`Requiem': The Photographers Of Vietnam

WASHINGTON - They found Sam Castan's film on the body of a dead North Vietnamese. Developed and printed, the pictures of that day in 1966 show 22 soldiers just before the attack in which 18 of them - and the Look magazine editor and photographer - would die.

In the last frame of color film Robert Capa shot on May 25, 1954, anonymous soldiers in brown walk through a vast field of tall green and yellow grass that looks to go on forever. Some time later that day, colleagues heard a mine explode, and the legendary photographer was dead.

An elegantly dressed woman crouches on a chaotic street, her dying child in her arms. She sobs for help as Phnom Penh falls in 1975. The man who took the picture, AP photographer Sou Vichith, a Cambodian, was last seen walking with his family toward the killing fields. He has not been heard from since.

To view the moment of death is to intrude on the ultimate intimacy. To see, preserved on film, the harsh world as observed by someone just before that moment is profoundly unnerving - we walk with Capa, but unlike him, know the mine is waiting.

"Requiem: By the Photographers Who Died in Vietnam and Indochina" (Random House, $65) is a book commemorating 135 photographers from all sides who died in the French war in Indochina and the Vietnam War. It includes essays by David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, Peter Arnett and others who wrote about the war. An exhibit of pictures from the book is showing at the Newseum in Arlington, Va., and recently more than 300 family members and friends gathered there for a symposium and reception.

"This book is not a book about dead people and Vietnam," said co-editor and veteran Associated Press photographer Horst Faas. "It's mainly, to me, a book on an important chapter of journalism in which everyone who was involved could be proud of."

The book is that, but it is also about what happens to a person's work and memory after the person is gone. And, like all photography, it is about looking: The desire to see and document what the bloody, exhausted, furious, roaring center of war looked like.

Some of the pictures will be at least vaguely familiar, some of the names known. But many have never been Vietnam icons. Their negatives waited in attics and archives here and in Vietnam until photographers Tim Page and Faas began to look.

The book begins with pictures a U.S. government photographer and freelancer Everette Dixie Reese took in the 1950s. The sun sifts through monsoon clouds onto mountains and plains. On the terrace of a temple of Angkor Wat, a monk stands timeless.

But the future was stirring and Reese saw it. Cambodian peasants carve wooden dummy rifles for the local French-controlled militia. A man in a loincloth holds a bow and arrow. Reese was killed when a plane he was in was shot down over Saigon in 1955.

Beyond his mother's stories, Alan Reese had no memories of his father. "The pictures," he said. "That's what I have."

The book and exhibit had their genesis years ago in Page's attempts to memorialize a friend, photographer Sean Flynn. The son of actor Errol Flynn, he vanished on a road in Cambodia in 1970 along with photographer Dana Stone.

Page spent years tracking the fate of Flynn and Stone, discovering they were captured and held by the Khmer Rouge for more than a year. Their story, he believes, ended in a killing field.

In working the Vietnamese bureaucracy on behalf of the monument he wanted to build for photographers who died in the war, Page found himself in an archive of pictures by North Vietnamese photographers. Prints in hand, he approached his friend Faas, AP photo editor in Saigon from 1962 to 1973 and now AP's senior photo editor based in London. The two began work in 1991.

Page and Faas had names, dates of deaths, but in many cases not much more. Young Western photographers wandered in and out of Vietnam, drawn by excitement and the opportunity to take career-making pictures. Sometimes they died before anyone got to know them.

The North Vietnamese considered themselves soldiers first, photographers second. Their photographs were to be used as propaganda and are, as Faas said, "strangely void of horror." They were forbidden to show dead and wounded communist soldiers.

"Their combat stuff doesn't have the same intimacy as ours," Page said, "because they didn't see the war the way we do. They were going to die for their country - theirs was a glorious role."

More than once, people asked Life magazine photographer Larry Burrows if he had a death wish. How else to explain the decade spent, on and off, taking pictures in Vietnam?

"I think he dismissed it as ridiculous," says Russell Burrows, whose father died when his helicopter was shot down over Laos in 1971. "The combination of being in love with the place and the fact that it was such an important story is what tied him so thoroughly to Vietnam."

Bernard Fall, who survived the Holocaust and fought in the French Resistance, took half a dozen trips to Vietnam to research and to take pictures for his books, among them "Street Without Joy." When Fall was killed in 1967 on his sixth trip to Vietnam, he left three daughters under 10.

After his death, his wife, Dorothy, received the tape-recorded notes he was dictating Feb. 21, 1967. A transcript is included in "Requiem."

"Shadows are lengthening," Bernard Fall said into his recorder, "and we have reached one of our phase lines after the firefight and it smells bad - meaning it's a little bit suspicious. Could be an amb - "

With that, the tape ended. And so did Bernard Fall's life.