Booknotes

SUSAN MOELLER, AUTHOR, "SHOOTING WAR": It's a photograph of a photographer. It's a self-portrait actually taken during the Vietnam War in 1968 -- probably the critical year during the Vietnam War. And it seemed appropriate for the book because this is a book about war photography. But it's also a book about how war photography came to be so important to Americans. And so it seemed interesting and critical to have that sort of duality. A picture of a war scene that itself had the photographer in it.

MOELLER: Minium Domcoum.

MOELLER: Well,, I guess, because he's one of the critical photographers from the Vietnam War -- his very important body of work.

MOELLER: Well,, it happened when I was in graduate school. I was at Harvard and had been a photographer previously. I had been a photo-journalist here in Washington D.C. And when the time came to make a decision about what I wanted to write my dissertation on -- classic dilemma. Actually, it was sort of a funny story. I had spoke to a number of the Harvard professors about -- not anything about war photography but about doing photography as sort of a social documentary photography. Pictures that we might have seen from the Depression. And Harvard said that sounded fine. But I had been an undergraduate at Yale University. Harvard is, as we all know, one of the best institutions in the country, but it doesn't have a single American art historian. Perhaps I should go back to my undergrad institution and find out what the competition had to say.

So I went down to the competition. And they said, well, this photography and social documentary photography subject sound good, but have you thought about war photography. And light bulbs went off and a bolt of lightening hit, and I said, yeah, actually, that's a better topic. I had spent just a very short period of time when I had been a photo-journalist in El Salvador and Honduras. And so that experience had led me enough to know that it would be interesting personalities and as well as an interesting subject.

MOELLER: Yes. I wrote the dissertation and then spent about a year revising it, making it a more accessible, more interesting book than the dissertation probably was.

MOELLER: When I was a little more than a toddler, maybe.

MOELLER: Well,, it was one of those Kodak instamatics. You know, those sort of black plastic ones that if you drop they shattered into a million pieces. And the first photographs I remember taking was at the New York's World Fair in 1964 and '65. I was not very old. But I was aware at that age that it was a historic occasion. And I think in some elementary fashion I wanted to document it. I wanted to say, OK, this is an event I was at and these are the United States Pavilions -- this was whatever the Pavilions were that seemed interesting.

MOELLER: Yes. We were always being taken to museums -- sort of all over. And both my mother and my grandmother were artists of some small talent. And I had an aunt who was quite a well-known painter. So it was in the family.

MOELLER: Well, as a photographer that would have been between -- after I had graduated from undergraduate school actually here in Washington. I started out and I -- let me think what probably was the first job. I think what it was -- I was hired by a coalition of groups who had some bills coming up in Congress that were to protect migrant workers, and they wanted someone to go around the country to photograph migrant worker camps and migrant workers in the field so they could use the reportage. I would also be writing as well -- the images were to be used as Senate testimony. And I had already been working with these groups as sort of a writer and consultant and added photography -- thereby, a career was born.

MOELLER: No. A few times I've photographed the aftermaths of it, but I've never never been there when the shelling's going on.

MOELLER: Right. Well,, often I get the question what's a nice girl like you doing in a subject like this? And people, when they think of war photography, all they think of is the horror and the grimness. But despite the the inherent grimness of the subject, there is something that is fundamentally positive about the process and the process of photographing war and the prints -- the photographic prints themselves. And that's where the connection to Anne Frank comes in. Because I think war photographers, really like Anne Frank, believe that people are really good at heart. And that if you can only show enough people what is really happening that, somehow, in some small way, what's really happening may happen better. There may be some change. It's a start.

MOELLER: Well, yes and no. There are photographers who are apolitical -- there're photographers who are quite political from a literal perspective or from a conservative perspective. There are some photographers who are very articulate -- some who are visually-oriented and perhaps aren't so verbal. But I think if you did have to pick a thread it would be this one that I mentioned. This belief that it's important to document the world -- particularly this aspect of the world.

MOELLER: I use Olympus equipment.

