If it is true, as critics such as Susan Sontag and John Berger have asserted, that photographs replace memory, then certain images from the Vietnam War era will remain seared into our collective consciousness long after the battles, the generals, the presidents and the political rationales, have been consigned to the rubbish heap of history. Saigon isn't even Saigon any more.
    What will remain are pictures. Not so much of the conduct of the war, the wounded and the dead; those pictures are remarkably the same from all wars since Timothy O'Sullivan focussed his camera on the "harvest of death" at Gettysburg. The pictures that with us are the unexpected ones, the ones that capture players acting out their small but terribly human dramas on the fringes of Great Events. And it is a matter of no small irony that it was precisely these photos, taken by American or South Vietnamese photographers, that helped turn the tide of the war against the interests of the United States. We saw things we never thought we'd see. So we asked questions of our government and our military that they never thought we'd ask. When the answers unforthcoming or unsatisfactory the fabric of civilian support, necessary for any prolonged war, began to unravel.

1. A SAIGON STREET - 1968
    In 1968, as our leaders were assuring us that the enemy was all but defeated, that there was, in the now infamous phrase "light at the end of the tunnel," the North Vietnamese army and the Vietcong launched coordinated attacks on every major city in the south. This became known as the Tet offensive. Apparently there was no "light." Apparently there was no "tunnel" either. There maze, a quagmire, and no apparent way out.
    The photographer Eddie Adams caught one episode that seemed to embody the shock that Americans felt at that time. The Saigon police chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan raised his pistol to the temple of a suspected Vietcong and, just as he squeezed the trigger, Adams snapped the picture. Loan stands coolly erect on the left while the young prisoner, his hands bound behind him, stands to the right, his face a twisted grimace. Loan's long slender arm unites the two figures in an elegant dance of death. Between them, in this formally symmetrical composition, is a wide, nearly empty street. The sun is bright, shadows dapple the pavement.
    This summary execution was, no doubt, an act of frustration; the chief of police, his world collapsing around his ears, can find nothing better to do than to shoot a bound prisoner in the middle of the street. Bang! -- just like that.
    The arrogance of the act is truly stunning. Was Loan unaware of the photographer nearby? Was he indifferent? Did he think no one would care about one pathetic young prisoner in a plaid shirt? The photo was widely distributed in the U.S. People cared. After all, Americans were dying to preserve what was supposed to be a democracy in South Vietnam. Americans' view of democracy in Southeast Asia may have been somewhat naive but it certainly did not include shooting suspects in the street, no matter how mad you were at them.
    That the futility, the thoughtlessness, of this killing was a kind of microcosm of the American experience in Vietnam was not lost even on an American public not usually comfortable with symbolism. In the end the Tet offensive was a military failure but Nguyen Ngoc Loan - - through the quick eye and hand of Eddie Adams--may have accomplished more for the North Vietnamese that day than they did for themselves.

2. TRANG BANG - 1972
    Five children run down a road toward us. Their mouths are open in cries of terror. One girl holds the hand of her younger brother. One girl is completely naked, having torn off her clothes because they were on fire. The smallest child turns to look back at the oddly pointilist wall of smoke that was once his village. Some soldiers are on the road behind the children. Their uniforms look American but they are South Vietnamese. They seem to shuffle with no great urgency away from the devastation they have just left. They pay no attention to the screaming children.
    The Vietnamese photographer Nick Ut placed himself in the middle of the road near Trang Bang -- where a village was bombed with napalm - - so that the children were running toward the camera, and toward us as we look at the picture. It is a wide, horizontal shot with deep focus, perfectly yet asymmetrically balanced. The boy in the left foreground, his mouth gaping in a black arch like the entrance to a temple, seems about to spill out of the picture into our own space. The genius of the photograph is that it is both panoramic and immediate, historical and personal.
    At this stage of the war we were told that our military involvement was "winding down." We heard words like "vietnamization." But when Nick Ut's picture appeared the same old questions came tumbling out. Is this how a war winds down? Isn't napalm used on terrain? When did it become an anti-personnel weapon? Was the napalm dropped from U.S. aircraft? Why do we bomb villages in a country we are trying to save? And, inevitably, if we're the "good guys," the carriers of the flame of righteousness, and we drop napalm on children, what do the "bad guys" do?
    The young girl, Kim Phuc, who ran naked from her village, and was immortalized in Nick Ut's photo, survived the war and now lives in Canada. Much of her body, like her former country, remains permanently scarred.

