Charlie Haughey with Vietnamese schoolchildren
Charlie Haughey, affectionately referred to as Chieu Hoi by his fellow veterans, has rediscovered a part of his life that lay dormant in his basement for over 40 years. When sent to Vietnam as a rifleman in 1967, a superior officer decided to utilize him as a photographer, but not for the reason you might expect. When his tour was up, Charlie had to scramble to collect all of his negatives - almost 2,000 of them - and bring them home, where they have remained stowed away until being found this past fall.
Infantry TAC officers aboard a Command and Control chopper (Charlie Haughey)
His story as a photographer in Vietnam began after some time as an infantryman, serving as "point man" - a lookout for the rest of his unit. After the superior officer discovered in Charlie's file that he had experience as a photographer, he handed him a camera and told him to photograph for morale, not to document the war. But when firefights broke out, Charlie's duty was to his fellow soldiers and not the camera. Before and after that, however, he captured some truly remarkable images of the country and people around him. "My photos are of the life side of war, not the death side of war", he says on his Tumblr page, which publishes his story and photographs. "It wasn't my job to take photos of people dying; it was my job to take photos of people doing their job with dispatch and honor."
Captain William N. Parish lightens the mood with young soldiers near Cu Chi (Charlie Haughey)
In his photography, he did just that. His images show his subjects experiencing a wide array of emotion - weariness, focus, anger, relaxation, even happiness. So often it's easy to externalize what we've seen and read about war, but pictures like Charlie's remind us that war was and still is a very human endeavor, and people just like us were cast into "hell", as so many veterans can attest.
Soldiers spending a few minutes "out of the war" aboard a Chinook (Charlie Haughey)
Some of Charlie's work will be curated in a show titled A Weather Walked In, to be displayed at ADX, an arts center and gallery in Portland, Oregon, over the next month. For a more extensive look at Charlie's photographs, visit his Flickr page.
- via Boston.com's The Big Picture
Tim Kauger is a blogger and photographer based in Short Hills, NJ. You can visit his website here.