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Soldier Interviews

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Earlier this week, Americans marked Vietnam War Veterans Day to honor the men and women who served in that war.

One of the reasons the war was so controversial was the images that were broadcast across the United States on TV or in newspapers and magazines.

In 2013, the Associated Press collected many of those photos in a book called " Vietnam: The Real War: A Photographic History by the Associated Press." Here & Now's Robin Young spoke with Santiago Lyon, then-director of photography for the AP, about the collection after its release.
More Photos:

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The Powerful Vietnam War Photos That Made History

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Earlier this week, Americans marked Vietnam War Veterans Day to honor the men and women who served in that war. One of the reasons the war was so controversial was the images that were broadcast across the United States on TV or in newspapers and magazines.

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A medic area designed by Food Machinery Corporation. July 28, 1969. Credit Credit Cynthia Copple/Overseas Weekly Collection/Hoover Institution Library and Archives

For more than four decades, Art Greenspon kept his recollections of photographing the Vietnam War for Overseas Weekly tucked away deep in his memory, as inaccessible as the images themselves. Then, in 2014, a treasure trove of 35 mm negatives emerged from the gloom of a Scandinavian cellar, vividly reminding Mr. Greenspon of his time working for the scrappy little alternative tabloid.

"I was thrilled and horrified at the same time," Mr. Greenspon wrote ina new book showcasing the long-forgotten images. "I was overjoyed to have the opportunity to see my photographs once again. But it also stirred up troubling memories and emotions that I had worked hard for decades to keep in safe storage."

He is among the photographers whose rediscovered work is part of " We Shot the War: Overseas Weekly in Vietnam, " a book and exhibition of the same title running through Dec. 8 at the Herbert Hoover Memorial Exhibit Pavilion at Stanford University.

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The featured photographs are not the iconic images we often associate with the Vietnam War. Although the photographers covered combat, few scenes in the book depict the blood-soaked drama of the battlefield. Instead, they offer relaxed portraits of American G.I.s and Vietnamese civilians taken between 1966 and 1972. They mostly show the long hours of boredom and tedium that dominate life at war.

Both the book and exhibition also explore the outsize role of a publication led by two tenacious women, Marion von Rospach and Ann Bryan, both Stanford alumnae. Ms. von Rospach founded Overseas Weekly with her husband in Germany in 1950 for American military personnel stationed in Europe. Ms. Bryan opened the paper's Pacific office and published the first edition in 1966.

Early on, Ms. Bryan, the only female bureau chief in Saigon, ran a one-woman show from her second-floor apartment, working as a reporter, photographer, editor and operations manager. Her mission was to write for soldiers in their own language. She fought for the right of women to report from combat zones despite - or perhaps because of - remarks from officers such as, "What the hell is a woman doing here?"

Ms. Bryan was "a no-nonsense woman, a female boss in a man-centric war zone," according to Mr. Greenspon, who arrived in Saigon on a one-way ticket, a two-week tourist visa and $50 in his pocket. Ms. Bryan gave him his start. Mr. Greenspon, who also sold pictures to newswires, went on to make one of the war's most memorable images, "Help from Above," showing a soldier with arms outstretched to an incoming medevac helicopter. The image was the inspiration for the poster for the 1986 film " Platoon " starring Charlie Sheen and Willem Dafoe.

With a crew of mostly freelance contributors, including the book's featured reporters - Cynthia Copple, Don Hirst, and Brent Procter - Overseas Weekly focused on the G.I.s rather than military brass or the official policy reports found in Stars & Stripes, the military newspaper based in Washington, D.C., that operates under the Department of Defense. Long before blogs and social media offered a platform for alternative voices, the tabloid covered issues faced by the grunts, including salacious reports about courts-martial in sex cases. This, along with the use of pinups of semi-clad women on the front pages, earned it the nickname Oversexed Weekly. It was popular among troops, but not the brass. The Army briefly banned the sale of the paper in Europe in 1953 for "irreverent treatment" of the military, but Congress members and the American Civil Liberties Union helped overturn the ban.

