We were in a
Vietnamese village during the Tet holidays of 1970 celebrating with the family of one of
our friends. The baby girl that I am holding was crying and fussing. No one, including her
mother, father, aunts, uncles or sister could comfort her. Finally, in desperation, her
father handed her to me and she stopped crying immediately. Everyone in attendance was
quite amazed, especially myself, and her father picked up my camera and took this photo.
This was the third Tet I had spent in
Vietnam. Feeling that I had nothing to return to back stateside at the end of my first
tour except inspections and harassment, I decided to finish up the remaining year and a
half of my enlistment by volunteering for a second tour in Vietnam as a photographer. By
the time this photo was taken, I had been there two years and to a young man of 21, it
felt like quite an investment of my life. I had been there so long that some of my friends
jokingly called me the "mayor." I had gotten to know the Vietnamese people and
developed quite a respect for them. I never learned the language or got myself to eat Nuok
Mam sauce (a delicacy made with rotted fish heads) but I had come to appreciate and
understand them and their culture. By this time, I knew I had been there too long: I had
gone native. I felt more comfortable celebrating with them than I would have had I been in
the E.M.(enlisted men’s) club getting drunk with fellow Marines.
By now, I had become thoroughly disillusioned with the
war. It just seemed like a total waste of my life, and everybody else's: American and
Vietnamese, soldier and civilian; a waste of enormous amounts of money that could be used
for far more worthwhile goals; a waste of valuable technology; a waste of a beautiful
country. It wasn’t just the war in Vietnam that I had become disillusioned with but
the entire notion of war as a means of accomplishing political goals. It seemed ludicrous
that a generation on the threshold of conquering space would resort to physical warfare
just as senselessly brutal and capricious as anything fought by our most primitive and
distant ancestors.
I enjoyed being a photographer—that much was true.
It allowed me to see the war from so many different prospectives. When I was photographing
orphanages, I saw it from the orphan’s point of view, when I went along on patrols, I
saw it from the villager’s and grunt’s point of view, when I sat in on high
level intelligence briefings, I saw it from the Commanding General’s point of view.
Vietnam had been the land of ultimate contrasts: never before had I experienced such
beauty—nor such ugliness; such intense friendship and such hate; such self-sacrifice
and such depravity.
Toward the end of 1969, things began to change. President
Nixon declared that the actual fighting of the war would be taken over by the
Vietnamese—or what came to be know as "Vietnamazation." My official title
was "combat photographer" but I began to feel as if it should be
"propaganda photographer". My assignments now were to "document" the
Vietnamazation of the war. Vietnamese civilians working on the base (yes there were
Vietnamese civilians working on the base—many of whom turned out to be V.C.) in the
most menial capacities were asked to pose as if they were doing all kinds of high tech
things like repairing riffles and radios, operating heavy equipment, learning how to
repair helicopters (they didn’t even have repair manuals written in Vietnamese). Not
only did they not know how to do any of these things, they didn’t even know why they
were being photographed. This went on for months. The civilian press corps was too busy
getting drunk down at the MAC V headquarters in Da Nang to notice. They confined their
investigative reporting to the informational handouts and answers to their questions given
at the nightly military briefings conducted by a smooth talking colonel who could gloss
over Hiroshima II.
I was starting to get the "short timer"
attitude. Even though I still had four more months to go in country, I no longer cared
about anything: I was just putting my time in, coasting, counting the days. For the
longest time, I always tried to do my best even though I knew no one noticed or cared, I
tried to keep up the morale of myself and those around me even though we had long since
ceased to believed in what we were doing. But by now, I had had it. I was over it. I had
heard "Goooooooooooooooooood morning Vietnam" on Armed forces Radio each morning
at 6 AM too many times. I no longer had any close friends: my old ones having long since
returned to "the world" and I hadn’t allowed myself to get close to anybody
again. I even began to have serious questions about my sanity. The ideals and values that
had seemed so logical, so valid, that had supported and guided me during my youth had
become meaningless by now. I found myself wandering aimlessly in an anti-gravity of human
and spiritual values.
