Through a Lens, Darkly

In “Dispatches,” his nightmarish memoir of covering the Indochina War, journalist Michael Herr describes Vietnam as “a dark room full of deadly objects.” Now, nearly 27 years after the war’s frantic finish, another door to that room has swung ajar, revealing not just a hidden chamber but an entirely new wing, lined from top to bottom with images that are alternately beautiful and brutal, revealing and beguiling:

A pair of Viet Cong guerrillas laying mines in the Mekong Delta, their chiseled faces taut with resolve. A forlorn villager helplessly cradling a 15-year-old girl’s lifeless body. Communist troops outflanking a desperate squad of South Vietnamese soldiers, probably recorded in the last few seconds before they died. A young woman rationing fish sauce to a crowd of North Vietnamese peasants, in a scene full of quiet luminance as an old Dutch Master painting.

Taken from the new book “Another Vietnam: Pictures of the War From the Other Side” (National Geographic, $50), these striking images view the 30-year conflict from the looking-glass perspective of America’s erstwhile enemies, the North Vietnamese. Co-edited by American photographer Doug Niven, “Another Vietnam” contains many pictures that have seldom been glimpsed by Western eyes.

Though a few ran in Hanoi newspapers and journals during the war, many others never were printed, either because they were deemed technically unexceptional or they didn’t fit the Communist government’s propaganda line. The book, Niven says, seeks to resurrect not only a cache of historic images but the names of the largely anonymous photographers who made them, names like Vo Anh Khanh, Mai Loc and Nguyen Dinh Uu.

“One thing I noticed is, after all these movies and all the books we’ve read, and all the Time-Life collections of pictures from the war, I still didn’t have a picture of what the enemy looked like. It was this faceless enemy living in the jungle and it was very abstract,” says Niven, 39, speaking by phone from his Santa Cruz home. “The wonderful discovery I made was that it wasn’t just people wearing black pajamas.”

With the book’s publication in February, a war that seemed to have bequeathed its cultural legacy to posterity decades ago has popped open like “an enormous Pandora’s box,” writes Niven’s collaborator, Tim Page, a legendary British-born Vietnam combat photographer. Niven believes the newly rediscovered photos add a crucial dimension to a war that was exhaustively covered by Western media at the time and has since been replayed through pop culture--but almost always from an American point of view. “The Vietnamese government is still struggling to arrive at an ‘official’ version of the war,” Niven says. “Maybe we in America are struggling with the same issue.”

By chance, another exhibition of Vietnam War imagery is on view through June 30 at the Perfect Exposure Gallery in Koreatown. “Nick Ut: From Hell to Hollywood” examines two sides of the work of veteran Associated Press photographer Huynh Cong “Nick” Ut, who was born in what was then South Vietnam but has lived in Los Angeles since 1977. Splitting its focus between the Indochina War and Ut’s frequently humorous candids of Tinseltown celebrities like Sly Stallone, O.J. Simpson and Robert Downey Jr., “From Hell to Hollywood” juxtaposes third-world agony with first-world absurdism.

Included is a haunting series of photos Ut took on the afternoon of June 8, 1972, in Trang Bang village, 30 miles northwest of Saigon. Ut witnessed the accidental napalm bombing of Trang Bang by South Vietnamese pilots and the subsequent flight of refugees from the fiery destruction. The central figure in his most famous image, which won a Pulitzer Prize, is of a 9-year-old girl, Kim Phuc, screaming in pain as she runs naked down a country road.

By many accounts, Ut helped saved Kim Phuc’s life by driving her to a doctor for help. The two subsequently became close friends, touring the world together to talk about the photo and the events that produced it. She calls me ‘Uncle Nick,’” says Ut, 51, a friendly, unassuming man who still carries around shrapnel fragments in his left leg. “Sometimes I look at her picture, I cry by myself.” Despite the trauma of those years, Ut says, he’d like to cover the current war in Afghanistan. “But it’s too cold for me. Plus today the pictures are like propaganda. I don’t think you see any more pictures like the Vietnam War.”

For many who experienced it directly, the Vietnam War is like a delayed-fuse bomb that detonates long after its initial hit, exploding across space and time. And to the hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese immigrants living in Southern California, the war is no artistic abstraction. For them, every image of the conflict is politically loaded, a painful reminder of friends and family lost, homes destroyed, lives torn apart.

Some vowed that the war’s “ghosts” would be laid to rest by Grenada, by Panama, by Operation Desert Storm. Instead they rose again after Sept. 11 in the debate over whether the deserts of Afghanistan might morph into another American military “quagmire.” Vietnam is a war whose next chapter is constantly being rewritten, whose photographic icons, even now, are being reshuffled and reedited.

That’s not surprising, according to Susan D. Moeller, a University of Maryland journalism professor. In her book “Shooting War: Photography and the American Experience of Combat” (Basic Books, 1989), Moeller writes that at least since the Spanish-American War, still photography has bared “the essence of war for Americans.” Even in today’s media climate of sound-bite saturation and 24-7 video streaming, she argues, still photographs retain a unique ability to encapsulate the way we experience and remember wars. “Still photography has contributed the most icons of war to our consciousness,” Moeller writes. “Photography ... transports war into the safety and intimacy of our living rooms ... it brings war home.”

