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Mark Jury was sent
to Vietnam in July 1969. This was not one of the military’s
wisest personnel moves.
Drafted into the Army, Jury was eager
not to fight in the war but to document it. For the next
12 months, armed with a trio of battered Nikon cameras and
supplied with 36-exposure rolls of Tri-X film by his Aunt
Nink in Pennsylvania, Spec 5 Jury roamed South Vietnam more
or less at will, unrestrained by rank, empowered by his military
press card.
His assignment as a photographer was nebulous,
and he took full advantage of his situation. Shooting film
instead of ordnance, he captured the “quiet war” beyond
the body count, the ambience of fire bases and hospitals
and rear-area offices. Mostly he caught the symbols and scrawls
of peace and rebellion of a new generation of soldier less
enamored of winning the war than with simply surviving his
tour.
When Jury arrived in country—he was assigned to
USARV-IO, one of the largest and possibly most irrelevant
information offices in the Army—the character and tenor
of the war were changing. The pursuit of victory, so elusive
and ultimately unachievable despite the reams of glowing
statistics promulgated by the Pentagon, was taking on new,
politically expedient guises: “pacification,” the
herding of peasants from villes in the unsecured countryside
into “safe,” controllable
hamlets; and “Vietnamization,” the shifting of
the burden of combat from GIs back to the Army of the Republic
of Vietnam.
With the inquiring eye of the photographer and
the sensibilities of the journalist, Jury explored the consequences
of combat, the contradictions, and the absurdities of the
war. His photographs and anecdotes tell more about what the
war was about, perhaps, than most of the photo spreads in
the newsweeklies and the three-minute stories on the nightly
news.
When he left Vietnam in July 1970, Jury had shot several
hundred rolls of black-and-white film. He went home to Clarks
Summit, Pennsylvania, to his wife and a baby daughter, and
set to work on what would become The Vietnam Photo Book.
It would be, in a sense, a yearbook of his tour of duty.
There
are no poignant depictions of battle, no scenes of carnage,
no bloody corpses in grotesquely harmonious array. There
are, rather, a remarkable assemblage of affecting images
that illuminate the human costs and unsettling truths of
the war, and the incongruities of life and death in the combat
zone.
This article was adapted from Bernard Edelman’s
preface to the second edition of Mark Jury’s The Vietnam
Photo Book, first published in 1971 by Grossman Publishers,
reprinted by Vintage, a division of Random House.
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©2006-
2011, Vietnam Veterans of America. All Rights Reserved. 8719 Colesville Road, Suite 100, Silver Spring, MD 20910