REQUIEM: By the Photographers Who Died in Vietnam and Indochina.<i> Edited by Horst Faas and Tim Page</i> .<i> Random House: 326 pp., $65</i>

For reasons of my own I didn’t want to be alone when I looked at the photographs in “Requiem By the Photographers Who Died in Vietnam and Indochina,” so a friend, Wayne Karlin, turned the pages with me, and together we went back inside the old war. One hundred and thirty-five photographers from all sides were killed in the region during the French Indochina war in the ‘50s and up through the fall of Saigon and Phnom Penh in 1975. A former Marine in Vietnam and a novelist, Wayne stalled when he came to a photograph by Larry Burrows. He had seen it before, and still he stared. “To me that was everything. It’s like something out of my own memory,” he said.

In “Requiem,” there are photographs that Burrows took for Life magazine, on a rescue mission known as Yankee Papa 13, the squadron call signal. The young crew chief in the helicopter, his M-60 machine gun jammed and on the floor, a dying Marine pilot is yelling to his gunner, that schoolboy face now contorted. In the next photograph, the crew chief is alone in a supply room, head down, weeping. Under heavy fire, he and Burrows had taken a huge risk to rescue the pilot of a downed ship. They could not help the wounded from the other three American choppers also shot down.

Feb. 10, 1971, the day that Burrows was shot down in a helicopter over Laos with the remarkable Henri Huet of Associated Press, cut deeply into other journalists, but we always knew that great talent didn’t protect you.

“Requiem,” compiled and edited by two legendary survivors of the American war, Horst Faas, who was AP’s chief photographer in Southeast Asia, and Tim Page, then a freelancer, is not intended to incite fresh grief or the old furies over U.S. involvement. What it honors is the passionate commitment of these photographers to their work, sometimes so obsessive that you feared for them, especially for those who began to be devoured by the war.

While many of the photographs are horrendous, a few show something close to sweetness. There is one of an Army chaplain celebrating Mass outside for troops seated on the ground, looking like large and thoughtful children. The film almost looks charred; the photographer, Hiromichi Mine, died two days later in a huge explosion, that film still in his camera.

Because “Requiem” has been compiled with such skill and respect and care, it almost transcends any other book of war photographs. Often enough we see for ourselves what the photographer saw on the final frame. Robert Capa, in northern Vietnam during the French war, had been taking pictures of French Union soldiers on a sweep in tall grass when he stepped on an antipersonnel mine in May 1954.

There is a bitter irony in Jean Peraud’s 1952 photograph of a Vietnamese prisoner, lying on the ground, bloodied hands held together over his face, so that only his eyes, wide and fearful, can be seen. Peraud, who survived a concentration camp in World War II, was captured in the French surrender at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and managed to escape from a truck moving the captives, never to be found. He preferred death to being a prisoner again.

So persistent were the editors of “Requiem” that they even persuaded the Vietnamese in Hanoi to give them access to their photographic archives, a request that was initially refused. For the first time, we see the work taken under conditions even more harrowing and more dangerous than those faced by most Americans. In text accompanying the photos, William Tuohy writes that aspiring Vietnamese combat photographers were trained by the Vietnam News Agency for a year. They were taught to dismantle their cameras blindfolded and to construct replacement parts. They were considered soldiers first, photographers second. They moved down the Ho Chi Minh trail into South Vietnam. Some were assigned to help the Liberation News Agency in the South, operating with the National Liberation Front, or Viet Cong.

One of the most talented was Tran Binh Khuol, who accompanied Viet Cong units against South Vietnamese soldiers and sometimes led the nighttime raids. In 1963, using a flashbulb, he managed to photograph guerrillas lifting a rocket launcher through water for an attack on government outposts. The lead man seems startled to be having his picture taken.

Every photographer, regardless of allegiance, is given a biography in “Requiem.” These include the Cambodians who worked for Western news organizations and were often of great value, none more so than Sou Vichith, who in 1974 photographed two Cambodian girls and a boy facing their doom. They have been seized by Cambodian government troops who are laughing and touching the girls. Only the boy shows sorrow. The young women are very staunch. The three were slaughtered, and Sou Vichith himself died after the great purge of Phnom Penh by the Khmer Rouge.

Despite the photographs of savagery, including those of torture, there are some that show young soldiers moved by what can only be recognized as love. They were nearly always the medics who bore a terrible burden. In Henri Huet’s series, published in Life, a wounded American medic keeps working although his left eye is so thickly bandaged he can only peer out of the other eye. Leaning against him is a more gravely wounded American, whom he feeds out of a C-ration can and whose faces he carefully wipes. In an account by Huet and an AP correspondent, the medic, from Richmond, Va., said he had extended his enlistment. “My mother got kind of put out with me for doing it,” he said, “but I didn’t want to leave the rest of the guys here.” In June 1966, his luck ran out, and he was sent home with severe injuries. Wounded twice on assignments himself, Henri Huet had four years left to live. What a huge legacy he, and all the others, left us.