To American viewers, the photos in “Another Vietnam” may seem to have arrived through a time warp, beyond the black hole of our omniscient media culture. While a number of images had been preserved by the Vietnam News Agency and its successor, the Vietnam Artistic Photographers Assn., many others were stashed away in closets and old ammunition cases or stuffed under sinks. If the photographer bothered to preserve his work at all, it was likely to be some faded, yellowing prints or a handful of negatives tucked in a plastic bag. Niven says he had to “sit and drink a lot of tea” with the photographers before they’d trust him and open their scrapbooks.

North Vietnamese photographers shared many obstacles with their Western equivalents, Niven says, including censorship and the constant threat of being booby-trapped or blown away. But they had additional problems. Instead of lightweight Nikons and Leicas, most hauled around bulky, 1940s vintage Kodak press cameras, or East German models with a single fixed lens. Film was always scarce, and unlike their Western counterparts they couldn’t hop a helicopter back to their editorial offices.

One photographer judiciously made a single roll of film last the entire war. Another, Nguyen Dinh Uu, rode his bicycle back and forth between Hanoi and the Demilitarized Zone that formerly separated North and South Vietnam, logging hundreds of round-trip miles while dodging bullets and bomb craters. As far as formal training, Niven says, the photographers ran the gamut from those who’d trained in Moscow or Eastern Europe to those who’d barely picked up a camera before.

“A number of these guys were familiar with composition and lighting and contrast,” Niven says. “So when they saw a situation that had those elements and also the elements of war and telling a story, they wanted all those elements to work together at the same time.”

Those formal skills unite impressively in images such as Le Minh Truong’s pictures of NVA troops descending a cliffside stairway in Quang Binh Province, or ascending a canyon through shafts of sunlight in the Truong Son Mountains, along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. They’re also present in Vo Anh Khanh’s stunning print of a makeshift Viet Cong operating theater in a mangrove swamp, an image whose grave subject matter is softened by its exquisite half-tones and almost hallucinatory composition.

Many of the photos are unabashedly propagandistic--smiling peasants serenading troops, young women making lethal booby traps--meant to illustrate the Communist narrative of a national war of liberation. “North Vietnamese images are really in that sort of communist socialist-realist tradition,” professor Moeller says. “They look so mannered and studied to our eyes.”

On the other hand, Moeller says, many early images of the war made by Western photographers were “literally wrapped in the flag.” “You have stories told by Larry Burrows of photos he was forced to take for Life magazine, of making the American flag really prominent in pictures of U.S. boats going up and down the Mekong.”

From the 130 images in “Another Vietnam,” Niven says, he hopes that a few “will be added to our collective memory,” images on a par with those by Western photographers that are pinned to America’s moral consciousness: Malcolm Browne’s 1963 photo of a Buddhist monk setting fire to himself to protest the war; Eddie Adams’ picture of a South Vietnamese general executing a Viet Cong prisoner on a Saigon street during the 1968 Tet offensive; or Ut’s photo of Kim Phuc.

“I think there’s a good five pictures in this book that deserve to be put on the same icon level,” Niven says. “That was one of my goals from the beginning, because I think many of these pictures are as good as their counterparts.” But others might prefer to see those images stay buried.

On a late spring afternoon in East L.A., Gilbert Guyenne welcomes a reporter to his business, Mimosa Nursery, a bower of exotic fruit trees, water plants and caged Asian singing birds spread under a row of power lines. “If something is involved with the North Vietnamese we stay away,” says Guyenne, who was born Nguyen Dung Tien in the former South Vietnam, fled the country when Saigon fell to the communists in 1975 and is the author of two novels dealing with Vietnamese history, “Mercenaries” and “Black Gold.”

Seated at a low concrete bench with his co-worker Ho Dang, who worked as a photographer for the South Vietnamese army during the war, Guyenne gingerly flips through a copy of “Another Vietnam,” never letting his eyes linger for more than a second or two. Ho Dang, who says he knows Ut, describes the Kim Phuc image “a true picture, a true story.”

“But recently the North Vietnamese used that picture [to get] more sympathy for the Vietnamese people, that a bad thing happened to the Vietnamese people,” Ho Dang protests. “We are journalists, so we respect the truth. What really bothers me is if someone tries to bend the picture. That really hurts me, that really bothers me.”

Smiling and shaking the reporter’s hand, Ho Dang says he must get back to work. “He is not upset,” Guyenne insists. “We are not upset at all.” But a few minutes later Ho Dang wanders back. “I’m too emotional,” he says. “I can’t do my job.”

Tapping the book with his finger, he faces the reporter with a look of pained finality. “I have a question,” he says. Suppose an image went out from Afghanistan of another young girl like Kim Phuc, a victim of a U.S. bombing raid. “Now how would you feel if Osama bin Laden said, ‘The American people have to take responsibility for that?’ So that’s a real picture, but Osama bin Laden made the picture like more and more important, try to take advantage.

“My question is, how do you feel? And do you think the American people will be happy to see it?”

Ho Dang’s eyes are red. Somewhere, a door closes.

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“Nick Ut: From Hell to Hollywood” continues through June 30 at the Perfect Exposure Gallery, 3513 W. 6th Street, Koreatown. Gallery hours are 11 a.m.- 4 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays. Admission is free. Call (213) 381-1137.