RIFLE RANGE BOY

Traditional Vietnamese stone carving at Ba Na Hill cable car station.   They led peaceful lives by their standards. They were ruled by little kingdoms with their own belief systems and mode of administration. There were little skirmishes here and there, but the subjects were contended, breaking their backs and building mammoth structures for their kings and the divine forces that protected them. They had a sense of belonging to the land that served them. In their own way, they developed their high culture for the present and the world after. Then came the foreign invaders. With their imposing figures, strange hues, smell, and conducts, they bulldozed their ideology. They handed us the book of love with the pretext of friendship and commerce. Whilst we closed our eyes in prayer, they took our land deeds unbeknownst to us, and we were stuck with their books. No more a godless society? They looked down at our living and called it uncultured. The French colonist proclaimed our land th...

Unseen images of the war from the winning side by Alex Q. Arbuckle 1972 Activists meet in the Nam Can Forest, wearing masks to hide their identities from one another in a case of capture and interrogation. From here in the mangrove swamps of the Mekong Delta, forwarding images to the North was difficult. "Sometimes the photos were lost or confiscated on the way," said the photographer. IMAGE: VO ANH KHANH/ANOTHER VIETNAM/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC BOOKS UPDATE, Feb. 10, 2016, 9:30 a.m.:  Based on serial numbers visible on the tail fins, readers have deduced that the crashed aircraft in the sixth photo is AJ 310, piloted by Lt. Stephen Owen Musselman, which was downed near Hanoi on Sept. 10, 1972. For much of the world, the visual history of the Vietnam War has been defined by a handful of iconic photographs: Eddie Adams’ image of a Viet Cong fighter being executed, Nick Ut’s picture of nine-year-old Kim Phúc fleeing a napalm strike, Malcolm Browne’s ...