McCullin Page #5

They looked as if they'd been taken from a butcher's shop, with blood everywhere.

In the end, I became totally mad, free,

running around like a tormented animal.

CLASSICAL MUSIC:

I've got to make sure that when they look at my pictures,

if it's on a Sunday morning after breakfast,

that it's going to hit them hard.

The very first man I saw in that Battle of Hue

had been hit in the face with two bullets.

And he had a bandage around him.

It looked like a child who had his porridge dripping down his face,

through this bandage, but in fact it was blood and not porridge.

Big, gooey chunks of human gore, just coming out of his face.

I put my camera up to my face

and he tried to move his head, this soldier,

but his eyes were screaming at me not to photograph him,

so I took my camera and went somewhere else.

There was no shortage of, you know, human flesh to photograph that day.

Our most vivid memory of the battle

was that it was one of the most intense battles of the Vietnam War.

Don came in and joined us and he just kind of showed up,

but what was unique about Don is that the other correspondents

and photographers would show up and, what I would say, snap and go.

They would take their pictures and then be out of there.

Don, for whatever the reason, decided to join with us,

stay with us and for several days, he became one of us.

On one occasion, on more than one occasion,

went out at great risk to himself

to assist with bringing some of our wounded casualties back

to where we could evacuate them.

His classic photo of the shell-shocked Marine

is a Delta Company Marine.

I dropped on my knees and photographed this man.

I shot five frames, each one singularly.

One, two, three, four, five.

There is not one blink of an eyelid. There's not one change.

All those negatives are exactly the same.

I have kept up with a sizeable number

of the Marines from Delta Company.

We get together periodically and that individual has not surfaced,

so I don't know his history from that day on.

PIANO MUSIC:

DISTANT GUNFIRE:

I photographed this giant American

who looked like an athlete, but he was throwing a hand grenade.

Within seconds, this sniper hit this soldier in the hand

and he had a hand like a cauliflower.

It was all busted and bursting open.

The picture itself almost defeats the anti-war feeling

that I was trying to put across,

because he looks the picture of manhood,

like a javelin thrower at an Olympic event.

Instead of that,

he was throwing a hand grenade which was meant to bring death to others.

DISTANT GUNFIRE:

The one meaningful picture I took in that battle

was a man who had been hit in both legs, an American Marine.

He was being supported by two friends

and if ever I thought, at the very moment in my atheistic kind of mind,

that I was looking at something purely religious, was of this man,

who looked like Jesus Christ being taken down from the cross.

When it was over, about 50% of the Marines were casualties.

In my own case, I went in with a company of 120 Marines

and sailors and at the end of the battle,

there were 39 of us that were still standing.

So you can see from just those shots how chaotic it was.

After two weeks, I got back to the press centre in Da Nang

and I realised I hadn't taken my clothes off, my underwear,

anything off for two weeks.

And, you know, I had a beard and I was haunted-looking.

I took those clothes off and threw them straight into the waste bin,

my underwear and everything I stood in, and had a shower.

I think I could have easily broke down in that shower and cried,

you know, I was so...

..so drained and used and crushed by two weeks of seeing people dying.

And you know, I think what I'm trying to say here is trying to be honest.

You know, photography suddenly didn't come into the picture, even.

It had nothing to do with photography.

After a while, if you are that involved in that kind of situation,

it's not about photography, it's about humanity.

Still photographs do have this strong affinity

with the way we remember, so...

And the vibrations of a still photograph can be intense

and can last for ever.

I can remember that Don sometimes worries,

I know, about, "Have I taken these risks? Is it worthwhile?"

I can tell him it is

because nobody can trace...it's like throwing a stone in a pond.

The ripples go out and you can't say,

"This ripple was caused by this stone," but they are.

And I think the disenchantment with the Vietnam War in America

is powerfully reinforced by some of the photographers,

American photographers, including Don McCullin.

Photography is the truth if it is being handled by a truthful person

and I have to tell you that I have a lot of integrity.

I would never tell a lie.

I would never try to recreate something that wasn't real.

I did a picture once where I did recreate something.

It was the only time I ever did it,

but I saw some Americans looting the body of a dead soldier,

looking for souvenirs and mocking the body, mocking the person.

And when they went away,

having rifled all through his personal things,

I brought them together and made a kind of montage

of this pathetic possessions of this North Vietnamese soldier.

It's the only time I've ever done it,

but I thought I would make a statement for this soldier.

I have no shame about doing that.

I have this picture and I think it says what I was trying to make it say, that, you know,

"Hear me. I am just a victim of war."

I was trying to say this about this young man.

We had total freedom in Vietnam.

That, of course, made the Americans feel,

when the war finally came to an end,

that it was the media that let them down.

They felt a bit upset about that, because they had given us

every facility and all they got in exchange was, you know,

that public opinion turned against the war in Vietnam.

So if you go to Afghanistan now, you are totally controlled.

They are never going to be allowed to take the kind of photographs

I did in Vietnam of the real thing, the battle, the price of war

and the suffering and loss, so the whole rulebook has been rewritten.

And it doesn't come out in our favour.

You just said it's a rotten job

and yet you have, in fact, sought it out.

You've sought out war and famine and misery

in all the time I've known you, which has been a long, long time.

Yes, I did it because I thought it was just going to be soldiers,

and then when I got to war,

I thought it was amazingly exciting to lay under

a barrage of shells dropping on me, or a sniper trying to get me.

I thought, you know, that was a challenge,

and I have swum around with many dead bodies in canals

to get by them when the sniper is working a ridge for me.

I felt I wanted to put my fingers up and say, "You missed it, mate."

And, you know, I had a very cocky attitude about warfare,

but then I started coming in contact with the real victims

and they are always the poor people who are not informed.

Rate this script:0.0 / 0 votes