Another Vietnam: Pictures of the War from the Other Side | Tim Page, Douglas Niven, ...

Another Vietnam: Pictures of the War from the Other Side | Tim Page, Douglas Niven, ... | Going back to Indochina like a repeat offender...

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Another Vietnam: P...

	Another Vietnam: Pictures of the War from the Other Side Tim Page, Douglas Niven, ... National Geographic, 2002 - 240 pages average customer review:based on 16 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Since the end of the war over 25 years ago, Vietnam has haunted America. Today, many people remember the war as a series of terrible pictures - taken by courageous civilian and military photographers. But there are other images of the war that we have rarely seen. These are the pictures taken by the other side, the Vietnamese, the enemy. Pictures of a peasant people fighting the most powerful nation on earth - and finally defeating it. In this book, we meet the Vietnamese soldier-photographers who risked their lives to capture their country's struggle in evocative, stunning images. For them, photography was a weapon used to win the war. Nine out of ten Vietnamese photographers were taken by bullets, bombs, dysentery, and malaria. Page returns to understand the spirit and dedication of these men, and to commemorate the sacrifice and loss of both sides. This is a new visual record of the war whose images have become so familiar. Through interviews with these photographers, and through their surprising images, a fresh per-spective emerges on the most troubling and divisive foreign war ever fought by the United States.

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The Photographs We Never Saw

I was a child during the Vietnam War and many of my first memories are of the powerful images that I saw in Look and Life Magazines. Over thirty years have passed and many of those images are still clear in my memory. The Vietnam War was the last war closely covered in those over sized and beuatifully produced photojournals. By the mid 1970's both Look and Life were out of business and our memories of great public events switched from black and white photo images to television images.

Starting the mid 1990's, photo editor Doug Niven travelled to Vietnam to search out the photographers who covered the war from "the other side". "Another Vietnam" is a collection of their war photos and personal stories. Their war photos range from carefully staged propaganda photos of smiling and soldiers and peasants to close up battle scenes as powerful as anything taken by Capa or Duncan.

What makes this book so fascinating is that even though I have been interested in the history of the Vietnam War for many years, I have never seen many photos taken from the Communist perspective. Even the staged propaganda shots are interesting. Our popular image of the North Vietnamese and their Viet Cong allies is as a faceless enemy pouring down the Ho Chi Minh trail, inured to suffering and intent on total victory. Therefore, it is so interesting to see this enemy humanized through sympathetic photographs. This book is a must purchase for those who love photojournalism and for students of the Vietnam War. Highly recommended.

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Going back to Indochina like a repeat offender...

... so wrote the indomitable Tim Page, the British combat photographer who used up more than one of his allocated lives in Vietnam. It is his obsession, as it is for many of those that the sinuous country touched.

Blaise Pascal, the French philosopher, rhetorically asked: What right do I have to kill someone just because he lives on the other side of the river? For Americans, this particular river was as wide as possible, the entire Pacific Ocean. Page returned again to work with the Vietnamese photographers who photographed from the other side - and developed a remarkable collection of photographs, all too many never seen in the West before. The book performs the most revolutionary anti-war function, one that the most strenuous efforts are made by the pro-war faction to suppress: it humanizes the "enemy."

Some of the photographs are clearly from the "socialist-realism" mold of propaganda. Others have the authentic stamp of being taken in the heat of battle. The first pictures show a youthful Ho Chi Minh, and the French soldiers in defeat. The book concludes with the detritus of the American defeat. Certain areas and events are highlighted, no doubt reflecting the assignment of the particular photographer: the Cu Mau peninsula; Operation Lam Son 719 (the ARVN invasion of southern Laos in 1971); the battle for Quang Tri, in 1972; and the collapse of the defenders of Saigon in 1975.

Particularly haunting photos are as follows: the devastation created by Agent Orange in the Ca Mau peninsula (p104-105); NVA soldiers marching on the "Ho Chi Minh" trail, with sunrays filtered by that famous triple canopy jungle (p115) and again marching on the same trail, above the clouds (p124-125); even though a propaganda picture, the character of a female fighter is most evident (p159); and most telling, for anyone who was ever involved in "training" native forces, hundreds upon hundreds of abandoned boots of the ARVN, during the final collapse of Saigon (p230-231).

