[Leica] Documentary Photography Book Review

[wayneserrano at earthlink.net (Wayne Serrano)]

On 5/18/04 11:48 AM, "George Lottermoser" <george@imagist.com> wrote:

> The following review of a major piece of Documentary Photography seems both
> timely and historically important:
> ----------------------------------------------
> Evidence of Things Not Seen
> 
> by CHRIS HEDGES
> 
> Agent Orange: "Collateral Damage" in Viet Nam
> by Philip Jones Griffiths
> 
> [from the May 24, 2004 issue of The Nation]
> 
> My father and most of my uncles fought in World War II. I grew up in the
> shadow of the war. But it was not the romantic war of movies and books,
> although this romance infected me as it did all of the other farm kids in my
> town. It was the war of the emotionally and physically maimed. My father, who
> had been an army sergeant in North Africa, went to seminary after the war and
> became a Presbyterian minister. When he spoke about the war you could almost
> see him push his rifle away. He loathed the military and especially the lie
> that war is about glory and manhood and patriotism. When our family visited
> museums he steered us away from the ordered displays of weapons, the rows of
> muskets and artillery pieces, which gleamed from behind cases or roped-off
> areas.
> 
> He was an early opponent of the Vietnam War. During a Fourth of July parade in
> the farm town where I grew up he turned to me as the paunchy veterans walked
> past and said acidly, "Always remember, most of those guys were fixing the
> trucks in the rear." He hated the VFW hall where these men went, mostly to
> drink. He found their periodic attempts to re-create the comradeship of war,
> something that of course could never be re-created, pathetic and sad. When I
> was about 12 in 1968 he told me that if I was drafted for the Vietnam War he
> would go to prison with me. To this day I have a vision of sitting in a jail
> cell with my dad.
> 
> But it was my Uncle Maurice I thought most about as I looked through the
> images in Agent Orange: "Collateral Damage" in Viet Nam, by the photographer
> Philip Jones Griffiths. Uncle Maurice was in the regular Army in 1939 in the
> South Pacific and fought there until he was wounded five years later by a
> mortar blast. He did not return home with my father's resilience, although he
> shared my father's anger and feeling of betrayal. His life was destroyed by
> the war. He refused to accept his medals, including his Purple Heart.
> 
> Maurice would sit around the stove in my grandmother's home and shake as he
> struggled to ward off the periodic bouts of malaria. He did not talk about the
> war. And so he drank. He became an acute embarrassment to our family, who
> lived in a manse where there was no alcohol. He could not hold down a job. His
> marriage fell apart. Another uncle hired him to work in his lumber mill, but
> Maurice would show up late, often drunk, and then disappear on another binge.
> He finally drank himself to death in his trailer, but not before borrowing and
> selling the hunting rifle my grandfather had promised me. The money, I am
> sure, went for a few more bottles.
> 
> There was only one time he ever spoke to me about the war. It was at my
> grandmother's kitchen table. He spoke in a flat monotone. His eyes seemed to
> be looking far away, far across the field outside the house and the warmth of
> the heavy porcelain stove, far across the snowy peaks, to a world that he
> could never hope to explain.
> 
> "We filled our canteens up in a stream once," he said. "When we went around
> the bend there were twenty-five dead Japanese in the water." Those who pay the
> price, those who are maimed forever by war, are shunted aside, crumpled up and
> thrown away. They are war's refuse. We do not want to see them. We do not want
> to hear them. They are doomed, like wandering spirits, to float around the
> edges of our consciousness, ignored, even reviled. The message they bear from
> war is too painful for us to absorb. And so we turn our backs, just as society
> turned its back on my uncle, as it turns its back on all who come back and
> struggle with the horrors of wounds, physical and emotional.
> 
> In 1962 the United States set out to destroy the crops and forests that gave
> succor and sanctuary to the Vietcong. The herbicide our government used to
> accomplish this task became known as Agent Orange, after the color of the
> canisters used to distribute it. Some of the herbicide contained dioxin, one
> of the world's deadliest poisons. This herbicide had cataclysmic effects on
> the foliage of Vietnam, but it also seems to have sown a "genetic time bomb"
> that has left in its wake thousands of deformed children. Many died shortly
> after birth. Griffiths has set out to photograph those unfortunates who
> survived.
> 
> There is a fierce debate about the link between the deformities and the
> herbicide, but the incidence of birth defects in areas that were sprayed is
> substantially higher than in those that were not sprayed. The wives of US
> servicemen who were exposed to Agent Orange gave birth to a disproportionate
> number of deformed babies. The affected families of Vietnam veterans were paid
> $180 million by the chemical companies that produced the herbicide, although
> none accepted liability. Needless to say, the Vietnamese victims as well as
> Vietnam veterans from other nations, such as South Korea and Australia, have
> received nothing. The only way to understand war is to see it from the
> perspective of the victims. The face of war is in this book. It stares out at
> you from the formaldehyde bottles that entomb dead infants with savage
> deformities. It stares out at you in the portraits of orphans, crippled,
> plagued by skin diseases, abandoned in hospitals and orphanages. It stares out
> at you in!
> the pictures from the village of Cam Nghia in central Vietnam, where one out
> of ten children is born with deformities. In Cam Nghia families care for
> children who suffer from spina bifida, mental retardation, blindness and
> tumors, children born years after the war but wounded as if the war never
