By Dirck Halstead

When I first arrived in Saigon in March of 1965, to open the UPI Pictures bureau, the first photographer I encountered was Horst Faas. A veteran of combat photography for Associated Press in the Congo and Algeria, he had been directing the coverage of the war in Vietnam since 1962. My first operation in the field taught me that if I stayed closeto Horst and watched what he did, not only would I get the picture, but would stand a reasonably good chance of survival as well.

During my first month on the job, I was given a new photographer to work with, Tim Page. He was an 18 year old "hippie" who had been making hisway around the world. Getting hold of a camera, he managed to sell some pictures to UPI that he had taken in Laos. From the start, I realized that these two photographers could not possibly have been more different. Faas was a disciplined professional, seasoned in combat. Tim was a disaster waiting to happen. In the first six months he was woundedthree times, once by U.S. warplanes that accidentally strafed an American Coast Guard cutter where I had placed him mainly to keep him out of harm's way. We used to joke that Tim didn't seem to mind being wounded since he enjoyed the drugs he was given inthethird field hospital.

Now, more than three decades later these two seemingly unlikely partners haveproduced what may not only be one of the best photo books ever published, but also a memorial to all our colleagues who did not live to see the end of the war.

Requiem is a labor of love created by those who were there, and who shared the dangers and the joys that existed side by side. Michael Herr wrote: "Vietnam was what we had instead of a happy childhood."  The 198 photographs in this graphically handsome and powerful book were all taken by the 135 photographers killed during the war. The eloquent words comefrom the reporters who worked alongside them: Tad Bartimus, John Laurence, Richard Pyle, Peter Arnett, Pierre Schoendoerffer, Nguyen Khuyen, Neil Sheehan, Jon Swain, William Tuohy, and in some cases the photographers themselves.

It was common in Vietnam for a photographer to take notes and file stories while in combat. Not only did they tell the story with their magnificent photographs, but also with their words.

Photographer Dana Stone sent this account with his film from Khe Sanh to UPI on April 4, 1968: "The radio operator died quickly in the black, foggy night. Whatever sounds he made were drowned out by the screams of the wounded corporaland the rasping gurgle of the captain with the throat wound.

"Of the five huddled figures in the bomb crater, only Stars and Stripes photographer John Olsen and I were unhurt by the exploding shell the North Vietnamese had fired blindly Wednesday night at the ridgeline overlooking Khe Sanh town.

"...The medic placed the West Pointer along the side of the bomb crater on his stomach to slow the flood of blood, and the captain wrote out with a pencil stub the correct frequencies. The mortar man finally reached the rear and put in a call for help.

"Back came the reply that the fog made even the most urgent helicopter flight impossible. 'Just waiting.'

"For the rest of that long, cold, foggy night we just waited. With dawn the first gray light showed the sprawling body of the radio operator whohad died, unknown to us, from a gaping wound in his side.

"Occasionally, through the fog the helicopter could be heard groping for some hole in the mist. A frantic voice broke into the helicopter circuit: 'I'm taking hits. I'm taking hits,' came the cries from the pilot. 'I have one man hit and I'm expecting an engine failure.'

"The contact broke.

"By 9:00 a.m. the eyes attempting to stare away the fog saw a patch of blue sky, but then the mist swirled over the ridge again, blocking us out from the world.

"An hour later there was another break, but the wind again blew the fog over the ridge. Finally the sun burned a big hole, and down through itcame the olive drab helicopter, a most beautiful sight to the captain and the corporal."

David Halberstam relates in his introduction: "War correspondents know who is real and who is not. A war zone is not a good setting for the inauthentic of spirit and heart." He and the other reporters write of their colleagues, the photographers, who had to be there: "We could missthe fighting and still do our jobs. They could not. There was only one way for them to achieve intimacy: by being eyewitnesses."

The staggering fact shown clearly by this collection is just how well these men and women did their jobs.