MOELLER: 35mm.

MOELLER: Always something with people in it. I've never been someone who's particularly interested in sort of abstract landscapes or cityscapes. If I would be shooting at a family event or something like that -- I'd be more interested in people's emotions, people's interaction. And those are also the same kind of images I think that I was particularly drawn to of the war photographs. It was not those that were of the destruction of buildings or the more static pictures of armaments stacked up or whatever -- but were those that attempted to describe the soldiers or the civilians experience.

MOELLER: Longer than I thought, but shorter than you might think. It was two years as a graduate student, then another year of revision.

MOELLER: Is it ever finished? I guess more or less last year. I mean, even when I was doing page proofs and galley proofs and so forth, there are footnotes that you want to add in or you realize that this is not quite right and so you're tinkering with it. So all total it was really four years. But three years stapled to the computer writing.

MOELLER: Well,, that's a good question. There are five wars starting with the Spanish-American War and moving more or less up to the present. So it's the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, Korea and Vietnam. And then there's a short epilogue about Grenada and a very short couple page prologue about the Civil War. People have often asked me when I've traveled around giving lectures as to why I didn't start with the Civil War because most Americans when they think of a book that attempts to look at war photography, they think of Matthew Brady's famous photography from the Civil War.

But what I was particularly interested in this book was in showing how Americans -- how we at home -- saw war. I'm not interested really in all the war photographs that were ever taken. I'm interested in those that those of us sitting our arm chairs in the living room see. Well,, the Spanish-American War was the first war that was really seen at home. If you want to put it that way, it was the first living room war. And the reason for that is that in the late 1880's and the late 1890's -- the Spanish-American War was in 1898 -- was when the half-tone was invented. It's a process that we still use today. It's a process of how we get photographs into print.

MOELLER: A half-tone means that you take a photograph print that you'd get back from the photo store and you superimpose a dot pattern on it. So if you took a magnifying glass to your daily newspaper you'd see the blacks would have dots very close together and the lighter areas would have dots very far apart. It's a way of simply printing a photographic print without using a continuous tone.

MOELLER: Well,, it was actually invented in 1888 -- but it wasn't adapted for use by the mass market press -- in other words, they couldn't really put it on those big rollers the newsprint goes through -- until the mid 1890's. So it was only really before -- right immediately before -- the Spanish-American War that the photograph has gone to print.

MOELLER: No, I went to the publications -- same kind of publications that I went to throughout the 20th century. Which are mass market -- national market -- publications.

MOELLER: Well,, those of your audience who may be my age or older -- Colliers Magazine, which only died in the 1960's, made its name from photography from the Spanish-American War. Scribner's Magazine, Harper's -- names that are still in some households at least household names. And many of these for the first time -- instead of sending illustrators to cover an event -- a lot of these publications had since Harper's been in existence more or less since before the Civil War. But in the Civil War they sent artists like Winslow Homer to the battlefield to take drawings. And those were in turn turned into engravings. Well, in the Spanish-American War these various publications sent down both illustrators and photographers into combat. So you had an illustrator such as Frederick Remington, the famous Western artist, who went down to cover Theodore Roosevelt and his charge up San Juan Hill at the same times you had very famous photographers like Richard Harding Davis or Jimmy Hare.

MOELLER: I'm teaching history at Princeton.

MOELLER: Well, I teach American History, for the most part. I also have taught a couple of courses -- actually, one course -- over in the American Studies Department. But I primarily teach 20th-Century History.

MOELLER: Yeah. Clean sweep, I guess.

MOELLER: I was born actually in a hospital in East Orange, and my family lived in West Orange, and my grandparents lived in South Orange.

MOELLER: Well,, I didn't last too long in New Jersey. We almost immediately moved to outside of Philadelphia and then more or less at the end of elementary school my father was transferred -- he's a businessman -- was transferred overseas to Belgium. And I went to school a little bit south of Brussels, Belgium. And then my senior year in high school we moved to Switzerland to Geneva. So it was a great way to grow up.