> ended.
> 
> We prefer the myth of war, the myth of glory, honor, patriotism and heroism,
> abstract words that in the terror and brutality of combat are empty and
> meaningless, abstract words that mask the plague of war, abstract words that
> are obscene to those ravaged by war. The children in this book know war.
> 
> I too went to war, not as a soldier, but as a war correspondent. I too battle
> the demons that defeated my uncle. Perhaps it is hopeless to expect anyone to
> listen. This book is hard to look at, just as war is hard to see. The myth has
> a powerful, intoxicating draw. It permits us to make real the darkest
> undercurrents of our fantasy life. It permits us to destroy, not only things
> but other human beings. And in that power of wholesale destruction we feel the
> power of the divine, the power to revoke another person's charter to live on
> this earth. What we do not understand until it is over is that by unleashing
> this destructive impulse we destroy not only others but ourselves. War
> reverberates for years afterward, spinning lives into a dark oblivion of pain
> and suffering.
> 
> Most war films and images meant to denounce war fail. They fail because they
> impart the thrill of violence and power. War images that show scenes of combat
> become, despite the intention of those who produce it, war porn. And this is
> why soldiers who have not been to combat buy cases of beer and sit in front of
> movies like Platoon, movies meant to denounce war, and they yearn for it. It
> is almost impossible to produce antiwar films or books that portray images of
> war. It is like trying to produce movies to denounce pornography and showing
> erotic love scenes. The prurient fascination with violent death overpowers the
> message. The best record of war, of what war is and what war does to us, is
> that which eschews images of combat. This is the power of Griffiths's book. It
> forces us to see what the state and the press, the handmaiden of the
> warmakers, work so hard to keep from us. If we really knew war, what war does
> to minds and bodies, it would be harder to wage. This is why the!
> essence of war, which is death and suffering, is so carefully hidden from
> public view. We are not allowed to see dead bodies, at least of our own
> soldiers, nor do we see the wounds that forever mark lives, the wounds that
> leave faces and bodies horribly disfigured by burns or shrapnel or poison. War
> is made palatable. It is sanitized. We are allowed to taste war's perverse
> thrill, but usually spared from seeing its consequences. The wounded and the
> dead are swiftly carted offstage. The maimed are carefully hidden in the wings
> while the band plays a majestic march.
> 
> War, at least the mythic version, is wonderful entertainment. We saw this with
> the war in Iraq, where the press turned it into a video game, with a lot of
> help from the military, and hid from us the effects of bullets, roadside bombs
> and rocket-propelled grenades. War is carefully packaged, the way tobacco or
> liquor companies package their own poisons. We taste a bit of war's
> exhilaration but are safe, spared the pools of blood, the wailing of a dying
> child.
> 
> Only those works that, like Agent Orange, eschew the fascination with violence
> to give us a look at what war does to human bodies grapple with war's reality.
> We can only understand war when we turn our attention away from the weapons my
> father refused to let us see in museums and look at what those weapons do to
> us, look at those who bear war's burden.
> 
> Modern warfare is largely impersonal. It mocks the idea of individual heroism.
> Industrial warfare, waged since World War I, means that thousands of people,
> who never see their attackers, can die and suffer in an instant. The power of
> these industrial weapons, to those of us who have not seen them at work, is
> incomprehensible. They can take down apartment blocks in seconds, burying
> everyone inside. They can demolish tanks and planes and ships in fiery blasts.
> They can leave a country like Vietnam defoliated and poisoned for decades
> after an afternoon flight.
> 
> Those left behind to carry the wounds of war feel, as my uncle did, a sense of
> abandonment, made all the more painful by the public manifestations of
> gratitude toward those who fit our image of what war should be. We see only
> those veterans deemed palatable, those we can look at, those who are willing
> to go along with the lies of war. They are trotted out to perpetuate the myth,
> held up as heroes for young boys to emulate. We do not tolerate deviations
> from the script.
> 
> My family was not unique. There were tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of
> thousands, of families like ours, families that cared for the human refuse of
> World War II. There are families today that carry similar burdens, from
> Vietnam, the Persian Gulf War and now Iraq. And there are their counterparts,
> once the enemy, now part of the suffering mass of humanity that survived the
> war, brothers and sisters of the maimed.
> 
> Agent Orange allows us to look beyond the nationalist cant and flag-waving
> used to propel us into war. It looks beyond the seduction of the weapons and
> the pornography of violence. It looks beyond the myth. It focuses on the evil
> of war.
> 
> War corrupts our souls and deforms our bodies. It destroys homes and villages.
> It grinds into the dirt all that is tender and beautiful and sacred. It is a
> scourge. It is a plague. Before you agree to wage war, any war, look closely
> at this book. Look at the faces of these children. Look at the faces of your
> own children.  
> 
> Fond regards,
> 
> G e o r g e   L o t t e r m o s e r,    imagist?
> 
> <?>Peace<?>   <?>Harmony<?>  <?>Stewardship<?>
> 
> Presenting effective messages in beautiful ways
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Excellent words.. I often wonder why all leaders of religion and government
just don't speak out against war and conflict and oppose all efforts that
turn us from becoming better human beings.