The book does not attempt to be a definitive history of the Vietnam War. And yet, by following the work of these photographers through the cycle of the war, it does chronicle many of the key events. Beginning withDixie Reese's photograph of the land andthe people in the 1950s, and the French fight against the Vietminh, it goes on to present Larry Burrow's magnificent coverage of the involvement of American advisors in the early '60s, through the buildup of American troops. It shows the escalation into the first main-forcebattles with the North Vietnamese shot by Henri Huet, Dana Stone and Kyoichi Sawada. The final battles for Saigon, and the brutal assault onPnomh Penh, are captured in heart-rending images by Cambodian photographers Sou Vichith, Tea Kim Heang and Kuoy Sarun, all of whom were abandoned and disappeared into the killing fields.

The inspiration for the book came in 1994. Tim Page, in an attempt to locate the remains of his colleagues Dana Stone and Sean Flynn, who were held captive for more than a year by the Khmyer Rouge--then executed,was given a box of photographs by the North Vietnamese in Hanoi. The photographs had been taken during the war by North Vietnamese photographers. All had been killed in action.

It was the shock and realization that not only Western and South Vietnamese photographers were recording the agony of the battle, that created an overwhelming desire to record the works of all the photographers who died doing their job.

The images that we are familiar with are interspersed with ones we have never seen before, produced by men and women who were on the other side.

There is a vivid photo essay by Larry Burrow's on the mission of a Marine Corps helicopter crew, "Yankee Papa 13." Larry had mounted a camera on the side of the helo facing the door gunner, Crew Chief James Farley, who within moments of opening fire on a "hot LZ " insertion found himself, along with Larry, dragging wounded crew members from an accompanying helicopter under heavy fire.

And Henri Huet's series on wounded medic Thomas Cole, whose head injury preventedhim from being able to see, yet he continued to work for hours, tendingthe wounded under heavy fire during an operation in Dong Tre.

In the final pages, reading about the photographers and seeing their portraits, I felt a kick in the gut looking at the faces of those men and women. They represent all the friends lost in the jungles and themountain ridges of that faraway place.

One story in particular, about young Robert Ellison brings those faces into focus:

"ROBERT JACKSON ELLISON
United States
Born July 6, 1944 in Ames, Iowa, USA
Died: March 6, 1968, near Khe Sanh, Vietnam

"At the University of Florida, Bob Ellison switched his major from herpetology to photography, then to journalism and soon landed a dream assignment: Ebony magazine hired him to photograph the march that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was leading from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.Ellison subsequently covered the civil rights movement throughout the South. The rather slight figure in a felt hat and a turtleneck sweaterbecame familiar to the thousands of marchers.

"Ellison arrived in Vietnam for the 1968 Tet Offensive and spent three weeks with the Marines at Khe Sanh. Later, to get back to Khe Sanh, hebartered his way onto a C-123 flight with a case of Coke, a case of beer, and a box of cigars. His name was inadvertently left off the manifest, and when the plane was shot down near the Khe Sanh runway, nearly a week passed before the twenty-three year old photographer's fate was known.

"Dr. King was assassinated a month later. Ebony eulogized both men in an editorial, describing Ellison as 'the young white photographer who lived free of prejudice, full of understanding and respectful of the rights ofall men.'

"His Newsweek photographs, published after he died, posthumously won Ellison the Overseas Press Club's award for Best Magazine Coverage from Abroad.

"Bob Ellison and the Marines on that fatal flight into Khe Sanh are buried in a mass grave in a military cemetery in Missouri."
 

A long time ago, a friend told me, "Vietnam will never let you go." Looking through the images and reading the words in one story in particular, about young Robert Ellison brings those faces into focus:

"ROBERT JACKSON ELLISON
United States
Born July 6, 1944 in Ames, Iowa, USA
Died: March 6, 1968, near Khe Sanh, Vietnam

"At the University of Florida, Bob Ellison switched his major from herpetology to photography, then to journalism and soon landed a dream assignment: Ebony magazine hired him to photograph the march that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was leading from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.Ellison subsequently covered the civil rights movement throughout the South. The rather slight figure in a felt hat and a turtleneck sweaterbecame familiar to the thousands of marchers.