3. Pietà: OHIO - 1970
    By the late nineteen-sixties student unrest had become a worldwide phenomenon. In France a national strike organized by a coalition of students and workers brought down the De Gaulle government. In Mexico City students were killed during protests before the 1968 Olympic Games. The "Prague Spring" disappeared in a wintry gust of Warsaw Pact tanks. City streets from Tokyo to Paris saw large scale "riots" although whether it was the demonstrators or the police who rioted remains a question for debate to this day.
    In the United States there were significant clashes at the Pentagon in 1967 and the "Battle of Chicago" during the Democratic National Convention in 1968. Increasingly, college campuses became the principle staging grounds for the "war at home." Administration buildings were occupied, ROTC buildings were burned, list of demands were read, voices were raised, fists were pumped, fingers were pointed. Some campuses closed down completely.
    In most countries student activism was a way of life (high school students have recently organized national strikes in Italy and France), but there was no such tradition in the United States. Nobody expected College students to actually be paying attention when they read Jefferson, or Thoreau, or the First Amendment. College students were supposed to drink beer and throw up; politics was a game for adults.
    The first post-World War II generation saw things somewhat differently. Raised in a period of almost unprecedented optimism, educated -- in unprecedented numbers -- to understand and believe the purest ideals of Democracy, we were impatient with the old Cold War rhetoric. The discrepancies between the ideals we were taught and the actualities of American life were all too apparent. The Civil Rights Movement (via the scintillating double-play combination of Thoreau-to-Ghandi-to-King) had taught us the mechanics of effective, non-violent protest. We now turned these techniques on the Vietnam War.
    While student rage was being amply expressed, the outrage that this provoked in many older Americans simmered and then seethed. They had survived the Depression, and then had to fight the most fearsome war in history. They had worked hard to send their children to college -- an opportunity most of them never had- - and now these "kids" were growing long hair and beards, playing guitars, smoking pot, using foul language, and trashing their campuses! The stage was set for a backlash. Police truncheons and tear gas were already familiar props in this drama but no one could have predicted where and how, and with what ferocity, the last act of the tragedy would be played out.
    Most Americans had never heard of Kent State university. It was not one of the elite schools, Berkeley, or Columbia, where the most intense confrontations had taken place. It was not on a coast, east or west; it was in America's heartland. And it was not 1968, it was 1970 when this backwater of the Peace Movement decided to have its own protest. By now these things were almost absurdly ritualized. The ROTC building was set afire. The protest spilled into the town where some shop windows were broken. The Mayor asked the hard-line Governor, who had already called the students "brown shirts" and "communists," to call in the National Guard. Armed with live ammunition, the Guard advanced; the students retreated across a parking lot. The Guard fired tear gas, but the wind was blowing the wrong way. Students hurled the cannisters back at them. The Guard withdrew to a safer position. The students threw rocks. A good time was being had by all.
    Then the Guard opened fire. The students thought they firing blanks, or firing over their heads. It quickly became clear that this was not the case. The Guard had fired into the crowd. Four students died. Ten others were wounded.
    John Filo was not a professional photographer. He was was walking around campus with his camera that day taking pictures for the yearbook. He saw a young woman kneeling over a fallen student like the iconography of a pietà scene in traditional Christian art. She flung out her arms and cried out in anguish and despair. The photographer snapped the picture.
    It may be the most disquieting image of the entire era. The slain student lies at a diagonal, perfectly straight, his face turned away, his arms tucked under him as if he were asleep on a cold night. What appears to be his blood forms a rivulet, and then a puddle. Others mill about nearby. They look dazed. One glares at the camera. None look at the dead student. Only the girl shows emotion. Her expression makes clear, as Picasso knew, that grief is not pretty.
    Irony piles on irony. Young men avoiding the military draft by serving in the National Guard shoot students for protesting the very war that the Guardsmen were avoiding. (There is a picture of a smiling Guardsman making a surreptitious "peace" sign). Or the Hegel/Marxist interpretation: the Guardsmen were working-class guys, who probably couldn't afford college, venting their resentment at spoiled, rich kids. Some Guardsmen will later say that they heard an "order" to fire. Or that they heard "shots" fired at them. A formal investigation by the Justice Department will discover no such order and no shots. More likely, nervous and poorly led, they simply panicked.
    There were ironies from the other side as well. The girl in Filo's picture was not a student, she was a fourteen-yea runaway from Opa-locka, Florida; she did not know the young man with whose death she would be linked for the rest of her life. He had just told her his name: Jeff. Two of the dead students were very likely not taking part in the demonstration at all, just watching.
    And so on. We have volumes of information but little understanding. For many people, staring in disbelief at John Filo's picture on the front pages of their newspapers, this was a kind of last straw. If Americans started killing Americans over this war, maybe there was something wrong with the war after all. Maybe it was poisoning us. Maybe it just wasn't worth it. At the same hard-liners' lines hardened. (I heard the father of a friend say that "those students deserved what they got because they shouldn't have been there.") Apparently exercising one's right to freedom of speech and assembly was a crime punishable by instant death by firing squad. Such was the temper of the time.
    Still, one sensed a weakening of conviction. On a balmy day that Spring nearly a million people converged on Washington D.C. for a "Moratorium" to protest the bombing of Cambodia (in the convoluted logic of the day the war could be shortened by extending it). For the first time older people, middle-Americans who had stood by their government all this time, were present in significant numbers. They had finally seen enough. At the head of the march was a group called "Vietnam Veterans Against the War." Nobody could call them draft dodgers, or commies, or pinkos, or spoiled rich kids. The Peace Movement now had all the ammunition. The President, of course, missed all this because he was barricaded in the White House behind a wall of city buses parked end to end. The President of a republic had to be protected from its own citizens. People new to the Peace Movement began their educations in American democracy that afternoon. All the more so when, toward evening, when the TV crews withdrew to develop their film for the evening news broadcasts, the D.C. police waded into the crowd with the usual billy-clubs and tear gas (this observer made a tactical withdrawal) but even the ritual gassing and clubbing seemed half-hearted. They were going through the motions. Rather like the war.
    And what of the "four dead in Ohio?" Neil Young wrote a song about them. The novelist James Michener wrote an exhaustive study of the incident. Their graduation pictures were published; four ordinary looking young people: smiling. There were even pictures of them shortly before the shooting. The one who looked like a cheerleader in her white sweater, collecting funds for the peace rally in a coffee can; the one sitting on a curb with her dog "Heavy"; the one who was an Eagle Scout. They did not look fire-breathing radicals. They looked like people we knew. They looked like us.
    The difference was that they were dead. The trajectory of the Vietnam war had reached all the way to Ohio, just in time to intersect with four incomprehensible destinies. Their names--Allison Krause, Jeff Miller, Sandy Scheuer, Bill Schroeder--are not on the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, nor even on the small one grudgingly erected at Kent State. Their families were eventually awarded a slight monetary "settlement." They tried for years to get the state, the Federal Government, somebody to apologize to them for the loss of their children. No apology was ever tendered.
    John Filo's picture, bearing the title "Kent State Death," won a Pulitzer prize and became an anthem, an icon of the sixties, included in compendia of Great Photos of the Century. Mary Vecchio, the girl kneeling over Jeff Miller's body, the teenage runaway with daisies on her jeans, had a Warholian fifteen minutes of celebrity. With her face beamed all over the country she was shortly recognized by the police and sent home. This being America, her image soon found its way on to T-shirts. Her family (this being America) sued to obtain forty percent of the profits.

