There
is Robert Capa, the most famous photographer of war, blowing up on a mine
in Indochina in 1954. He was at Dai Than, south of Hanoi, for Life magazine
with lieutenant-colonel Jean Lacapelle.
The column stopped. “What
is it?”, asked Capa. “Viets everywhere”, was his answer. In the distance
the fire of the artillery could be heard, machine-guns rang out, some gunshots
going off from time to time. It was hot, the people on the jeep were getting
bored. “I'll get out for a moment, call me when we leave”, he told Lucien
Bidard, “Le Gros Lulu”, the prince envoy of the newspaper France Soir.
He nodded and stretched on the seat. There were neither villages nor trees
around, the place was open, barren, there were no risks of attacks. A few
seconds, and a deafening burst… Bodard understood immediately. Capa was
lying on his back, his left leg a few metres away, he was still breathing.
Life's reporter John Macklin
did not understand. He was on another jeep.
A second lieutenant approached
him and, with no apparent emotion, told him in French: “The photographer
is dead”. “Pardon?”, was his reply. “He is dead”, said again the other.
Macklin turned to a colleague, almost enjoying himself: “This guy is trying
to tell me that Capa is dead…”. The second lieutenant then tried in English,
articulating every letter: “He is dead…”. Only then did Macklin get out
of the jeep.
There is Jean Peraud, sergeant
photographer on strength at the General Staff of the French army. He was
in his thirties and was in a German concentration camp during World War
II: he knew what it all meant. In Indochina he was the leading photographer
of the Army. Unlike Capa he was a soldier.
Once, while he was patrolling
around, he found himself face to face with a Viet. He photographed him
while the other, surprised, stayed there pointing his rifle against him.
The first who shot was Peraud. In 1954 he was parachuted at Dien Bien Phu,
where the military stupidity of top-ranking officials set up a huge stadium,
20 kilometres long and eight wide… They were on the field, the mountains
surrounding it as tiers of seats belonged to the enemy.
He stayed there until the
end, the outposts giving up one after the other, the bayonet-fighting extreme
defence, the surrender. He was taken prisoner and began his journey towards
the “re-education”. While he was on the enemy truck, he told Pierre Schoendoerffer,
future film director, his fellow-soldier and fellow-prisoner: “We must
get out of here. I couldn't bear to be tortured and humiliated again. I
feel I wouldn't make it”. They jumped off the truck as soon as they could.
Schoendoerffer was trapped
in a puddle, seen by the guards of another truck and taken again. Peraud,
who had walked some metres in the forest, was then put to death there.
There is Larry Burrows who
covered 50 war missions for Life magazine and who showed the Americans
the colour pictures of what the Government was strenuously trying to deny
in the black and white of diplomacy, that is that they were involved up
to their ears in Vietnam.
It was 1963 and people saw
napalm, military advisers arguing with corpses in the background, jumping
off helicopters, questioning for the first time… It was the war with its
cruelty and violence reflected in the eyes, the face and the tears of the
soldiers who were involved but did not know why.
Larry, who was English,
began his career at 16 as a tea-boy in a London's photographic laboratory
during the battle of England, the bombardments, the raids, the shelters,
the dark city of rationing and promiscuity… In Vietnam he used to wear
a jacket he had invented with an endless number of pockets so that he could
carry as many rolls as possible. He used to slip others in his socks.
His only vanity consisted
in having a bath and dressing up for dinner whenever that was possible.
“It's a question of civilisation”, he explained. Lucien Bodard, who had
turned war dirtiness into his own motto, judged him a dandy.
Burrows died at 45 in 1971:
the helicopter he was on was shot down by the Vietnamese anti-aircraft
guns in Laos.
There are Sean Flynn and
Dana Stones, the thirty-year-old easy riders of photography. They used
to follow or anticipate the movements of the American army on their motorbikes.
Sean was the son of the handsomest Robin Hood of the movies: his father
Errol Flynn embodied the genius and the recklessness of Hollywood's star
system.
