Word: viets
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...Carl Mydans helped to transform American photojournalism from a source of inert head shots and ceremonious poses into a supple narrative art. As a staff photographer for LIFE, Mydans was present and accounted for at the darkest moments of a dark century: the Depression, World War II, Korea and Viet Nam. The retrospective of his work at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth offers a chance to review his pictures uncoupled from the periods they defined and the magazine pages they were designed to serve. A museum show is the acid test for photojournalism. Mounted on a wall, these...
Mydans would take many such pictures of the uprooted and crushed: a man carrying the body of his wife through the chaos of an earthquake in Japan, a young Korean mother as she flees the fighting around Seoul, a Vietnamese grandmother during the Tet offensive in Viet Nam. Against these even his sunnier bits of Americana--schoolchildren at play, a general store--seem to be glimpses of an imperiled tranquillity. Even an unemphatic shot of street sweepers clearing the route of a Red Army parade column describes a world where great powers lunge through, leaving lesser souls to deal with...
...years since Viet Nam, critics in and out of uniform have repeatedly charged that too many officers have become cautious bureaucrats, adept at Pentagon politics perhaps, but interested more in advancing their careers than in preparing for the brutal exigencies of combat. In an era of unconventional warfare and low-level guerrilla struggles, military reformers sometimes fear that a rigid military-academy mind-set is geared to yesterday's wars of attrition. They question whether West Point is turning out the kind of officers that the nation needs...
...year-old academy, which is enjoying a resurgence of popular support and of internal morale, has few doubts about its modern role. During the Viet Nam War, West Point was so unpopular that it was unable to fill its class of '72 with qualified applicants. Last year, at a time of renewed patriotism, it received 12,644 applications for some 1,400 places. Although only 12% of newly commissioned U.S. Army lieutenants are West Pointers, 37% of the Army's generals once wore cadet gray. The academy sets the tone for the officer corps; it regards itself as a repository...
...values cherished by West Point sometimes get twisted or lost on the battlefield. In Viet Nam, the questionable enemy "body counts" served up by senior military leaders--many of them academy graduates--"cut right against the integrity we were taught at West Point," concedes General Palmer, a deputy commander of U.S. forces in Viet Nam. (His much criticized superior, General William Westmoreland, '36, was a cadet first captain and later superintendent of the academy.) The Viet Nam War is an awkward subject at West Point. In class, cadets are taught that the military leadership was not blameless, but most subscribe...