4. SOME MOVE - - OTHERS DON'T
    The Vietnam war was extensively, relentlessly filmed. At times it seemed like a McLuhan-esque war, like there was no point in doing anything unless a camera was there to record it. The journalist Michael Herr mentions field commanders who were eager to send out patrols (i.e. "get some people killed") when camera crews were visiting. (Think of Francis Ford Coppola appearing as The Director, in his film Apocalypse Now, shouting instructions to soldiers under fire). As video is more appealing to television news producers than photos are, we saw the war in nightly installments, a ten year mini-series.
    We saw Buddhist monks immolate themselves to protest the Diem regime and saw, with horrified fascination, how long it takes for a human being to die by fire. (Ingmar Bergman used this footage in his classic film Persona). We saw men in business clothes firing automatic weapons when the U.S. Embassy grounds were penetrated during the Tet offensive. We saw a callow, fair young man slip a flower into the rifle barrel of a helmeted MP standing guard in front of the Pentagon; a literal demonstration of "flower power" in a gesture of perfect absurdist grace. (We never did see the Pentagon "levitate" as the Yippies promised it would on that occasion, but some of us are convinced that it gave a slight shimmy).
    There are now documentary films to chronicle every aspect of the war era, miles and miles of footage, an industry of compilation, juiced with voice-over narration and period songs on the soundtrack by Jefferson Airplane and The Doors. The trouble with motion pictures, however, is that they move. Riveting though it may be, an image flickers on the screen and is gone, replaced by another, or by nothing. We may be riveted but the film moves on. Like everything that exists in time, its time is limited; like life, like us. The still photograph exists outside of time; it never changes, it never passes. In the end, as Susan Sontag has famously observed, it does not narrate, it does not even record--an instant, plucked out of reality, can't really be trusted to tell a story -- rather it becomes a piece of history in itself. Arrested, and arresting, it becomes an artifact, an object of contemplation.
    So Nguyen Ngoc Loan's pistol will remain poised at the head of the hapless prisoner, the children of Trang Bang still run toward help, never quite arriving, and the girl who just happened to be passing through Kent on a Spring day will keep her vigil, pleading with us to do something.

Frank Cossa
Department of Art History
College of Charleston