Customer Reviews

Another Vietnam: Pictures of the War from the Other Side

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

As a former Marine Corps combat photographer and recipient of the Purple Heart and Bronze Star with Combat "V," (I Corps, Khe Sahn, Con Thein, Dong Ha, Vietnam), Peter Caldwell missed the point about the book. The book was not produced to glorify the NVA or the politics (which enough has been written), but simply to add another piece to a broad visual mozaic. Dr. Caldwell would certainly be hard pressed to attend the International Assn of Combat Photographers. Its membership include former Nazi photographers. In our world as combat photographers, then as now, our role was to document war, to present images however controversal or appealing, to the public. Sometimes these images can be bitter medicine for both sides...just like the images of My Lai.

Tim Page did an excellent job compiling a visual treasure of the North Vietnamese photographers. And as a former combat photographer, I was stunned to view their work. Other distinguished photographers and correspondents like Larry Burrows, Bernard Falls, Henry Huet, Sean Flynn, Dana Stone -- to name a few who I had the pleasure to meet and work with and all were killed in Southeast Asia, they would hold this book in high regard. After all, as combat correspondents we did not judge but observed. And that's what this book is all about.

SSgt. F. Lee
Combat Photographer ('66-67)

With all due respect to Peter Caldwell, I think this book has a lot of value for all Americans, including Vietnam veterans. There are some photos which are propaganda, but they are labelled as such and as the author explains they are part of a larger story. All wars come with propaganda, even our own present war in Afghanistan (remember the US Special Forces soldiers riding horses with the Northern Alliance guys?) The other photos in this handsome book are stunning, especially a very wide panorama of a terribly defoliated Ho Chi Minh Trail. Very touching portraits elsewhere as well as dramatic battle scenes, in addition to the brief histories of the Vietnamese war photographers (in their own words) make this a very valuable and important book. There is something inside for everyone, just dig a little deeper past your first reaction...

This is a tough book to sum up in a few words, since many people will use their background to judge it. If you felt we should have won the war, you will hate it. I was forced to serve in VietNam and I found the pictures very interesting. More than just the US era in VietNam, the photos go back to WWII. There are pictures of the Ho Chi Mih trail which vividly show the difficulty in shutting off that supply line. There are pictures of what the US now calls 'collateral damage' from the bombing in the North. There are some propaganga photos, but they are so stated. But far and away there are photos showing the everyday life of those involved in combat, and for that it is a very valuable book. It is a documentation from the other side. Considering how our drill instructors were wont to describe the other side as a bunch of pj'ed peasants, the quality of the photos is first rate. I can not begin to imagine the conditions under which many of the photos were taken, let alone survived to be developed. If you have an open mind about the war, you will enjoy the book. If you already have decided about the war and felt we were suppsoed to have won 'if only....', then I am sure there are lots of gung ho war movies and books for sale on Amazon.com that will better suit your mindset.

Tim Page's Nam is one of my most cherished books about military history because the spectacular photographs succeed in conveying not just a visual depiction of the war but also the emotions of its participants (in the case of that book , focusing primarily on U.S. forces). I was therefore very excited to see this new volume compiled by Page and his team, which is full of photographs of the war from the perspective of the North Vietnamese. However, I gave this book four stars rather than five because of one disappointment I have with it: Nearly all the photos depicting battles or battlefields or in any way involve "the enemy" focus on ARVN forces. There were hardly any photos that had anything to do with U.S. forces or any of the other foreign armies defending the South. This struck me as quite odd. I realize the book's authors are limited by the photographs available to them (i.e. ones taken by photographers travelling with Viet Cong and NVA forces), but surely it can't be that these photographers never took pictures of subjects that involve forces other than the ARVN. In this sense I felt like the book fell short of telling the entire story of the other side. However, this book is still very much worth owning, so don't let my one complaint scare you away.

