THE BEST PHOTO FROM VIETNAM: ONE PHOTOGRAPHER'S DEFINING IMAGE OF WAR


As fellow troopers aid wounded buddies, a paratrooper of A Company, 101st Airborne, guides a medical evacuation helicopter through the jungle foliage to pick up casualties during a five-day patrol of an area southwest of Hue, South Vietnam, April 1968. This photograph is featured on the cover of the Associated Press' new book 'Vietnam: 


Like the soldiers he was photographing, Art Greenspon was in his 20s when he traveled to Vietnam to document the war. After five months in-country, Greenspon went on a two-day patrol with soldiers in the A Shau valley, just inside the Laotian border. There, after an ambush and subsequent firefight, Greenspon made a photograph that David Douglas Duncan, the famous TIME-LIFE war photographer, lauded as the “best picture yet of the Vietnam War.”


One week after that fateful patrol, Greenspon was wounded when a spent shell hit him in the face. Greenspon returned to the U.S., worked as a photographer for the The New York Times, and transitioned to a successful career in finance.


But he wasn’t done. At the age of 69, Greenspon earned a masters degree in clinical social work with the goal of helping veterans. “I know how hard it is to recover from PTSD, trauma and addictions,” he says. “In the final years of my life, I am dedicated to helping troops recover from the horrors of war.”


TIME asked photographer Peter van Agtmael to speak with Greenspon about his career. Van Agtmael, age 32, has spent the past seven years documenting the United States’ extended conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as their affects back home. Their edited conversation appears below.


Peter van Agtmael: Tell us about your background. Why did you become a photographer?


Art Greenspon: My father had an old Zeiss Ikon he brought back from World War II. I loved it, but he would never let me use it. Instead he bought me a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye. I have fond memories of taking over the downstairs bathroom making contact prints under the red light we screwed in above the sink.


While I was working at WCBS-TV in New York I drove the old-time cameramen crazy asking them how their cameras worked and why they were shooting this or that angle. I was more interested in what they were doing than in some of the bullshit stories I had to cover. I quit the glamour job in TV news and took one as a darkroom assistant in a small commercial studio paying sixty dollars a week. I was happy as a clam!


Why did you go to Vietnam? Tell me a little bit about your time there before taking the famous picture.


The biggest news story in the mid-Sixties was Vietnam. On the weekends, I’d go out into the streets to shoot the protest and the support-the-troops demonstrations — but I always seemed to come away with better snaps of the “Support Our Boys” folks.


Every Memorial Day, my dad would take the whole family to see the parade in Bridgeport, Connecticut. His eyes would well up with tears every time an American flag went by. He obviously had been very moved by his own war experience and my brother and I had been raised to honor and respect our country and the men and women of the armed services. I had no strong personal feelings one way or the other on Vietnam at first, but I knew I would never find the “truth” at home. The truth was over there in Vietnam.

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