They were the images that communicated the horrors of war in ways words could not.
They were so much more than just photographs, Vietnam’s President said on Thursday, recalling black-and-white images he said he will never forget from the war that ended 40 years ago: A Buddhist monk consumed by flames in a fiery suicide. A screaming child running naked as her skin burns from a napalm attack. “They gave the whole world a full picture of what was going on in Vietnam,” President Truong Tan Sang told Associated Press ahead of an exhibit of the AP’s wartime photographs in Hanoi.
Vietnam: The Real War, a collection of 58 photographs taken by the AP, opens to the public Friday, marking a homecoming that officials say is historic and an emblem of changing times. Forty years after the war ended, it is the first time that these images are being exhibited in Vietnam, where the conflict is called the “American War.”
The burning monk
Malcolm Browne’s shocking 1963 photograph of the burning monk, which appeared on front pages around the globe and sent shudders all the way up to the White House, prompted John F. Kennedy to order a re-evaluation of his administration’s Vietnam policy.
The execution
Eddie Adams captured the moment a Viet Cong suspect was shot in the head, point blank, by a South Vietnamese commander in 1968.
The napalm girl
Huynh Cong (Nick) Ut was 21 when he stood on Vietnam’s Highway 1 on June 8, 1972, and captured one of history’s most famous images – a naked child, now known as the “napalm girl,” screaming and fleeing after South Vietnamese planes looking for Viet Cong insurgents attacked with napalm from the air.
On Monday, 43 years later, Ut went back to document some of his war memories. “I stood here and watched the bombs come down,” Ut said just before he exposed a frame of Kodak Tri-X black-and-white film that carried the likeness of nine-year-old Kim Phuc, her body severely burned.
So when Ut returned to the village of Trang Bang on Monday, he brought his iPhone 5 with him and was given custody of AP Images’ Instagram account for the day. That gave him the power to upload, instantaneously, images that during the war would have taken hours to get 25 miles south to AP offices in Saigon, then in and out of the film-developing process before a print could be beamed to the world.
Ut, whose AP photographer brother Huynh Thanh My was killed in the Vietnam War in 1965, has made this journey often – usually at least once a year in recent years, he says. It remains significant to him. He suspects the conflict would have played very differently for people back in the United States – and their policymakers – if instantaneous photo sharing had existed then. “My God. Today in Vietnam everybody has a phone,” Ut says. “A couple hours, that was too long. Now two minutes you get it to the world. I couldn’t have imagined.”
Free press and photography
AP president Gary Pruitt, who was in Hanoi to attend a Thursday night preview and the exhibit’s Friday opening, spoke about about the importance of a free press, in a country that still lacks one.
Many of the AP pictures led to “serious tensions” with the U.S. government, he said. “There were times when the United States government felt the AP’s work was undermining its military effort, and wanted AP to ‘get on the team.’ The team meaning the American military team,” Mr. Pruitt said. There was government pressure at times to change reporters and to change coverage. “AP resisted that pressure.”
Vietnam, 40 years later
The AP exhibit comes amid a flurry of war-related commemorations. This month marks the 20th anniversary of restored diplomatic ties between the U.S. and Vietnam. Major celebrations marked the recent 40th anniversary of defeating the Americans on April 30, 1975, when northern communist forces seized control of U.S.-backed South Vietnam, ending the war.
Vietnam War by the numbers
Americans killed: 58,000
Vietnamese communist forces and civilians killed: 3 million
South Vietnamese soldiers killed: Vietnam refuses to say how many died in the war but some U.S. estimates put the number as high as 250,000