Rare Vietnam War images from the winning side, 1965-1975

 

The history of the Vietnam War is one that has been complicated by politics, and it is a history that is still being written and rewritten.

The war involved a fraternal conflict between the communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) and the non-communist Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam), and spread to neighboring Laos and Cambodia; However, it was also a proxy war in the Cold War competition between the Communist bloc and the Western bloc.

North Vietnam was widely supported by the Soviet Union and China and their satellite states, while South Vietnam was supported by the United States and its allies. The echoes of the war spread beyond Vietnam and the countries participating in the conflict.

Vietnam was a transformative event and became an international symbol for the protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s.

The war had an acute impact that spread from Vietnam to other countries and continents, an impact that was temporal as well as geographic, reaching not only wartime but also postwar generations.

The history of the war has been partial, underpinned by American dominance of English-language historiography of the war and a focus on American policies and the American experience of the war, as well as mostly negative assessments of South Vietnam.

The so-called first 'television war', the Vietnam War was defined and shaped by the cameras and the courageous photographers behind them. The photographs collected in this article are part of the photographic book Another Vietnam: Pictures of the War from the Other Side and show the war from the Vietnamese perspective.

The book presents the perspectives of North Vietnamese war photographers who documented their people's 30-year struggle, first against the French and then against the Americans.

These photographs portray a society committed to victory at all costs, they show us courage, drama, determination and, often, a violent beauty.

While Western photographers had the most modern equipment and facilities, the Vietnamese worked with cumbersome old cameras, some of which dated back to the 1930s. Each roll of film was precious, so rare that one cameraman only took 70 photographs during the entire war.

Using household chemicals, he developed his photographs, in the open air or in underground tunnels, under the constant threat of B-52 attacks.

Many of these photographs have rarely been published in Vietnam, let alone the rest of the world. The book contains one hundred and eighty of these unseen photographs and is definitely worth having in your collection.