Shooting Vietnam

Discover what it was like to be amidst the action as a military photographer during the Vietnam War.

 

Shooting Vietnam takes you there as you read the firsthand accounts and view the hundreds of photographs by men who lived the war through the lens of a camera. From the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, they documented everything from the horror of combat to the people and culture of a land they suddenly found themselves immersed in. Some juggled cameras with weapons as they fought to survive while carrying out their assignments to record the war. Others did not survive. Shooting Vietnam also finally brings recognition to these unheralded military combat photographers in Vietnam that documented the brutal, unpopular, and futile war.


 


Often, during a brief respite from trudging through swamps and rice paddies or jumping from a chopper into a hot landing zone, the photographers would wander the streets of villages or even downtown Saigon, curiously photographing a people and a culture so strange and different to them. It is these photographs, of a kinder, more personal nature, removed from the horror and death of war that they also share with the reader.


  The accounts in this book come from young men thrust into a conflict half way around the world, and all who had their own unique perspective on the war. Some were seasoned photographers before the military, others had only recently held a camera for the first time.


 

"The photography is excellent . . . an essential read to anyone interested in the Vietnam War or conflict photography in general." —War History Online