The Warrior Image by Andrew J. Huebner

Author:Andrew J. Huebner [Huebner, Andrew J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, 20th Century, Military, Social Science, Popular Culture
ISBN: 9780807868218
Google: fx1Nx_i3iw0C
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Published: 2011-12-01T15:58:34+00:00

FIGURE 15.“InvasionDMZRuns into the Marines,” Life, October 28, 1966. In 1966 popular magazines began featuring such helpless, bandaged soldiers on their covers or in articles. Courtesy of Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.

Such images were not necessarily “antiwar”; journalists surely understood that wounds and death were a part of any conflict. And most correspondents and editors in 1966 still supported the American intervention in Vietnam. But these images, like ones from Korea, reminded viewers of war’s costs. In this way reporters valorized the suffering of the individual GI, made him seem pitiable, but without questioning his manliness or toughness, and without explicitly condemning the wider war effort in Southeast Asia. As Susan Moeller has written, combat photographers in Vietnam “took portraits of the troops to champion the fortitude of the individual soldiers in their sad triumph over the hardship of warfare.”78 In these portraits war was a messy, tragic business. As the conflict later stalemated, such exposure of suffering overtook support for the war in stories from Vietnam.

Deliberate or inadvertent abuse of civilians, Vietcong prisoners, and enemy suspects continued to command significant attention. Sometimes such damage seemed justified. Dan Rather reported from Vietnam in January 1966: “In this village along the Saigon riverbanks, residents admit a Vietcong battalion, with Chinese advisers, spent the night, moving out just a few hours before U.S. troops came in. Our troops continue burning every hut they find, and all crops, convinced that practically every man, woman, and child in this section belongs to the Vietcong.”79 Laura Bergquist of Look magazine, on the other hand, suggested just how tragic this thinking could be for the people of South Vietnam: “A visit to the jungle that is the Da Nang Surgical Hospital brings on nausea. There, two to a bed, lie hideously wounded Vietnamese civilians, children and adults. Eighty percent are war victims (mostly mortar and mine wounds, ours and Vietcong Charlie’s). I couldn’t look at one child, perhaps seven, who was one huge, blistered napalm wound.”80

With different moral issues at stake the press reported the abuse of communist captives. In the spring, newspapers around the country ran a picture by photographer Sean Flynn depicting a Vietcong sniper strung up in a tree by his heels. Time magazine, still supportive of the war, lamented the widespread attention Flynn’s photo garnered, particularly since most publications ran it without his accompanying dispatch about how the prisoner had killed a baby and was cut down unharmed after only fifteen minutes. “Such pictures,” groaned Time, “are hardly ever balanced out by coverage of the Viet Cong’s far more common tactics of terror and brutality.” Evidence of American or South Vietnamese harshness “so often” received undue coverage with “indignant captions.” Trying to right the wrong, perhaps, Time had recently reported on the killing and mutilation of two American pilots by the Vietcong.81 Dispatches on the brutality of the enemy often appeared in this context, as if to help justify American retribution.

Possibly feeding Time’s aggravation, Kenneth Gale of NBC reported from Vietnam in November about the interrogation of several Vietcong prisoners.

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