MOELLER: Well, there are 40 pages -- I think there's 60-odd photographs.

MOELLER: Yes. Consecutively.

MOELLER: Well,, this was a photograph of probably -- it looks like a heap of laundry, but it's really one of the most famous photographs in the Spanish-American War. It's the picture of two dead Rough Riders. Your viewers may recall that Theodore Roosevelt was probably the most famous of the Rough Riders. It's the role that propelled him into the White House. And the man on the left -- you can barely see that he has hobnail boots sticking out from under those blankets -- is a man named Hamilton Fish Jr., and his father was Secretary of State under Grant, I believe. He had volunteered for the war and had been killed on the very first battle that the Rough Riders were in.

The reason why this photograph is particularly important is first because it depicts as much as you can see that that body of probably the most famous person who was killed during the war. But it's also, I think, an indication of how the photographers felt about the men who were killed during the war. Often we tend to think about war as in cliches. World War I was a war to end all wars and so forth. Well, the litany for the Spanish-American War was a war for duty and destiny. And the sense -- it was probably actually the most popular war in American history. More popular than even World War II.

And the sense was that this was everyone's chance for glory. And when the photographers went to Cuba to photograph the war, they took photographs that protected the soldier's nobility. They didn't want to show pictures of men bloodied by combat. This particular photograph of the two bodies under the heaps of blankets -- the photographer who took that made the conscious choice. He covered the bodies up. Made the conscious choice to photograph them that way so the viewers at home his audience wouldn't be able to gawk.

MOELLER: Boy, just a couple weeks.

MOELLER: Alright. This is actually photograph number -- that's photograph number two. This is the same.

MOELLER: This is number three in the book.

MOELLER: This is those same two bodies in the foreground there again -- you can see sort of a man's hobnail boots sticking out from under the blankets. In the background is a circle of officers. This is taking place before another battle and the man in sort of the dark shirt -- he's got crossed suspenders on the far right -- is Theodore Roosevelt. This was a photograph that was not allowed to be published. And the reason why is because in this photograph you see men talking and laughing as if the two dead boys don't exist. And that was considered to be unthinkable -- that you didn't have respect for the dead.

MOELLER: This is sort of a classic war photograph. I think many of us, when we think of wars in years gone by, maybe we've seem movies of Waterloo or whatever, of the Civil War, and this is what we think of. We think of cannons and billowing smoke. This is a picture of one of the artillery engagements during the war. The big wagon wheel you see is attached to a canon and the reason why everything is so light in the sort of upper right is because it's the billowing cannon smoke. And this is, I think, indicative of the kind of photograph that the photographers wanted to take. It was a very romantic view of war. Perhaps, maybe the other reason to mention it is because the only images of combat that really exist for the Spanish-American War -- you have to remember that at this point the camera equipment was very slow, it was very large and didn't have the kind of fast film and perhaps long lenses that we are used to now -- so there are no pictures of Theodore Roosevelt charging up the San Juan Hill. There are no pictures of men jumping out of trenches or whatever. The only photographs that we have -- that one could consider combat -- are those of sort of cannon's firing.

MOELLER: More than you might think. I'm trying to remember -- there were probably a couple hundred. But of those -- and I may be misstating, I'm not sure I remember my own facts here -- but of that number, as was true for all wars, even though there may be a lot of photographers, only a handful were really critical. There were very few outlets where -- photography as I mentioned it was a very new technological phenomenon, and so the outlets for photographers were really in cities like New York.

MOELLER: No, the first two were taken by one photographer and ...

MOELLER: Burr Macintosh, yes.

MOELLER: Well, not especially, except he was one of the first photographers to come down with yellow fever. There are many more soldiers who were killed during the Spanish-American War because of yellow fever than because of the actual combat injuries. And the reason that he came down with yellow fever is that when the troop ships arrived off the coast of Cuba, the correspondents were not allowed to go on shore with the troops, and Burr McIntosh wanted to get a photograph of the men striding ashore. And he smuggled his cameras into one of the men's boats and had them row his cameras ashore, and then he dove over the deck and swan into shore not realizing how far he was out and also that the undertow was going the wrong direction. By the time he got into shore he was pretty exhausted and his health was more or less shot. So he was a prime candidate for coming down with fever.

