First Photographs: Under Fire in the Landing Zone

I come to the business of tactical photography from a somewhat unusual foundation. For one thing, my father was a famous photographer when I was a kid and the last thing I wanted to do was to be a clone of him. So I have no formal photographic training at all, despite being around Ansel Adams, William Garnett, Dorthea Lange, Imogen Cunningham, and other important photographers while a kid and as a young man, and learned what I know on my own. And that began when I joined the Army and went off to Viet Nam in 1962, it was with a borrowed Rolliflex 120 camera and a "brick" of film and my father's admonition to try to photograph what I was seeing, in the tradition of "Dori" Lang who had made such wonderful images documenting the plight of migrant farm workers during the Great Depression and the "Dust Bowl" years of the late 1930s and early '40s.

What I was seeing then was the beginning of American combat operations in Southeast Asia, and the invention of the "air assault" and "air-mobility" missions by a very small number of Army and Marine Corps helicopter crews. My own company, the 8th Transportation Helicopter Company, worked out of the little town of Qui Nhon and flew troop insertion and resupply missions all over the central part of the country, all the way to the Laotian border, and occasionally beyond.

This photograph was made during one a combat troop insertion into a "hot," or defended, landing zone. The soldiers are Vietnamese army Rangers and they were tough, brave, professionals. They have "un-assed" the helicopter and are struggling through the mud of the rice paddy to a dike that they will then use to dash toward their objectives. We took a bullet in our engine compartment on the way in, but nobody was injured or killed on that mission.

So what was I doing making photographs when I was supposed to be manning my machinegun? Nobody has ever asked, but I wasn't goofing off. The helicopter is in my field of fire and I could not engage targets for those few seconds while we were in the LZ like this. I carried the Rollie pre-focused and with the exposure set on a strap around my neck. All I had to do to make this photograph was to glance down into the finder, adjust the framing, and push the shutter release, and doing so didn't interfere with my mission. I was back on the gun when we lifted off, ready to fire within five seconds or so.

That was nearly fifty years ago. The pilot in the left seat of that aircraft was probably CWO Fred Bell, and he and many others with whom I flew back then are friends of mine today. Fred and the other pilots and the staff officers and NCOs "invented" the Army aviation mission as it is conducted today, and although the helicopters today are bigger and stronger, the air assault mission has really not changed much since we were doing it when this photograph was made.