He had his father's height,
body, temper and madness and inherited a delicacy of behaviour from his
mother, the French actress Lili Damita. He was born in Palm Beach, grew
up in Paris, felt perfectly comfortable in sophisticated London as well
as in wild Africa. He re-invented himself as a photographer in Saigon and
played a great role. Stones was his perfect double: he was reflexive, scrupulous,
methodical.
In April 1970, the Khmer
Rouges captured them in eastern Cambodia and nothing was ever heard of
them again. Twenty years later Tim Page, a photographer of the Associated
Press, of Upi and of Paris Match, shed light on their end in a movie called
“Darkness at the Edge of Town”. Thanks to private research and records
that the CIA made public, he managed to find the place where they had been
held as prisoners in Kompong Cham's province. Thirteen months of captivity
before being killed with a shot on the back of the neck. Three teeth and
a filling was all that remained of them.
Tim Page and Horst Faas
are the authors of this “Requiem. By the Photographers Who Died in Vietnam
and Indochina” (published by Jonathan Cape), over three hundred pages and
as many pictures that tell the story of 135 photographers who lost their
lives in those places for those wars from 1950 to 1974. Wars. The last
releases.
Sometimes, in fact, the
pictures were the final ones, taken just before their author fell to the
ground, blew up in the air, found himself without arms or legs. Today Hanoi's
people accept the American Express, the Club Mediterranée is building
a holiday village near Bao Dai's old imperial palace, Giap has tea with
retired American generals and the State that fled from the roof of its
own embassy in Saigon is now here as a prospective trading partner, ready
for new investments and new profits. Everything has changed with respect
to the future past.
The first pictures that
Everette Dixie Reese took in Vietnam in the early 1950s seem to tell the
story of a country wrapped by dream and sleep. There are temples, patrols
on elephants, the deltas of still rivers, moored ferry-boats, monks praying,
the statues of gods and demons with young couples wedging through, half-naked
children who play, the city streets where old shop-keepers with a sunshade
lean on their nephews wearing west-style clothes and carrying a French-speaking
magazine in their hands.
It is peace wrapping the
storm, it is the “happy war” as Bodard renamed it in his trilogy “La guerre
d'Indochine: l'enlisement, l'humiliation, l'aventure” (published by Grasset),
the most moving, sharing and critical homage of the last war epic of his
country (Algeria will be the “dirty war” that the French won on the field
– thanks to the Indochinese experience – but lost politically). It is a
war that existed but did not appear, kept on the mountains, with some terrorist
attacks, where one learns to live with the military apparatus day by day
and makes a fortune on it.
It is the decline of a colonial
power that does not understand what the enemy is building, that ignores
the idea of a people's army, that is not aware of a slow but constant encirclement.
It is the “happy war” of the Ritz Hotel, of call-girls, of opium and cognac,
the empire sinking into itself that rejoices in dissipating and in being
dissipated. There is a sense of decay and the idea of some sort of immortality,
too. Those who deceive themselves by thinking of having won the most awesome
war, that second conflict that shook up the world, do not understand that,
besides the victorious powers, unknown abysses open wide.
As if evoked from an underworld,
liberation movements, fondled and supported when they were helpful but
that are now being sent back into the same hell they once were, brought
back in line as poor, too greedy and untrustworthy relatives, are now coming
to the forefront.
They must wait, though,
the West can still rule, is not ready yet to give up. It is not like this,
it will never be like this anymore. It will take decades for France to
heal that wound. Those overseas lands belong to her historical memory,
are part of her geographic and existential record. y: '.
This is something most Americans
could not feel. Indochina's French veterans felt proud of having fought,
of having been taken as prisoners, of having been defeated with honour,
whereas the American public opinion and the army saw it as a useless nightmare
where the enemy became the “good” and the United States was the “villain”,
where countries fought but did not admit it and when they did it was not
believed.
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