The paper earned its muckraking reputation - and the ire of the Pentagon - by printing articles on racism, drug abuse, the military justice system, and the sex-reassignment surgery of a transgender World War II veteran. It was put up for a Pulitzer Prize for exposing the underground activities of the American Nazi Party within the U.S. military.

"Many Army officers maintained that though the facts were usually right ... the stories fostered disrespect for the military establishment," wrote The New York Times in a 1969 article.

Throughout the conflict, the paper's staff was devoted to reflecting the war back to the young Americans fighting it. Mr. Hirst documented Johnny Cash, June Carter, and Carl Perkins's 1971 performance for U.S. troops at Long Bình - an experience that was later recounted in Cash's song " Singin' in Vietnam Talkin' Blues."

"Unlike photographers working for major media outlets the Overseas Weekly photographers found that their subject was also their audience," wrote Eric Wakin, deputy director at the Hoover Institution, in the book's foreword. "They took photographs that were never intended for a civilian viewership."

With the publication of the forgotten archives, a new generation of civilians and service members now has access to a valuable record of a war that killed one million Vietnamese and over 58,000 Americans, a toll that still resonates nearly half a century later.

"Combat scars everyone, soldiers and journalists alike. And the psychological wounds don't heal, even after fifty years," Mr. Greenspon wrote in his essay. "Now, Hoover has stirred up a whole new set of traumatic recollections and resentments. I am both excited at seeing some of my lost photos and, at the same time, troubled by the memories they spark."

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Forgotten Images of the Vietnam War Made for the Americans Who Fought In It

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LENS For more than four decades, Art Greenspon kept his recollections of photographing the Vietnam War for Overseas Weekly tucked away deep in his memory, as inaccessible as the images themselves. Then, in 2014, a treasure trove of 35 mm negatives emerged from the gloom of a Scandinavian cellar, vividly reminding Mr. Greenspon of his time working for the scrappy little alternative tabloid.

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Horst Faas, legendary photojournalist, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, and senior photo editor at The Associated Press, died in Munich on Thursday, his daughter told the AP. Faas was 79.

Faas, born in Germany in 1933, joined the AP in 1956 and was best known for his war photography: Congo, Algeria, and most famously, Vietnam, where he was the AP's chief of photo operations from 1962-1972.

Faas didn't just cover the violence, but also recruited and trained young, talented foreign and Vietnamese freelancers, creating what came to be called "Horst's army", who fanned out with photography equipment supplied by Faas to take "good pictures".

After retiring from The AP in 2004, his health began to deteriorate, and he became paralyzed from the waist down in 2005. He is survived by his wife and daughter.
WARNING SOME GRAPHIC IMAGES

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The Late Horst Faas Risked Everything To Get These Gritty Wartime Shots

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Horst Faas, legendary photojournalist, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, and senior photo editor at The Associated Press, died in Munich on Thursday, his daughter told the AP. Faas was 79. Faas, born in Germany in 1933, joined the AP in 1956 and was best known for his war photography: Congo, Algeria, and most famously, Vietnam, where he was the AP's chief of photo operations from 1962-1972.

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The war in Vietnam has been described as the war America watched from their living rooms. Images of combat and American GIs were projected through our TV screens and across our newspapers daily.

During the war in Vietnam, the American military gave the press unprecedented freedom of access to combat zones. This allowed newspaper reporters and photographers and television crews to document a war involving American sons and daughters on the other side of the world. This willingness to allow documentation of the war was also extended to the military's own photographers. Between 1962 and 1975, military photographers for the United States Army, Marine Corps, Navy, and Air Force took thousands of photographs of the American conflict in Vietnam, which are now located at the National Archives. These photographs serve publishers, historians, and students who want to learn more about Vietnam. They include images of almost every aspect of the war.