MOELLER: I probably know less about him. He, on the other hand, was one of the better photographers of the war and was a photographer that was used both in, I think, some of the major magazines like Scribners and Harpers and so forth.

MOELLER: World War I.

MOELLER: Well, cameras got slightly smaller, slightly faster, but it was less the technology -- although that was important -- but more that the photographers had learned how to photograph war. Right after the Spanish-American War there were several other national conflicts -- or international conflicts. There was the Boer War, the Russo-Japanese War, Boxer Rebellion. So photographers were sort of jaunting around the world and they realized that they could not use the large format cameras that they had taken to the Spanish-American War. They needed ...

MOELLER: Well, many of the photographers in the Spanish-American War used a camera that took 8 by 10 negatives. So just think of an 8 1/2 by 11 sheet of paper is more or less that size. Not only that, but there were glass plates. So you can imagine how careful someone had to be, and also, you're carrying 20 glass plates, how heavy that was. So what the photographers had learned between the Spanish-American War and World War I was that it was just untenable to carry that large a camera. What they really needed to do was go down to the smaller format cameras which were available. The largest would be 5 X 7 and, I guess, even smaller -- sort of index-card size.

MOELLER: This is a photograph of a burial of an American officer. There you can see the casket covered with the Stars and Stripes. And there are a few funeral wreaths in front of the coffin. Honor guards standing behind it. This was the burial of one of the first men killed after the United States entered the war, which was of course in 1917. The reason for showing this picture is to demonstrate the absolute blanket censorship that was in in operation during World War I. There was throughout the entire war -- from '14 to '18 it was not allowed -- you were not allowed to show any pictures of the dead or even of any pictures of Americans wounded -- unless the wounded were already receiving aid and unless they were totally cleaned up. In other words, you could not show pictures with blood, with people with perhaps a missing limb or so. You also saw very few pictures of combat. Most of the pictures were, as I said, absolutely censored.

The idea being that none of the powers that be -- whether they be American or French or even the central powers Germany, Austria, and so forth -- wanted to inform the public at home exactly what was happening on the fighting front -- as we all know from hindsight, how absolutely a bloody a war it was. Well, as you can imagine, the concern of the military authorities was that if the public at home saw exactly what was happening on the fighting front, all support for the war effort would totally dissipate.

MOELLER: No, Catol and Herbert, like another group called Underwood and Underwood, are two of the most prominent picture agencies that were in existence. Most of the photographs are anonymous. They were anonymous in as much as we don't know who took the pictures. That was another effect of a censorship -- you didn't know who took the pictures. The pictures that did appear in the publications were released often months after the event they pictured. And the captions themselves were very obscure -- would never identify an individual officer, would never identify an individual place. You would not see Americans with the Eiffel Tower in the background because they didn't want to show that Americans were in Paris, for example.

MOELLER: Oh, I think this is one of the sort of humorous, quietly humorous, photographs of the war. This is, I believe, titled something to the effect of "Americans ready for a gas attack." They look like bugs, but they're wearing gas masks. And this was an example of the kind of photography, the kind of photographs, that was passed off as combat photographs. To us it looks like if you take their masks away they are posing for some sort of high school year book. It doesn't look like they are anywhere near ready to go into combat. But this was about as close to the fighting lines as we saw during the war itself.

MOELLER: Yeah. This is, I think,, one of the best and most successful pictures of the war. I think that this is the way that we as historians or we as learning from history think about World War I. We think of men going over the top. Men going over there laden with the sort of knapsacks and the guns and those funny bowl shaped helmets. But this was not, as I've said before, indicative of the photographs from the war. It's an anomaly that we saw anything of, as I say again, this close to the front or or even this compositionally well-contrived.

