It could once have been said that the Vietnam War was the most photographed war in history, but you can’t say that anymore, because today everybody has a camera. Everything, it seems, is photographed by someone. But, in 1965, the year the United States put bombers in the air and boots on the ground in Vietnam, pretty much the only people who carried cameras were professional photographers and tourists. And there were not a lot of tourists in Vietnam after 1965.
But there were a lot of professional photographers. Some six hundred of them travelled to Southeast Asia during the war, and the reason is that the U.S. military basically issued the press an open invitation to the conflict. This was far from the stupidest decision the United States made in Vietnam, but it was one more symptom of the general folly of American overconfidence.
American officials may have imagined that the images and stories that made their way out to the world through the media would be heroic, but, of course, the opposite was the case. War is not about blowing up buildings, which is the image of warfare we mainly see today. War is about killing human beings. That is literally the point. And so, allowed into the war zone, reporters and photographers witnessed the slaughter of civilians and the brutalization of prisoners, the burning of villages and the deaths of soldiers, and they brought all of that into people’s homes. The press helped to turn public opinion against the war, not because the press was antiwar or even had a politics but because war is hell, and hell is photogenic.
There were few restrictions on journalists in Vietnam. If you had a press pass, you could travel on military trucks, hitch a ride on a helicopter, sleep on the base, eat with the troops, interview officers. And take pictures. It seems that nothing was done in secret. Amazingly, there are photographs of the massacre of hundreds of civilians at the village of My Lai. A combat photographer was assigned to the unit. He was military personnel, but when the story broke he had the pictures. The soldiers had taken his presence for granted.
Viet Cong suspects taken away for interrogation, in the Mekong Delta region, in July, 1966.
Photographs from Vietnam were in demand because it was the era of big picture magazines like Life, Look, Paris Match, and Stern—glossy pages, lots of advertising, millions of readers. Catherine Leroy was one of those readers. Leroy was born in a suburb of Paris in 1944. She was a kind of truant, hated school, found bourgeois life boring. She worked at a temp agency, but she wanted adventure. In an attempt to impress a boyfriend, she took up skydiving and made eighty-four jumps over Burgundy.
Catherine Leroy photographs her jump in operation, in February, 1967.
She got hooked on pictures reading Paris Match and she started taking photographs herself with a new kind of camera, the Instamatic (introduced in 1963). She decided she wanted to be where the action was, so she saved up to buy a Leica and a one-way ticket to Saigon. “Photojournalists are my heroes,” she wrote, according to the writer Elizabeth Becker. “I want to be a photojournalist. The biggest story in the world right now is the Vietnam War.” She arrived there in February, 1966. She was twenty-one years old, spoke little English, was without professional contacts, and had almost no money. She became one of the most celebrated photojournalists of the war.
Leroy was ambitious and she had guts. Everyone who knew her says that. She swore like a marine (once she learned the English words) and she didn’t back down. She talked her way into being chosen to participate in the only paratrooper combat jump of the war and was honored by the United States Army.
Catherine Leroy before a paratrooper-training jump, in February, 1967.Photograph © Bob Cole / Courtesy Dotation Catherine Leroy
Everyone also says—they make a point of it—that she was tiny. She was five feet tall, weighed eighty-five pounds, and wore pigtails. In combat fatigues and boots, she looked, as one writer put it, like “an adolescent boy going to a costume party.” But she lived with the soldiers, ate what they ate, did everything they did. When they charged up a hill, she charged with them. She carried a pack and several cameras.
“If your pictures aren’t good enough,” the legendary combat photographer Robert Capa is supposed to have said, “you aren’t close enough.” Leroy got close. Men were shot and killed all around her. She herself was badly wounded by shrapnel. At one point, she borrowed a bicycle and entered the city of Hue during the Tet Offensive, one of the major battles of the war. She was taken prisoner by North Vietnamese soldiers, talked her way free by explaining that she was a French journalist, which, somehow, worked, and managed to take some of the only photographs of the North Vietnamese Army (as opposed to the Viet Cong, who were South Vietnamese Communists) that anyone had seen. Life magazine ran them as a cover story.
Leroy knew little or nothing about the region’s history. She was aware, of course, that Vietnam had been a French colony, and that the French had lost it to nationalist forces at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, in 1954. Her father wept when he heard the news. But she didn’t care about politics. She was not there to take sides. She was in it for the adrenaline.
Combat photography is made in the fog of war. It is a combination of fluke and artifice. Getting the image is a matter of being in the wrong place at the right time, but no one can predict where and when that place and time will be. The consequence is that an aura of ambiguity—What exactly are we looking at? How exactly was this image made?—hovers over the genre. Especially the images that become iconic.