The jobs of the military photographers were not only to document the war, but also to capture images for the historical record. One photographer, Chuck Cook, describes it as follows: "What the photographers did was worth doing--maybe not for the reasons the military said. They just felt that what the soldiers were going through was worth saving." In his book Vietnam: Images from Combat Photographers, author C. Douglas Elliott describes the images that came in from the combat operation as ones "that did not show winners and losers. They showed soldiers--often teenagers--coping as best they could with unrelenting heat and humidity, heavy packs, heavy guns, and an invisible enemy whose mines, booby traps, and snipers could cut life short without a moment's warning." In order to capture these images, photographers took many risks and suffered many of the same hardships as the soldiers and personnel they were covering.

The operations and direction of the military photography was organized by the Army Pictorial Center (APC), which dispatched a series of teams for brief visits. These teams were organized into DASPO (Department of the Army Special Photo Office). DASPO rotated photographers into Vietnam for three-month tours of duty from a base in Hawaii. It wasn't long before the Marines sent their own photographers into the field, quickly followed by the Army and its 221st Signal Company. The DASPO and the 221st were considered the Army's elite photographic units. Smaller numbers of photographers worked for the Public Information Office (PIO), the Air Force and the Navy. The Air Force photographers assisted in aerial reconnaissance and documentation of bombing missions. The Navy photographers worked from the Combat Camera Group-Pacific (CCGPAC) photographing river patrols, counterguerrilla missions, and SEAL teams. The mission of DASPO was to provide a historical record of the war for the Pentagon archives.

These photographers were not there as journalists, but rather to create a visual record of operations, equipment, and personnel. After the photographs were processed by the Pentagon, they were made available to military publications, the press, and the public at a photographic library at the Pentagon.

As these photographers worked to document the war, they covered a variety of people and circumstances including combat missions, GIs, support personnel, medical units, and visits by dignitaries, politicians, and entertainers. While they may have been there to provide visual record of operations, equipment, and personnel, their photographs also tell a story. It is a story about the young men and women who fulfilled served their duty to their country by serving in the war in Vietnam.
This article was written by Linda Darus Clark, a teacher at Padua Franciscan High School in Parma, Ohio.

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The War in Vietnam: A Story in Photographs

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En Español 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.

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Where Have all the Flowers Gone: Eve of Destruction

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I redid "Where Have All The Flowers Gone" video and changed the music to Eve of Destruction, by Barry McGuire. I think it's a better version. Prev1 was kind enough to make some suggestions that prompted me to redo the video. I kept both so you could make your own decision.

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Vietnam War Facts for kids

History.com Vietnam War

How the Vietnam War Affected a Generation

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“War Stories We’ve Been Missing for 50 Years”

“The First Saddest Day of My Life”

Coming Home from Vietnam

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Agent Orange

Protest Music

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May 7, 1954: Ho Chi Minh's Viet Minh forces defeat the French at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, effectively ending the 7 ½-year Indochina War.

July 1954: At a conference in Geneva, world powers agree to a divided Vietnam.

Communists, led by Ho Chi Minh, control the North. The United States eventually supports an anticommunist government led by Ngo Dinh Diem in the South.

Sept. 10, 1960: Le Duan replaces Ho Chi Minh as First Secretary of the Vietnamese Communist Party in Hanoi.

Nov. 8, 1960: John F. Kennedy beats Richard Nixon in the U.S. presidential election; Lyndon B. Johnson is vice president.

Dec. 20, 1960: Southern revolutionaries, backed by the North Vietnamese Communist Party, form the National Liberation Front, known in Saigon and Washington as the Viet Cong.

June 11, 1963: Self immolation of Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc in Saigon sparks outrage around the world and brings attention to the developing conflict.

Nov. 1-2, 1963: President Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu are murdered during a coup by dissident generals of the South Vietnamese army.

Nov. 22, 1963: Kennedy is assassinated and Johnson is sworn in as president.