MOELLER: I think it would either have to be World War II or Vietnam because the photographs from those wars were the most outstanding and also because they were also the wars -- well, World War I or World War II, rather -- the war in which I was able to begin to interview some of the photographers themselves. So it's always more interesting not only when I can look at the photographs at they appeared but can say, "Alright, Mr. Carl Midens, how did you take this picture and what were you thinking of?"

MOELLER: No, actually while I was writing the Spanish-American War, the very last survivor -- and was not a photographer but was some teenager who had lied his way in to fighting in the Spanish-American War -- he died at the age of 109, and he died while I was writing that chapter.

MOELLER: I did talk to a couple of the photographers who were in the Signal Corps Photographic Division. And many of the photographs from all the wars were military photographers. Many of even the civilian publications -- whether it be the New York Times or Time and Newsweek -- did us military photography. And I did in World War I talk to some military photographers, but as far as I know, all of the civilian photographers had died by the time that I was writing the book.

MOELLER: Oh, boy. Numbers are not my strong suit -- that's why I didn't go into math.

MOELLER: Well, in the Spanish-American War, something to the effect of -- including the Philippines and including all of those who were killed by disease -- it's less than 5,000. And World War I -- I'm going to have some military buff stand on my head -- I'm not going to hazard a guess.

MOELLER: Yes. What had really happened was that 35mm camera had come in. Many of the photographers who we associate with World War I -- World War II, rather -- were using the new 35mm cameras -- Lika cameras and context cameras. There were still some larger format cameras-- two and a quarter cameras -- that were being used. Speed graphic was sort of the classic. But almost all of the photographs that we remember from Life Magazine, for example, were 35mm cameras. And what that meant was that photographers were freer than they ever had been before. They could take pictures under all kinds of lighting circumstances, because the film was faster. They could take pictures at the dusk and the dawn as well as in the bright in a bright light of daytime.

MOELLER: Actually there are some color photographs from World War II. There are some from the Italian front, I believe -- well, there are some both from the Italian front and from the Pacific.

MOELLER: Sure.

MOELLER: Well, this is probably in a way the most pivotal photograph from the war. It was printed in September, 1943. And the reason it's pivotal ...

MOELLER: Life Magazine, yes. The reason it's pivotal is that it was one of the first three photographs that were released of the American dead. So it's the first time in 50 years that Americans saw Americans who had been killed in combat. Up to that 1943 date, censorship for World War II was the same as for World War I. You couldn't show graphic pictures of any kind.

MOELLER: This is the classic photograph taken by Joe Rosenthal of AP of the flag being raised on Mt. Surbashi on Iwo Jima, and I think the one point to say here is that it is not a fake. It is a second picture of the second flag raising on Iwo Jima, but it is a legitimate un-posed photograph of the second flag raising. And the reason for a second flag being raised was the first flag that was raised was very small and fighting was still going on on the Island and the Admiral in charge of the fighting wanted a larger flag from the ships so that all the soldiers could be inspired by the American flag -- so they brought up a larger flag to raise.

MOELLER: It's a tough photograph. It's one of the last from the war. It's probably the last combat picture in many ways from the European front. It's a photograph of an American soldier killed on the very last day of the war against Germany in 1945. And it's from a series of photographs -- it's the very last one taken by probably the most famous war photographer of all, Robert Cappa.

MOELLER: Well, maybe because he had the most charismatic personality. He was also the photographer -- you might see a picture of his later -- that is most famous for his pictures of a Normandy D-Day invasion.

MOELLER: 25 is a classic example of how Americans use photographs against their enemies. Particularly, Americans had a campaign to rev up hate against the Japanese enemy and used photographs such a this to legitimate the kind of characters they would instill. Stereotypes that we are more used to seeing in the sort of poster campaigns.

MOELLER: I believe so.