Most of these pictures record tiny episodes, but those thinkers with a long view might refuse to accept that there were ever two Nams in the 20th Century. When France tried to pick a southern area called Cochin China for itself as a French colony in 1945, there should be little doubt that it was merely usurping part of Ho Chi Minh's independent Vietnam. A picture shows Ho in Hanoi, 39 days after his declaration of Vietnamese independence on Sept. 2, 1945. The picture of Le Minh Truong by himself, Kontum, 1972 (p. 114) is as unexciting as my own pictures taken in that area in 1970. The surprising picture on page 49 was taken May 9, 1973, soon after the American withdrawal: "Cuban leader Fidel Castro hoists a victory flag at the site of the strategic 1968 battle [Khe Sanh]." There are so many troops in the picture that it doesn't show any bomb craters, and a mountain in the background (possibly as far away as Laos) shows that the area was not entirely leveled. Khe Sanh had the highest priority for B-52 strikes when North Vietnamese troops threatened the U.S. troops there and this book says that "was part of the North's plan to divert U.S. and South Vietnamese forces from population areas prior to the Tet offensive." (p. 49). This might provide a lesson for anyone planning a war against American forces, which are bound to rely on a strategy which depends heavily on bombing, and Americans are organized so they pay more attention to their top priority than to anything else. A panorama made from six negatives of "supply trucks rolling through a ghost forest denuded by defoliants dropped by American planes" (p. 135) shows some of the damage from 40 million pounds of Agent Orange "which were sprayed over five million acres, creating environmental havoc." (p. 135). Such tactics suggest that the war was against Nam as a whole, and not a strategy that would have been adopted by one half against the other. The American Civil War was pretty bad, but Abe Lincoln never nuked the South. General Sherman was hard on South Carolina, but not as bad as Americans who wanted to nuke Nam. The defoliated mangrove forest, Ca Mau Peninsula, 1970 (p. 104-5) looks awful, "Americans denuded the landscape with chemicals to deny cover," as if we were involved in a cat and mouse game, but couldn't decide how serious we wanted it to be. A weird picture in which "An NVA soldier positions a Chinese-made mannequin" (p. 60) (a long time after Hamburger Hill) is the perfect: SO? SHOOT ME picture.

I found a lot of irony in the information on page 56 about only 8 of 109 students (the guys who are smiling) being accepted into the army in Hanoi, Aug. 1971. The standards were tough: these "young men were chosen because they had good revolutionary credentials, which usually meant that they didn't come from landowning families." This sounds like a perfect way to pick people who would be willing to hold on to a government job, regardless of the circumstances. The increase in the NVA, from 35,000 in 1950 to over 500,000 by the mid-1970s, didn't require a mandatory system until 1973, when the United States withdrew and the NVA was free to pursue military objectives without being bombed. With the use of American support, South Vietnam's ARVN were capable of suffering "243,000 dead and a half a million seriously wounded." (p. 202).

Picture (p. 218) Russian MIGs "at a remote air base" on January 1, 1973 and the military parade (p. 220) on the outskirts of Hanoi in October, 1973, after the United States had stopped its bombing. Hiding all these things is the result of a lot of effort. On page 54, Hanoi, 1972 "Military trucks park in relative safety in front of the French embassy. . . . In November 1971, however, American bombs accidentally struck the embassy." It sounds like the embassy was still pretty safe, but the attack on the U.S. Embassy by a squad of Viet Cong sappers on January 31, 1968, mentioned on p. 151, definitely sounded intentional.

Doug Niven did an amazing job of collecting, editing and printing these truly incredible images. They are unforgettable, and anyone with an appreciation of photography should not be without this incredible book, regardless of the history or politics involved.

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.

Having studied Tim Page's great work "Requiem" tens of times, each time seeing something new in the striking photographs, and having seen Riley and Niven's brilliant work on the killing fields of Cambodia, I knew what to expect when I opened "Another Vietnam." This is a natural follow-on to "Requiem" and reflects Tim Page's admiration for war photographers on all sides. I have the feeling that Tim Page is still at work seeking out new information on some of his closest friends who disappeared on the battlefields of Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. I hope to see more film documentaries from Tim Page. His investigations, first documented in his film "Danger at the Edge of Town," will continue until all his colleagues are accounted for. No one can accuse Tim Page of having forgotten his heroic comrades. They live on in his lifetime of work.

... 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.

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.