Get Even More Visitors To Your Blog, Upgrade To A Business Listing >>

These Candid Photographs Taken by Servicemen Show How Young U.S Soldiers Saw Life in Wartime Vietnam

The Photographs are almost banal.

In contrast to most images of a war that still reverberates decades later, they show soldiers lazing, showing off their squalid jungle living quarters, discovering the charm of the Vietnamese children they encounter, reveling in a rare ocean swim. There is nothing remotely as chilling as much of the classic Vietnam War photography, no shots like Nick Ut’s of a naked Vietnamese girl fleeing from a napalm bombing or Eddie Adams’s shot of a Saigon police chief firing a bullet into the head of a Viet Cong prisoner.

Yet these photographs were taken not by professionals but by young grunts barely out of high school. Grinning wide-eyed at this strange land where they had been sent, often against their will, in circumstances they did not fully understand, with little foreboding of what might be in store, their photographs of ordinary wartime days have a special poignancy.

A U.S.O. performance at Fire Base Rawlings. Tay Ninh Province, Vietnam. November 1969. (David Fahey)

Larry Diesburg taking a smoking break after filling sandbags near Binh Long, Vietnam. (Larry Diesburg)

A Vietnamese boy’s daily work, along highway QL-19 near An Khe Pass. (James Alan Jenkins)

Light at night used to detect Viet Cong activity during the Tet offensive. Ninh Hoa, Vietnam. 1968. (Gene Bailey)

The Quang Tri River seen from a Huey helicopter. Vietnam. (Richard Lynghaug)

See more »


This post first appeared on Hopscotch, please read the originial post: here

Share the post

These Candid Photographs Taken by Servicemen Show How Young U.S Soldiers Saw Life in Wartime Vietnam

×

Subscribe to Hopscotch

Get updates delivered right to your inbox!

Thank you for your subscription

×