MOELLER: Published in Newsweek. Yeah. It was a military photograph. Here you had the classic sort of bare-chested square-jaw American with his rifle trained on a rather myopic round-glasses, buck-toothed, receding-chin Japanese soldier. An attempt by the Americans to show a sort of the kind of prime physical specimen of Americans and the rather weak degenerate humans that characterized the Japanese race.

MOELLER: Well, in the 1920's you have the creation of what we might call the "news magazines" which would be Time and Newsweek and so forth. Those publications that use photographs a lot but are text heavy. Then in the mid-1930's you have Life and Look. And it's really those four magazines that continue from the 1930's really up to the present day to dominate American's coverage of war and coverage of world events.

MOELLER: Well, this is probably the most horrific photograph from the book and it is a photograph from the Guanada Canal of a Japanese skull that's sort of speared on top of a Japanese tank. When I interviewed him about this, he mentioned that he was with a a platoon of soldiers who were walking through the jungle, came out into a clearing and saw this and he took it. Saw this scene and he took the picture of it. It was published in Life and perhaps created the greatest amount of furor of any photograph in the war. It received a lot of support from people as well as a concerted outcry from others.

MOELLER: This is perhaps a photograph that shows the kind of of care, the kind of patriotism symbolism that was still evident and still operating in in World War II. The caption was "Crucified to a stretcher." And here we have a man who was literally crucified in the crucifix position with his arms outstretched but is actually wearing a crucifix. It's actually a good example of how photography could capture the symbolism.

MOELLER: This was in Look Magazine.

MOELLER: Yes, that's correct.

MOELLER: Ah, that famous photograph from Robert Cappa that I was telling you about earlier. Of the Normandy D-Day invasion -- you can barley make out there's a man crawling ashore and those sort of spiky things in the background are tank traps.

MOELLER: No, Robert Cappa died in 1954 as perhaps one of the very first victims of the Indochina War. He was photographing the French Indochina War right before the siege of De In Ben Foo. He was killed by a mine.

MOELLER: Well, I'm not sure whether he's exactly my favorite but he's certainly one of my favorites. But I think that he is perhaps the most well-known of all the photographers who ever covered war -- at least in this century.

MOELLER: Well, not much changed except that you did now have the introduction of a Nikon camera. And what that meant is you had a camera that could accommodate a lot of different kinds of lenses. So you begin to have for the first time a wide ...

MOELLER: Japanese camera. A wide use of telephoto lenses, wide angle lenses. So in other words, it's much easier to take closeups of men in combat without actually sitting on top of the soldiers themselves.

MOELLER: Well, color was around but was almost never used in the Korean War -- actually less than it was in World War II. It was not really until the 1960's in Vietnam that you really begin to see color. I think the big difference between Korea and World War II was less that the technology had changed and more that American attitudes towards the war itself had changed. World War II was the war that everyone felt needed to be fight fought. It was a good war. But the Korean War people had much more ambivalent feeling about -- so the photographs that came back mirrored the the ambivalence.

MOELLER: This is one of the very first photographs to come out of Korea. It's a photograph of an American P.O.W. who has been trussed up with telephone wire and has been assassinated at the side of a road.

MOELLER: U.S. Army photograph that appeared in several publications. As you can imagine, it horrified the country. It was one thing to see Americans killed in action. It was another thing to see Americans who seems like they have killed in cold blood.

MOELLER: Well, this, I think, is an excellent example of what I was telling you about. The difference between how Americans felt about World War II and how they felt about Korea. When this photo appeared in Newsweek, a letter writer wrote in after it appeared and said this is "the" photograph from Korea just like the flag raising on Iwo Jima is "the" photograph from World War II. Well, the Iwo Jima photograph of the flag raising is a photograph -- it's a very patriotic, very heroic photograph and that photograph is much more of a photograph that's compassionate, but not heroic.

MOELLER: Hank Walker was a staff member of Life Magazine.