Vietnam is finally at peace - trying to play economic "catch-up." This collection of photographs is a haunting testament to lessons unlearned, for all Americans.

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Quagmires

Another Vietnam--the very title resonates, having been, during the past thirty years, both a peace slogan and a shopworn phrase meaning "count us out." In the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion we are hearing--and certainly fearing-the heavy implications it bears. The possibility that the war on terrorism, with its rising post-action body count of American soldiers, may result in multiple quagmires reminiscent of Vietnam has made it into a mantra.

However, the Another of the title is about the other side (North Vietnam) and how it viewed and captured on film, the story of the mid-twentieth century Indochina conflict. Does it make sense to go back after three decades? If we are to believe George Santayana's warning, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to fulfill it", then it not only makes sense, it is absolute necessity.

Author Tim Page, a British combat photographer who co-edited the award-winning book, Requiem, explains the purpose of Another Vietnam. "This is a tome of resurrection-It is the unveiling of a perspective on a period of shared history, a point of view that we in the West had not really understood."

The book opens with Doug Niven's story of his early 1990s search for Vietnam era negatives, an occasional old picture, and the cameramen themselves. An outline of photography in Vietnam dating back to the 1840s follows. Although the earliest photos were family pictures, the growth of photography was spurred by that region's cycle of aggression-repression- revolution. (Before French rule and American incursion, Vietnam spent centuries under China's thumb.) Ho Chi Minh, father of Vietnam's independence movement, had worked, as a young man, in a Paris portrait studio. His awareness of "the power of the photographic image" undoubtedly influenced his decision to have a pictorial record of the events that were just beginning in 1945.

Propaganda is an integral aspect of any war. In no conflict was this more pronounced than Vietnam. Much of what was shot by Western photographers played either to the American street protestors who wanted instant peace, or to the Washington politicos anxious to justify the expenditure of men, money and matériel. North Vietnam, of course, had its own agenda, which was promoted through pictures displaying the power and persistence of its people.

Many shots were staged, but others could not have been. In particular, there is the photo of a single guerrilla paddling a small boat in the Mekong Delta. As far as the eye can see (which in this case is to a distant mountain range) the landscape resembles Mount St. Helens after its 1980 explosion. There is not a single living plant or tree in what had once been a thriving mangrove forest destroyed by US defoliants. This was both a military maneuver and a morale buster since the Vietnamese have great respect for such forests. Today, the Saigon River watershed remains toxic, a consequence of the chemicals in Agents White, Blue and Orange.

Many photos did not make it back to Hanoi. Photographer Dinh Dang Dinh lost one hundred rolls of film--six months work--during a B-52 bombing raid. In most cases, film was so scarce that cameramen guarded it like soldiers horded ammunition. Often developed under the "darkroom" of a midnight sky and with the crudest of chemicals and equipment, film that did reach Hanoi was sometimes out-dated by subsequent events. And, if the images were used, their outlet was limited to non-aligned or Communist block countries.

Looking at them now, one can only speculate as to whether they might have decisively swayed opinion in the America of the 60s and 70s. The photographers and the populace of North Vietnam were willing to endure enormous hardship, adversity on a level that had no parallel in Western society. What could we have learned about these people if we had seen the picture of woven baskets containing small mounds of dirt passed along a line of peasants as the infamous tunnels were excavated by hand? Might we have recognized that, lacking our firepower, they became geniuses at hiding things from our bombs -- supplies, weapons, tunnels, themselves? Even roads and bridges could disappear beneath their clever camouflage.

Above all, the North Vietnamese possessed that most enduring trait--and one we in the Occidental world have yet to fully learn--that of patience. In the end, they outlasted us. We need not agree with their political beliefs to be appalled at the cost of this victory: 3,000,000 combined soldier and civilian lives.

This is a splendid, superbly written book that belongs in any personal or public library where the objectivity derived from multiple sources is important. It is filled with gritty, black and white photos shot by determined men under horrendous conditions. One does not need color to see blood. Or fear. Or tenacity.

We would do well to look closely at it in the light of our 21st century excursions into war. Another Vietnam bears a subliminal message: that we often overestimate our technological prowess and underestimate the shrewdness of our adversaries.

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