A picture becomes iconic when it is stripped of context. Iconic images are often given generic titles—for example, Robert Capa’s “The Falling Soldier,” taken in 1936, during the Spanish Civil War. But who is the soldier, for which side did he fight, and where was the picture made? The image itself contains little information. It comes with the territory, therefore, that Capa was later accused of staging the photograph.
Accusations of fakery in combat photography go back at least to Mathew Brady’s pictures of Civil War battlefields. Brady’s troop of photographers appear to have sometimes moved corpses to compose a better shot. Probably the most famous combat picture of the Second World War was effectively a reënactment. This was Joe Rosenthal’s iconic Iwo Jima photograph. Rosenthal worked for the Associated Press. The famous photograph, taken on February 23, 1945, is of a second flag-raising at the summit of Mt. Suribachi, on the island of Iwo Jima, in southern Japan. Fighting on the island had stopped, so the soldiers in the picture were not under fire, and the action of raising the flag (there is a movie of it) took all of a few seconds. Other photographers were present, and the six men appear to be struggling only because there are too many of them. Everyone wants to be in the picture. Rosenthal sent the film off to Guam, where the negatives were developed. Someone at the A.P. chose the image, cropped the photo, and sent it around the world by radiotelegraph. It appeared on front pages everywhere two days later. Rosenthal had no idea what he had shot. He said he didn’t even look through the viewfinder, just pointed the camera in the general direction of the soldiers. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize.
The Vietnam experience can almost be summarized by its iconic photographs, images everyone knows; the war in visual shorthand. Eddie Adams’s “Saigon Execution” was taken on February 1, 1968. The gunman is the South Vietnamese police chief, Nguyễn Ngọc Loan, and the man shot is Nguyễn Văn Lém, a fighter in the Viet Cong. Adams worked for the A.P., and the next day his photograph appeared in newspapers around the world. The immediate impact on public opinion is hard to gauge, but, as the war went on, the picture came to stand for the belief that in supporting South Vietnam, the United States was supporting war criminals. Stories circulated that Lém was involved in the assassination of the family of a South Vietnamese officer, although it’s unclear what exactly happened. In any case, Loan may have felt justified in executing the prisoner on sight. Adams won a Pulitzer Prize, basically because his timing was right.
“The Terror of War,” also known as “Napalm Girl,” was taken on June 8, 1972, and famously attributed to the photographer Huỳnh Công Út. The central figure, Phan Thị Kim Phúc, is nine years old. She suffered third-degree burns over much of her body but survived. Út, who was Vietnamese himself, probably saved her life by getting her to a hospital. But the incident was not what we like to think of as a normal act of war. The children were accidentally napalmed by South Vietnamese pilots who mistook a group of fleeing villagers for Viet Cong. And there are doubts that Út was the photographer, although Út has repeatedly maintained that he was. There were (typical for Vietnam) several photographers and reporters present—the children were running toward a gaggle of journalists. A recent documentary, called “The Stringer,” makes a good case, as does an article in last summer’s Rolling Stone, that the photograph was actually taken by a stringer who could not afford to complain when the editor at A.P. attached Út’s name to the picture. Út won a Pulitzer.
No aura of ambiguity hovers over Catherine Leroy’s photographs. Her camera is fearless. This is not to say she did not produce some images that became iconic. She wrote affectionately and religiously to her parents back in France, and her letters give us a look at the person beneath the hard-ass exterior. They also help us understand her admiration for the soldiers, many doomed, whom she worked alongside. She writes to her father that she could have filled “whole pages about ‘my Marines.’ The young marines in particular are very impressive: calm, very relaxed, the tough youths do a real professional job. In these units there are some absolutely crazy heroic acts.”
The most famous of Leroy’s Vietnam work might be “Corpsman in Anguish,” one frame in a series that she made of a medical provider, Vernon Wike, attending to a dying marine during the First Battle at Khe Sanh, in 1967. “The pictures I took of a Navy corpsman leaning over his dead buddy on 881,” Leroy said, “summed up for me my 15 months of war—I understood then what I was in Vietnam for.”
A marine shot by an “invisible enemy” in a battle south of the D.M.Z., in February, 1967.
A soldier on an operation near the Cambodian border, mid-September, 1966.
The kind of fighting the troops she chose to follow was nine parts boredom and fatigue and one part terror and chaos. Leroy captured both. She left Vietnam in December, 1968, a little less than three years after she arrived. She returned in 1975, on her own, just in time for the fall of Saigon, and she photographed victorious North Vietnamese troops entering the city and occupying the former Presidential palace. Vietnam was soon reunited as a Communist country, exactly the outcome France, and then the United States, had spent thirty years and billions of dollars trying to prevent. They got nothing for it. Leroy’s photographs are part of the record of the damage.