MOELLER: Photograph number 48 is perhaps a good example of some of the photography from Korean War that looked ahead to the Vietnam War. It was unusual in Korea to see -- the picture depicts an American training his gun on some Chinese communists who were there lying in the ditch in their sort of quilted clothing. I think it's it's an example -- oh, I was going to say that in Korea it is very rare to see just distinct landscape. The kind of landscape that we're going to see very frequently in Vietnam.

MOELLER: No I didn't.

MOELLER: You caught me on that one. I'm not sure -- I don't believe he is, but I don't want to kill him off prematurely.

MOELLER: Well, this again is in some ways a forward-looking photograph to Vietnam because Margaret Burke White was one of the most famous and also one of the very few women photographers in the war. And she is also one of the few photographers who was interested in a part of the Korean War that didn't receive much attention -- which was was the guerilla war. This is a photograph of a South Korean soldiers carrying a dead guerrilla -- North Korean guerrilla -- who's being brought back to headquarters in order to be identified. We don't tend to associate guerrilla with the Korean conflict. But there was indeed a major sort of component to it.

MOELLER: My age too.

MOELLER: Well, I think it probably depends on who you talk to. I do think that the Vietnam War -- maybe because it's the most recent war and also in some ways is the most visual war -- related to it primarily visually. That people do tend to associate -- when they first think of war -- they'd call up Vietnam images.

MOELLER: Just really a proliferation of different kinds of 35mm cameras. Instead of only having the Nikon cameras from Japan and the Lika camera from Germany, you began to have Minolta's. So there were proliferation of equipment.

MOELLER: Color was used, yes, for the first time. Particularly in the 1960's when money was no object, color was used lavishly.

MOELLER: Well, unfortunately that's financial considerations. It's a big book and we wanted people to be able to afford it.

MOELLER: It does make a big difference to print color. Although, as I suggested, many of the very famous photographs from Vietnam were not in color. Actually, I think there is only three photographs that should be in color that we had to translate into black and white. The reason for so many black and white photographs that were taken during the war was that the wire services -- in other words, AP and UPI who transmitted their photographs through the air -- more or less they couldn't use color. Or at least, it took much longer to transmit color photographs, so they always shot in black and white. So many of the famous photographs that we remember from the war -- and we'll see a few coming up -- were originally in black and white.

MOELLER: Nope. Don't make it worse than it is. It's $25.95.

MOELLER: $29.95.

MOELLER: Well, I think it's about the upper end of the trade press. But, hey, you get a lot of photographs and you get a lot of information so ...

MOELLER: Yes.

MOELLER: They were great. They really have been both from the beginning stages of helping me edit the book and conceptualize changing it from a dissertation into a book that the man on the street might be interested in reading. They were very helpful, and they've been very helpful more recently in helping me publicize and market it.

MOELLER: Larry Burroughs is probably the photographer from the war. He was an Englishman, very gentle man, who tragically was killed as a result of the war. He was one of many war correspondents who was killed. He was killed in a helicopter accident over Laos. But the reason for showing this photograph is not only that it's probably from his most famous photo essay that appeared in Life Magazine in 1965 -- it's a photograph from a series on a helicopter crew. One day in the life of a helicopter crew. But I think this photograph is a very good example of how technological war had become. And that was a good example of the combat photographs from World War -- sorry, from Vietnam. But we didn't see that type of technology evident in the previous wars that we were to see in Vietnam.

MOELLER: Well, this was one of the ones in color. That photograph that you're putting up on the screen there was originally cropped. The woman who is the photographer at the right of your picture was cropped out of the photograph.

MOELLER: Yes. This is another Larry Burroughs photograph. And it's the evacuation of a -- they're running up to an LZ, a landing zone, for a helicopter come-down and air lift this man back behind the lines.

MOELLER: This is one of the, I think, three or four classic photographs of the war.

MOELLER: It's 55. It's a photograph of a little naked girl running down the road in Anluck. She's just torn her clothes off because there was a napalm strike.

MOELLER: Nick Ut.

MOELLER: A photographer who was photographing for AP. And I think it's one of the photographs that those of us who lived through the war remember when we think of the war. It's one of the icons, if you want to put it that way, of the Vietnam War.

