PHOTOGRAPHER’S VIEW : Memories of War Rekindled

“Please, sir . . . please don’t photograph me. . . . I don’t want my family to see me like this,” whispered a young Army lieutenant suffering from a stomach wound.

It was Christmas Eve, 1968, near Qui Nhon, Vietnam, as I knelt close to the man to hear what he was trying to say to me as his men looked on.

I wanted that photo, but it was not worth the discomfort it would cause a man already in great pain. Maybe I should have taken his photo before he saw me. I had hesitated a second too long and to have taken it afterwards would have been unethical if not simply cruel. And I was certain that if I tried now, his men would have protested in a physical manner.

As Larry Burrows, the celebrated Life magazine photographer, once said with much distress after photographing American wounded, “Sometimes one feels like such a bastard.”

Burrows, a kind, bespectacled English gentleman who was a mentor to us younger photographers working in Vietnam, felt war photography was an intrusion into a suffering subject’s innermost feelings.

“It is very unpleasant,” he said, “but I’m trying to show other people what is happening in Vietnam. People here do suffer. If I can convey that in photographs, then I have made a point.”

After 12 compassionate years of covering the Indochina war, Burrows--along with photographers Henri Huet, Kent Potter and Keisaburo Shimamoto--was killed in a chopper shot down over Laos in 1971.

The dangers and dilemmas that confronted photographers covering the Vietnam War are recalled anew in “Shooter,” a TV movie whose co-writer and co-executive producer (with Stephen Kline) is David Hume Kennerly, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his combat photography there. The film airs Sunday at 9 p.m. on Channels 4, 36 and 39.

For those of us who went to Vietnam to take pictures, “Shooter” is like attending a nostalgic police lineup of people we knew, loved and hated. Although the story is pure Hollywood-homogenized Vietnam, the characters, the situations and the humor are so authentic that it was equally as painful as funny for me to watch.

Those were dangerous and bad times, but, yes, there were some jubilant times as well. And the Saigon of “Shooter” looks so much like the Saigon of the ‘60s you can almost smell the nuoc-mam and the flowers on Nguyen Hue.

The scenes in “Shooter” dealing with the actual shooting of photos are so well crafted that they brought back a flood of memories--some very sensitive and uncomfortable.

There is one scene where the principal character, Matt Thompson, gets smacked in the head with a rifle by an outraged infantryman after Matt discreetly shoots one frame of the GI’s dead commanding officer being held in the arms of his radio man.

Under the same circumstances I would have acted as Matt does--unless, of course, I was asked first not to shoot, as I was at Qui Nhon. Yet no matter how sensitive you would be in a situation, there were moments so private and so painful that you might be pushing it to try to squeeze off even one frame.

And sometimes things were so bad it was more of a priority to help with the wounded. I came back to Saigon once covered with blood after bandaging a Vietnamese man and his two daughters. I got no photos, but saved three lives.

While there were military units and individuals in units who treated photographers with courtesy and appreciation, there were others who got nervous when you showed up with cameras--an omen of possible bad things to come. I knew what they meant: Nothing made me more uneasy than when a colleague would shoot a few frames of me in the field. Possible obituary pic? Oh God, I hope not.

The Matt Thompson character is, of course, modeled after Kennerly, and we see a dashing, ambitious, prize-winning photographer complete with an abrasive sense of humor being pursued by women from the Delta to the DMZ.

I think it would have been more realistic to have shown Matt making a weekly trot down to the medics for a shot of penicillin. But I guess you can’t do that on TV--no more than you can show grass and opium being smoked by GIs and members of the Fourth Estate.

Ngoc, the Vietnamese lab man in “Shooter,” reminds me so much of Ngoc, the lab man for UPI in Saigon, that I’m surprised they didn’t show him nibbling on chicken claws.

There is Klause, the German photographer who is walking off with most of Vietnam’s Buddhas. In Saigon, I knew a German photographer named Horst Faas who collected two Pulitzers for the Associated Press and collected for himself most of Vietnam’s prized ceramics.

There is Rene, a French photographer who goes into combat carrying a couple of Nikons and an AK-47 assault rifle. In one scene he returns to the bureau and hands in his film. “I shot six rolls of film and three VC,” he says without missing a beat.

As in “Shooter,” such war lovers were not appreciated by other photographers because their conduct could endanger our non-combatant status.

All civilian photographers were issued an MACV (Military Assistance Command Vietnam) press credential--a non-combatant ID card. Phuoc Van Dang, one of AP’s top combat photographers, once sent MACV a report and photo of an American photographer carrying and using an AK-47 rifle in the field. The command pulled his press card and he was sent home.

Later Phuoc was shot in the eye by a North Vietnamese soldier. Almost mortally wounded, Phuoc pleaded with the Vietnamese marines he was with not to harm the frightened enemy soldier. They shot him anyway.

The character I most identify with in “Shooter” is Stork. Stork is getting close to leaving Vietnam and grows progressively more cautious and superstitious, even seeking the advice of a fortune teller, who reads his future from chicken entrails.

I always carried a “lucky charm” given to me by a loved one before I left for Vietnam. When two photographer/friends grew mustaches and were subsequently killed (Bob Ellison of Newsweek at Khe Sanh in 1968 and Ollie Noonan of AP near Da Nang in 1969), I felt it would be a bad omen to grow a mustache. (I grew one when I returned to the United States.) I also had my fortune read by an Indian-Hindu astrologer who advised me to leave Vietnam. I was already planning to do so.

But the humor of “Shooter” is a cover--like a fresh gauze bandage applied to an open wound. No matter how much gauze you lay over it, the blood slowly seeps to the surface, reminding you that Vietnam was a real place where thousands of real people died.

There is another photographer in “Shooter,” named Growald, who is symbolic of the compassion that in fact lay quietly in the gut of every photographer who worked in Vietnam. Some had more than others, but I don’t know of anyone who wasn’t to some degree affected by the incredible amount of suffering and death.

And in the tradition of the late Larry Burrows, Henri Huet, Kiyochi Sawada and Kent Potter, some of us began to realize there were special photos that came not from us, but through us as we felt ourselves become part of a great universal consciousness of compassion. In the end, that was as good as any Pulitzer.

There is a Pulitzer bestowed in “Shooter,” as a matter of fact, in a way that pays tribute to all Vietnam photographers. Then comes a list of names--a dedication to all the shooters who didn’t return.

So many friends gone forever. After watching “Shooter,” I miss them even more.