote a letter on November 12, 1965 to my local draft board to make an inquiry about my status. On the fifteenth of that same month, they responded notifying me that I might be called for a physical in December or January. Sure enough, they sent me a Christmas present on December 3, 1965 ordering me to report for a physical exam on January 14, 1966.

After taking the physical and written exams, I was told that I qualified for any training the Army had to offer. The recruiter talked to me about my interests and I settled on still photography, since that had been a hobby of mine for several years and I thought it would be a really cool job. I must have been naïve as hell, because it never occurred to me that there was something called a combat photographer. Like most people at the time, I’d seen the pictures on TV, in news magazines, etc., but it just didn’t enter my mind that some damned fool was right there with a camera! I guess I figured I’d be shooting portraits, parades and ceremonies, or maybe the Bob Hope Show, but combat was the last thing to enter my mind. (I would never even get to see the damned Bob Hope Show either.) So I enlisted, and on February 14, 1966 I was sent off for Basic training.

After Basic training, I headed for Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. I worked hard at my classes, because they kept telling us if we failed the course, we’d be sent to Fort Polk, Louisiana, and be trained for the infantry. Keeping that in mind, I actually ended up graduating at the top of my photo class. I figured that if I did really well, I’d get one of the better assignments like Europe or Hawaii. Then I learned that Hawaii wasn’t even classified as an overseas assignment.

I finally came down on orders for Vietnam. It turned out that everyone in my photo class was on those orders as well. We finished our training and had some leave time prior to reporting for shipment to Vietnam.

The Loneliest Days of My Life

Nothing in life is to be feared.

It is only to be understood.

Marie Curie

When my leave was up, I had to say my goodbyes and report to Oakland Army Terminal for shipment to Vietnam. I boarded a plane in Amarillo and headed to San Francisco. I was the only GI on that plane, so I sat alone pondering the future and getting more depressed by the minute. When I got off the plane and entered the terminal building, there were signs everywhere saying, Military Personnel Report Here. There was a large banner with the 1st Cavalry Division insignia that said, All First Cavalry Division Personnel Report Here. I remember thinking that there was something special and different about the First Cavalry I’d learn a little later how true that thought really was. We were loaded onto a bus and sent across the bay to Oakland. Although the place was busy and there were a lot of people there, I never felt more alone. I didn’t know anyone and they didn’t know me. We were all strangers and we weren’t going to be there long and we all knew it.

A few conversations started up here and there, but nobody really talked much to one another. I guess they were as lonely as I was. After a short while, we were put on another bus and sent to another side of the base. We drove up to a very large Quonset hut building surrounded by chain link fencing with barbed wire atop it. As we entered the gate, someone checked off our name and we went inside. Another lonely night for sure. If I recall correctly, the damned bunks were three high instead of the usual two. We’d been told not to unpack as we’d be leaving the following morning. There was no way I could get to sleep that night and 0500 hours came earlier than usual the next morning. We got up and loaded onto the bus. They told us we’d be fed on the aircraft. So now we traveled over to Travis Air Force Base and were taken to a secure locked up area of the terminal. As soon as they checked everyone’s name on the flight manifest, we started boarding the plane.

Oakland Army Terminal, on San Francisco Bay, processed Army troops before shipping them to nearby Travis Air Force Base, which came to be known as the Gateway to the Pacific including Vietnam.

With everyone on board and the baggage loaded, we were immediately cleared to taxi to the runway. That’s when reality finally set in. There was almost total silence on that plane for at least the first hour. Nobody knew the other poor sap sitting next to him and would probably never see him again, so it was a very lonely time. The stewardesses (that’s what they were called back then) started serving coffee and bringing out our first meal of the day. The captain came on the intercom and told us the usual bullshit. "Thanks for flying with Continental Airlines, we hope you have a pleasant flight, the flight time is 23 hours to Tan Son Nhut Airbase, etc. Next stop: Saigon, Republic of Vietnam.