MOELLER: It appeared in the Philadelphia Enquirer. This was a photograph from 1963 of a Buddhist Monk sitting himself aflame in the streets to protest the government.

MOELLER: AP photograph. Malcolm Brown worked for AP. He then, several years later, worked for ABC, then returned to Vietnam -- actually working for ABC in Vietnam and then returned, working for the New York Times, where he still is. But that photograph being one of the first graphic images from Vietnam was not pictured everywhere. The very first photograph that we saw of that little naked girl running down the road -- that was on the front pages of all the newspapers around the world. As was this quite famous photograph from the Tet Offensive of 1968 which was taken by Eddie Adams, also of AP, a photograph of a South Vietnamese general shooting an alleged Viet Cong lieutenant.

MOELLER: Well, it was very controversial for all kinds of reasons. It raised questions about how far photography go. How much should the media show us. But more importantly than the journalistic issues, it raised questions about was this a war that condoned that kind of action. Was that a war that Americans wanted to participate in?

MOELLER: It was General Lone.

MOELLER: Yes. It really did.

MOELLER: Well, that's one of the most famous photographs from the My Lai massacre. And I think that all of these last four images that we've shown -- the My Lai massacre photograph, the photograph of the naked little girl, the photograph of the man being shot in the middle of the street, the photograph of the burning monk -- if you recall all of them, they are all pictures of Vietnamese civilians. And this is very unusual. Vietnam was the first war in which we saw photographs of civilians in any number at all. And the reason for this is that it was a way that the press of commenting on the war. It was a way of showing the American public, look, this is what -- we're not only killing enemy soldiers. It's not only American soldiers as well that are being killed, but we're also injuring women and children. It's sort of a moral commentary. I think one of the reasons why these photographs made such an impression is because they did deal with civilians. They dealt with the victims of war.

MOELLER: Ron Haberly.

MOELLER: Still alive.

MOELLER: No he's a hard man to reach, and you can understand why -- he doesn't want to talk too much about ...

MOELLER: Well, I just kept getting letters that were sent back so I can't really answer that. He did have some interviews very shortly after the photographs came out. But I think he's tried to remain private since then.

MOELLER: No. Actually with no other exceptions did I have any difficulty in speaking to photographers. Malcolm Brown, the one who did -- the photographer who took the burning monk shot, Eddie Adams, who took the assassination shot, the execution shot -- both of those photographers, for example, I talked to. And Larry Burroughs who took the first two photographs that we saw from Vietnam, although as I mentioned, he is no longer alive -- his son and his wife were very helpful in opening up his notebooks and files and speaking to me about his experiences during the war.

MOELLER: This is a photograph of -- it's very close to, I think -- it's Operation Prairie. You have the date in front of you.

MOELLER: '71. And was actually taken back, I believe, in 1966. This photograph -- as the caption appears in the book -- was released in Live Magazine as part of the memorial issue that was dedicated to Larry Burroughs after he had been killed in Laos. And this photograph, I think, is most notable for the relationship that's created here between the black soldier on the left and the white soldier on the right. Although blacks and other minorities participated overwhelmingly in the war -- and were overwhelmingly on the front lines as well -- there are relatively few images that came back showing blacks and showing minorities. And many photographs that did come back tended to emphasize the harmonious relations between the races rather than emphasize perhaps conflict that might also have been mentioned.

MOELLER: Boy, that's a tough question. That's like asking a mother whether she has a favorite child. No, I don't think I do.

MOELLER: Well, I guess I'm most interested in looking at photographs in context. I have a tough time walking into magazines -- or walking, rather, into museums and seeing photographs out of context on the wall as images of art, if they were originally taken as journalism. So I'm most interested in photographs in their original context, looking at them in Life Magazine or looking at them in Harpers Magazine or any of these other, now defunct, publications and seeing where they were in the page, what was the headline, what was the caption. Seeing them as the public at the time saw them.

MOELLER: Thank you sir.