Information Suppression1987Copyright © 1997 Property of Deborah K. Fletcher. All rights reserved.
The Vietnam Experience: Combat Photographer, by Nick Mills, was published in 1983 by the Boston Publishing Company, Boston, Massachusetts. It describes the lives and experiences of the military combat photographers of the Viet Nam Conflict in a unique photo-documentary. It tells of pain, death, fear, grief, sadness, and friendship, but one of its greatest - and most subtle - ironies is the difficulty which photographers had in getting photographs out of the battle zone and into the public's eye. One of the greatest problems was the tight security which the military placed on combat photographs, and the suppression of many of the photographs which they took. The photographs which became part of the permanent record also became part of the public record, so many photographs which put the army in a less-than-flattering light were destroyed. Many real-life photographs, which included soldiers in less-than-perfect uniforms, or with cigarettes, or committing acts which were not sanctioned by higher authority were destroyed so that the world's image of the United States' military would not be marred. To prevent this injustice, many photographers retained prints, duplicate transparencies, or rolls of film which they exposed with their personal cameras. One of the most important cases of a photographer's retention of a roll of film exp[osing a military suppression was in the case of the massacre at My Lai on March 16, 1968. In that case, Sergeant Ronald L. Haeberle witnessed and photographed American troops shooting down, burning out, and raping Vietnamese civilians for no cause. He witnessed approximately fifty men, women, children, and infants being murdered, but did not know whether that was a normal military action or not. When he turned in his black-and-white film to the Public Information Office of his unit, he retained a roll of color slide film from his own camera. He left the army two weeks after the massacre. Later, he made a slide show of his military career which included the slides of the massacre. He showed the slides to family, friends, and organizations for months until the Criminal Investigation Division found him in one of their investigations. His slides helped to convict the commanders of Haeberle's unit of some five hundred counts of murder in courts martial. Haeberle's case prompted new regulations restricting the use of film from personal cameras in combat, and the pictures he took were sold to Life magazine. Those pictures made Haeberle the most notorious of all the military photographers in Viet Nam. They were also a telling case of one man beating the system. In The Vietnam Experience, lost or not-quite-legal photographs of the Viet Nam Conflict have been brought together. Some are anonymous. Others are water damaged. All represent the reality of death, destruction, and hope in Viet Nam. Please View and Sign My Guestbook © 1998-2000 Debbie Fletcher, joiya@tcia.net
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