Rating: 
Summary: Fascinating Book
Review: An interesting view from the other side. Unusual collection of pictures, often taken under difficult conditions. Good background information. As for an occasional 'propaganda' picture, I guess it's only we Americans who don't indulge in that sort of thing.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent Photo Essay
Review: As a former Marine Corps combat photographer and recipient of the Purple Heart and Bronze Star with Combat "V," (I Corps, Khe Sahn, Con Thein, Dong Ha, Vietnam), Peter Caldwell missed the point about the book. The book was not produced to glorify the NVA or the politics (which enough has been written), but simply to add another piece to a broad visual mozaic. Dr. Caldwell would certainly be hard pressed to attend the International Assn of Combat Photographers. Its membership include former Nazi photographers. In our world as combat photographers, then as now, our role was to document war, to present images however controversal or appealing, to the public. Sometimes these images can be bitter medicine for both sides...just like the images of My Lai. Tim Page did an excellent job compiling a visual treasure of the North Vietnamese photographers. And as a former combat photographer, I was stunned to view their work. Other distinguished photographers and correspondents like Larry Burrows, Bernard Falls, Henry Huet, Sean Flynn, Dana Stone -- to name a few who I had the pleasure to meet and work with and all were killed in Southeast Asia, they would hold this book in high regard. After all, as combat correspondents we did not judge but observed. And that's what this book is all about. SSgt. F. Lee
Combat Photographer ('66-67)
Rating:
Summary: Some Beautiful Composition
Review: As a student of photography I loved this book. Given the conditions under which many of the photographs were taken, the composition of some of these images is amazing. If you love natural light, black and white photography, as I do, I definitely recommend taking a look at this book - the exhibition is even better.
Rating:
Summary: Some Beautiful Composition
Review: As a student of photography I loved this book. Given the conditions under which many of the photographs were taken, the composition of some of these images is amazing. If you love natural light, black and white photography, as I do, I definitely recommend taking a look at this book - the exhibition is even better.
Rating:
Summary: Christopher Riley and his team do it again!
Review: Christopher Riley has added another great book to his name. The genius behind "The Killing Fields" has decided to visit another era of modern history, and in the process has forced us to rethink our views of something we thought we knew. He gets Tim Page to help out in this effort, and it seems to be a good idea. The photos are shocking, and some of the propaganda photos completely uninteresting, but it is a great work.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent!
Review: Doug Niven did an amazing job of collecting, editing and printing these truly incredible images. They are unforgettable, and anyone with an appreciation of photography should not be without this incredible book, regardless of the history or politics involved.
Rating:
Summary: First rate, typical of Tim Page, Chris Riley and Doug Niven
Review: Having studied Tim Page's great work "Requiem" tens of times, each time seeing something new in the striking photographs, and having seen Riley and Niven's brilliant work on the killing fields of Cambodia, I knew what to expect when I opened "Another Vietnam." This is a natural follow-on to "Requiem" and reflects Tim Page's admiration for war photographers on all sides. I have the feeling that Tim Page is still at work seeking out new information on some of his closest friends who disappeared on the battlefields of Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. I hope to see more film documentaries from Tim Page. His investigations, first documented in his film "Danger at the Edge of Town," will continue until all his colleagues are accounted for. No one can accuse Tim Page of having forgotten his heroic comrades. They live on in his lifetime of work.
Rating:
Summary: Truly a different perspective
Review: It's true some of the shots represented here are pure propaganda, but that's completely beside the point. Nothing about the book claims objectivity: it clearly states its intention to represent the war as seen by photographers on the other side. The first casualty of war is truth, and we've certainly been fed plenty of pro-U.S. propaganda over the years. Some of the shots are simply surreal. The operating theater in the middle of the swamp and the puppet troupe entertaining on the Ho Chi Minh trail are worth the price of the book.
Rating:
Summary: Another look at Nam.
