I've scanned a few more pictures for posting this morning.
Someone earlier had asked if I ever contacted any of the kids that I had pictures of. The answer to that unfortunately is no. I didn't keep any record of names. Besides that, contacting most of those people would have been extraordinarily difficult. Best I can recall, I don't think the rural areas of Vietnam even had a postal service at all.
In one of these pictures, our Interpreter is "checking the papers" of people we'd detained in a small fishing village along the coast. At that time in Vietnam EVERYONE had to have some form of I.D. The NVA and VietCong frequently had forged papers. On this recon missison, we got into a very short (but violent) firefight with some NVA who'd been "posing as fishermen" in this village. The battle ended about as quickly as it started as we had the few enemy vastly "outgunned".
Another picture in this series shows one of our guys "posing" for his picture beside a group of prisoners we'd taken in the same fishing village mentioned above.
In all of these pictures, you can easily see the technical difficulty we had to photograph under. At any given time, if you exposed for the face, or any other "mid-tone" area, the highlights would be totally blown away. It was almost impossible to cover the entire range from shadow to highlight without using "fill flash", which I don't recall ever doing. As you can easily see, the shadows are pretty much "plugged" and the highlights are "blown out" completely.
Finally, there's a picture of a woman holding her young child. This again was in the same fishing village. This photo (if you can see it clearly enough) is quite telling. If you look at the expression on the face of this woman, you can see a the fear, concern in her eyes. This was an expression I came to see thousands of times during my tour. As I'd mentioned in an earlier post, this was more common among adults than the children. Occasionally however, it could be seen on the faces of children as well.
Last edited by hillerby; 07-19-2009 at 08:47 AM.
Reason: I left out some information