Aug. 2-4, 1964: Two supposed incidents in the Gulf of Tonkin lead Johnson to seek congressional approval for direct U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

March 8, 1965: First Marines land in Danang.

Nov. 14-18, 1965: In the Ia Drang Valley, American troops fight their first large scale battles against the North Vietnamese Army.

April 15 and Oct. 21, 1967: Hundreds of thousands of antiwar protesters gather for demonstrations in New York's Central Park and in Washington.

Summer 1967 to Spring 1968: During a series of "border battles" in the remote locations of Dak To, Con Thien and Khe Sanh, U.S. Army and Marines face relentless onslaughts from North Vietnamese.

Jan. 31, 1968: During the Tet Offensive, North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops launch surprise attacks against targets throughout South Vietnam.

February 1968: In the ancient imperial capital of Hue, communist forces execute at least 2,800 people, mostly South Vietnamese civilians.

March 16, 1968: Over the course of four hours, American soldiers kill more than 500 unarmed civilians in and around the hamlet of My Lai.

March 31, 1968: Johnson announces he will not run for re-election.

Nov. 5, 1968: Nixon is elected president, promising to end the war in Vietnam.

Oct. 15, 1969: The first Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam, a series of mass demonstrations across the United States, take place; a second happens on Nov. 15.

Nov. 3, 1969: Nixon goes on television to call for national solidarity on the Vietnam War effort, appealing to a "silent majority" to support his policies.

May 4, 1970: Four days after Nixon announced the expansion of the war into Cambodia, four students at Kent State are shot by National Guardsmen during a protest.

Feb. 8 - March 25, 1971: The South Vietnamese launch operation Lam Son 719 against North Vietnamese forces in Laos, which ends in their hasty retreat and defeat.

March 30 - Oct. 22, 1972: The Easter Offensive invasion by North Vietnamese forces is successfully repelled by South Vietnamese.

Jan. 27, 1973: Cease-fire agreement is reached between U.S. and North Vietnam, U.S. POWs begin to return home.

March 29, 1973: Last U.S. combat troops leave South Vietnam.

Aug. 9, 1974: Nixon leaves office.

April 30, 1975: Saigon falls.

Nov. 13, 1982: Opening of the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial Wall.

July 1995: Under President Bill Clinton, the U.S. normalizes relations with Vietnam.
More: More: Why Ken Burns decided this was the time to make a Vietnam War documentary The Vietnam War: Why it was the conflict that no one wanted to talk about

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Vietnam War: A timeline of U.S. entanglement

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May 7, 1954: Ho Chi Minh's Viet Minh forces defeat the French at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, effectively ending the 7 ½-year Indochina War. July 1954: At a conference in Geneva, world powers agree to a divided Vietnam. Communists, led by Ho Chi Minh, control the North.

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The Real Lesson of the Vietnam War | Fredrik Logevall | TEDxCornellU

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Interactive Vietnam War Map | Pritzker Military Museum & Library | Chicago

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Explore the Vietnam War and the Pritzker Military Museum & Library’s resources through an interactive map.

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Infographic: The Vietnam War: Military Statistics | Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

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The Pace-Gilder Lehrman MA in American History Program is now accepting applications! Click here

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vietnam war chart study guide by lyndiaa includes 7 questions covering vocabulary, terms and more. Quizlet flashcards, activities and games help you improve your grades.

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Let's Begin...

The Ho Chi Minh Trail not only connected North and South Vietnam during a brutal war but also aided Vietnamese soldiers. The trail shaved nearly five months of time off of the trip and was used as a secret weapon of sorts. Cameron Paterson describes the history and usage of the infamous trail.

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The infamous and ingenious Ho Chi Minh Trail - Cameron Paterson

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The Ho Chi Minh Trail not only connected North and South Vietnam during a brutal war but also aided Vietnamese soldiers. The trail shaved nearly five months of time off of the trip and was used as a secret weapon of sorts. Cameron Paterson describes the history and usage of the infamous trail.