Vietnam: The Real War

The Vietnam War has left a deep and lasting impression in American life, from its impact on the men and women who fought in it, to the journalists and photographers who covered it, to the millions of Americans who protested against it or supported it. Thanks to an uncensored press, the world knew and saw more of this war than any in history before or since. The Associated Press made an unprecedented commitment to reporting the conflict: It gathered an extraordinary group of superb photojournalists in its Saigon bureau and these men created one of the great photographic legacies of the twentieth century. Collected here are images that tell the human story of the Vietnam War, as we watch the American presence in the war swell from a trickle of military advisers in the late 1950s, through dramatic operations involving thousands of soldiers in the 1960s, to the fall of Saigon in 1975. These are pictures that both recorded and made history, taken by unbelievably courageous photojournalists. In a moving essay, writer Pete Hamill, who reported from Vietnam in 1965, celebrates their achievement, focusing on five masters who took many of the photographs in the book: Horst Faas, Henri Huet, Eddie Adams, Nick Ut, and Phuoc Van Dang.