Review: Most of these pictures record tiny episodes, but those thinkers with a long view might refuse to accept that there were ever two Nams in the 20th Century. When France tried to pick a southern area called Cochin China for itself as a French colony in 1945, there should be little doubt that it was merely usurping part of Ho Chi Minh's independent Vietnam. A picture shows Ho in Hanoi, 39 days after his declaration of Vietnamese independence on Sept. 2, 1945. The picture of Le Minh Truong by himself, Kontum, 1972 (p. 114) is as unexciting as my own pictures taken in that area in 1970. The surprising picture on page 49 was taken May 9, 1973, soon after the American withdrawal: "Cuban leader Fidel Castro hoists a victory flag at the site of the strategic 1968 battle [Khe Sanh]." There are so many troops in the picture that it doesn't show any bomb craters, and a mountain in the background (possibly as far away as Laos) shows that the area was not entirely leveled. Khe Sanh had the highest priority for B-52 strikes when North Vietnamese troops threatened the U.S. troops there and this book says that "was part of the North's plan to divert U.S. and South Vietnamese forces from population areas prior to the Tet offensive." (p. 49). This might provide a lesson for anyone planning a war against American forces, which are bound to rely on a strategy which depends heavily on bombing, and Americans are organized so they pay more attention to their top priority than to anything else. A panorama made from six negatives of "supply trucks rolling through a ghost forest denuded by defoliants dropped by American planes" (p. 135) shows some of the damage from 40 million pounds of Agent Orange "which were sprayed over five million acres, creating environmental havoc." (p. 135). Such tactics suggest that the war was against Nam as a whole, and not a strategy that would have been adopted by one half against the other. The American Civil War was pretty bad, but Abe Lincoln never nuked the South. General Sherman was hard on South Carolina, but not as bad as Americans who wanted to nuke Nam. The defoliated mangrove forest, Ca Mau Peninsula, 1970 (p. 104-5) looks awful, "Americans denuded the landscape with chemicals to deny cover," as if we were involved in a cat and mouse game, but couldn't decide how serious we wanted it to be. A weird picture in which "An NVA soldier positions a Chinese-made mannequin" (p. 60) (a long time after Hamburger Hill) is the perfect: SO? SHOOT ME picture. I found a lot of irony in the information on page 56 about only 8 of 109 students (the guys who are smiling) being accepted into the army in Hanoi, Aug. 1971. The standards were tough: these "young men were chosen because they had good revolutionary credentials, which usually meant that they didn't come from landowning families." This sounds like a perfect way to pick people who would be willing to hold on to a government job, regardless of the circumstances. The increase in the NVA, from 35,000 in 1950 to over 500,000 by the mid-1970s, didn't require a mandatory system until 1973, when the United States withdrew and the NVA was free to pursue military objectives without being bombed. With the use of American support, South Vietnam's ARVN were capable of suffering "243,000 dead and a half a million seriously wounded." (p. 202). Picture (p. 218) Russian MIGs "at a remote air base" on January 1, 1973 and the military parade (p. 220) on the outskirts of Hanoi in October, 1973, after the United States had stopped its bombing. Hiding all these things is the result of a lot of effort. On page 54, Hanoi, 1972 "Military trucks park in relative safety in front of the French embassy. . . . In November 1971, however, American bombs accidentally struck the embassy." It sounds like the embassy was still pretty safe, but the attack on the U.S. Embassy by a squad of Viet Cong sappers on January 31, 1968, mentioned on p. 151, definitely sounded intentional.
Rating:
Summary: Another look at Nam.
Review: Most of these pictures record tiny episodes, but those thinkers with a long view might refuse to accept that there were ever two Nams in the 20th Century. When France tried to pick a southern area called Cochin China for itself as a French colony in 1945, there should be little doubt that it was merely usurping part of Ho Chi Minh's independent Vietnam. A picture shows Ho in Hanoi, 39 days after his declaration of Vietnamese independence on Sept. 2, 1945. The picture of Le Minh Truong by himself, Kontum, 1972 (p. 114) is as unexciting as my own pictures taken in that area in 1970. The surprising picture on page 49 was taken May 9, 1973, soon after the American withdrawal: "Cuban leader Fidel Castro hoists a victory flag at the site of the strategic 1968 battle [Khe Sanh]." There are so many troops in the picture that it doesn't show any bomb craters, and a mountain in the background (possibly as far away as Laos) shows that the area was not entirely leveled. Khe Sanh had the highest priority for B-52 strikes when North Vietnamese troops threatened the U.S. troops there and this book says that "was part of the North's plan to divert U.S. and South Vietnamese forces from population areas prior to the Tet offensive." (p. 49). This might provide a lesson for anyone planning a war against American forces, which are bound to rely on a strategy which depends heavily on bombing, and Americans are organized so they pay more attention to their top priority than to anything else. A panorama made from six negatives of "supply trucks rolling through a ghost forest denuded by defoliants dropped by American planes" (p. 135) shows some of the damage from 40 million pounds of Agent Orange "which were sprayed over five million acres, creating environmental havoc." (p. 135). Such tactics suggest that the war was against Nam as a whole, and not a strategy that would have been adopted by one half against the other. The American Civil War was pretty bad, but Abe Lincoln never nuked the South. General Sherman was hard on South Carolina, but not as bad as Americans who wanted to nuke Nam. The defoliated mangrove forest, Ca Mau Peninsula, 1970 (p. 104-5) looks awful, "Americans denuded the landscape with chemicals to deny cover," as if we were involved in a cat and mouse game, but couldn't decide how serious we wanted it to be. A weird picture in which "An NVA soldier positions a Chinese-made mannequin" (p. 60) (a long time after Hamburger Hill) is the perfect: SO? SHOOT ME picture. I found a lot of irony in the information on page 56 about only 8 of 109 students (the guys who are smiling) being accepted into the army in Hanoi, Aug. 1971. The standards were tough: these "young men were chosen because they had good revolutionary credentials, which usually meant that they didn't come from landowning families." This sounds like a perfect way to pick people who would be willing to hold on to a government job, regardless of the circumstances. The increase in the NVA, from 35,000 in 1950 to over 500,000 by the mid-1970s, didn't require a mandatory system until 1973, when the United States withdrew and the NVA was free to pursue military objectives without being bombed. With the use of American support, South Vietnam's ARVN were capable of suffering "243,000 dead and a half a million seriously wounded." (p. 202). Picture (p. 218) Russian MIGs "at a remote air base" on January 1, 1973 and the military parade (p. 220) on the outskirts of Hanoi in October, 1973, after the United States had stopped its bombing. Hiding all these things is the result of a lot of effort. On page 54, Hanoi, 1972 "Military trucks park in relative safety in front of the French embassy. . . . In November 1971, however, American bombs accidentally struck the embassy." It sounds like the embassy was still pretty safe, but the attack on the U.S. Embassy by a squad of Viet Cong sappers on January 31, 1968, mentioned on p. 151, definitely sounded intentional.
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