Vietnam Era Iconic Images

"...there [remains] a residue of feeling too deep for easy articulation, from which no American who lived through the war is free. It consists of iconic images of the war: the Saigon officer, in his American flak jacket, shooting a bound, unarmed guerrilla in the head; a child running from a cloud of napalm, her hands upraised, her body burning; the women and children massacred at My Lai; the terrified ARVN soldiers pulling helicopters out of the sky in their desperate effort to escape from the failed invasion of Laos; the dead students at Kent State; the GIs throwing their medals back at the government; the faces of women imprisoned in the tiger cages."

--From Marilyn Young, "The War in American Memory," in The Vietnam War: Vietnamese and American Perspectives, edited by Jayne S. Werner and Luu Doan Huynh. Armonk, NY: M.E. , 1993, p. 254.

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For more on the impact of photojournalism on the Vietnam War, see "THREE IMAGES: The Effects of Photojournalism on the Protest Movement during the Vietnam War" by Brady Priest, Shayla Schneider, Marty Whited, and Brian Coates. Archived from http://www.middlebury.edu/classes/fall97/ac400/group2/priest/brady.html