As we came in for our final approach, the captain spoke again. Once more, the usual crap about flying Continental, it’s been our pleasure (hell yeah, you’re going back), the weather at Tan Son Nhut is clear, temperature is blah, blah, etc. This time though, he really crapped in my cornflakes when he said, Some of you may notice that our final approach will be much steeper than you’re accustomed to; that’s because we want to avoid ground fire. Sure enough, the final approach was steep. Hell, I thought he was trying to fly the damned plane into the ground.

We arrived on September 27. When we touched down, you could cut the tension inside the aircraft with a knife. Even now, every veteran who went over there on a plane will tell you that there are two things about arriving that you’ll never forget. The first one is the incredible heat that hits you in the face like a hammer when you get to the doorway. The other is the smell. I can still remember both of those as if it was yesterday. A whole other part of my life was about to begin.

Welcome to Vietnam!

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness,

and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.

Mark Twain

As soon as we got off the plane, we were told to keep with the group; our baggage would be loaded onto trucks. We were herded into a small area for a quick briefing. Don’t leave your bags, they’ll be stolen. Don’t let any of the Vietnamese carry your bags for you, they’ll be stolen. Don’t give any of these people any money. Stay with the group! Soon enough, we’re loaded onto vehicles for a short ride to Long Binh, Camp LBJ, and taken to the 90th Replacement Battalion. Again we hear it, You’ll only be here a short time. (How many damned times have I heard that already?)

By now, the loneliness has subsided. I’m no longer just a lone individual on a plane full of strangers. I’m back in the Army now, someone is barking orders; do this, do that, go here, go there. The Army is my home and the Army is my family. They keep us pretty busy and keep our minds occupied. Once at LBJ, we have our names checked against another list and we’re assigned a bunk inside a large tent. The heat is suffocating.

They told us that we could pack away our dress uniforms and get into fatigues. We were also told to place our duffel bags on our bunks and keep them there. Now, an army bunk is barely large enough for my 155lb, 5ft 6in frame, let alone a damned duffel bag that’s almost as big as me. Like a good trooper, I did what I was instructed and tried to sleep with my duffel bag, but sleeping in the choking heat was impossible. Late that night, a monsoon rain came and I heard the cursing and shouting as guys jumped out of their bunks into water running through the tent, 6 or 8 inches deep. Their bags and clothing were soaked, and in that environment, they’d never dry out. Sometimes it paid to listen to the sergeant when he gave instructions.

This was my welcome to Tan Son Nhut Air Base, the Republic of Vietnam, September 27, 1966.

Billboard just outside Tan Son Nhut: PanAm Makes the Going Great. Yeah, unless you’re going to Vietnam.

They advise us that there will be three shipping formations daily and all formations are mandatory. And, Oh by the way, don’t be surprised if your orders are changed while you are here! Another comforting thought, to be sure. Officers and senior NCOs were placed into another group separate from the junior enlisted men like me.

We were told we’d be assigned various work details while here. The damned army just wasn’t about to let us sit around and take it easy. They kept us busy filling sandbags, pulling KP, burning shit (yeah, that’s for real), or some other backbreaking mindless job.

I decided to volunteer for KP and clean the pots and pans since that was done outside of the mess hall. You could hardly breathe inside it because of the damned heat. So I’m out there cleaning up pots and pans for the next meal to be prepared, and I saw a three-wheeled Lambretta scooter going down the road toward the garbage cans. I ask one of the cooks, What the hell are those Vietnamese doin’ over there?

He explained that they picked up the garbage each day in that area of the camp. I looked back toward the group of garbage cans and see these three Vietnamese guys grabbing shit out of those cans and eating it. This stuff ’s been out there in the damned heat for hours and it smelled like nothing you can imagine – and these guys were eating it. That’s about the time I thought I’d heave all over myself. Choking back the vomit and wiping tears from my eyes, I turned and went back to work, not believing the scene I’d just witnessed.

Front gate of Camp Gaylor, home to the 69th Signal Battalion at Tan Son Nhut Air Base, was my first stop after Long Binh.

At each formation, various names would be called out and you’d get all your stuff and off you went to your unit