Last month, just before Christmas, I went to view a photography exhibit at the Whitney Center on the campus of Onondaga Community College.
The exhibit was one from the National Archives titled “Picturing Nam.” it was a collection of fifty photographs from the Vietnam War taken by photojournalists, military photographers and ordinary G.I.s. They were taken in the villages and jungles of Vietnam during the span of 1965 to 1975.
Some of the photos were color, others were black and white. All of them were haunting.
There was a color photograph of a young Marine, who appeared to be barely 18 years old, taken near Da Nang in August 1965. He had the faraway look of someone who had already seen too much and would never forget what he had seen, much as he might try to. You couldn’t help but wonder whether he had survived his tour or became one of the earliest of the 57,000 plus who would give their lives.
There was a color photograph of an Infantry Company in the midst of a “search and clear” mission of the kind that my friend Larry Hackett would tell me about after he survived his combat tour and before he was killed by Agent Orange, the defoliant used by our government with no warning to the troops.
Indeed, there was a color photograph, taken in 1966, of an aircraft spraying Agent Orange as part of what was called “Operation Pink Rose.” 255 flights in which 255,000 gallons of Agent Orange were used to defoliate portions of the country. It was deemed to be a “limited success.”
The exhibit had a photograph of Napalm exploding a Vietcong structure south of Saigon.
A photograph titled “Ambush” captured a scouting operation caught by surprise in February 1968 and the body of a dead Marine killed at the beginning of the fire fight.
Photographs depicting different aspects of the life and death of a Vietnam tour were part of the exhibit, ranging from a Catholic priest saying Mass on a Fire Base, to an aerial view of a bombing run over North Vietnam, to surgery and other medical care being provided on a ship off the coast.
It depicted GI life from the mundane reading of a newspaper by a GI who was a member of the Ist Air Cavalry on the Cambodian border to the hollow-eyed expression on the faces of Marines observing one of their own getting First-Aid during the Battle of Hue.
This wasn’t the first photography exhibit about the War in Vietnam I had gone to see.
Almost twenty years ago Larry and I had driven to Rochester see an exhibit entitled Requiem which displayed the work of 135 photographers who had been killed in the war. There were many more photos in the exhibit than the 50 I recently viewed at the Whitney Center.
In some cases the photographs were taken from the last roll of film that the photographer was shooting when he was killed. That fact coupled with the devastation and carnage displayed in the photographs made the images even more haunting.
The exhibit was later published in a book also entitled Requiem. Unbeknownst to me, Larry bought the book.
A decade later, after he had died from cancer caused by his exposure to Agent Orange, his wife Alice gave me the book. It remains one of my most prized possessions.
After viewing the exhibit at the Whitney Center this past month, I opened Requiem again and leafed through its pages once more.
I thought about the many veterans who die from Agent Orange, kill themselves because of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and other maladies resulting from their combat sacrifices.
It occurred to me that we are very fortunate that we have the photographs from these exhibits and books because, as a nation, it seems that is the only way in which we remember them.