First sergeant of A Company, 101st Airborne Division, guiding a medevac helicopter through the jungle foliage to pick up casualties suffered during a five-day patrol near Hue, Vietnam, April 1968.
The jungle never gave you a break. Not for the heat, not for the smell, not for the fact that you hadn’t eaten in days, and sure as hell not for the men bleeding out in the dirt. The First Sergeant stood in the clearing, arms stretched to the sky, like he was calling down some kind of salvation, but there wasn’t any of that here—just the ugly mechanical beat of the medevac, cutting through the thick, wet air, the promise of maybe getting out of this alive.
Five days in the bush. Five days of rotting boots and swollen leech bites, of whispers in the trees and the constant, gnawing certainty that the next step could be the one that blows your legs off. Five days of moving and stopping, setting up perimeter, waiting to get hit, waiting for it to end. Then, finally, the thing they’d been waiting for—an ambush, a firefight, the sudden screaming panic of it all. And now, here they were, gathering the pieces, trying to get the broken ones out before the jungle swallowed them whole.
The kid on the ground wasn’t dead, not yet. He was holding his stomach like he could keep himself together if he just pressed hard enough, teeth gritted, eyes wide. Maybe he was praying. Maybe he was already halfway gone, floating somewhere between here and wherever it is you go when it’s over. The others moved fast, dragging bodies, slinging arms over shoulders, hoisting the wounded up like sacks of rice, pushing forward because if you stopped to think about it, if you stopped at all, you’d be no good to anyone.
Above them, the bird circled, looking for its opening. The jungle made everything harder—branches like knives, grass like razor wire, and that goddamn wet heat that clung to your skin and never let go. The rotor wash sent a storm of leaves and dust into the air, mixing with the sweat and blood and jungle stink of it all. The first sergeant waved it in, directing the pilot with hands that had done this too many times before, hands that knew the weight of war, of men, of what it meant to carry someone who wasn’t going to make it.
No prayers here. No time for that. Just get them on the bird. Get them out. Get back to the fight.
An American soldier keeping a constant reminder of his girlfriend, with his helmet band filled with her photographs. May 1968, South Vietnam.
He carried her with him, always. Not just in the quiet moments, not just when the jungle whispered, or when the night held still. No, he carried her in the thick of it—through the monsoon rot and the blood-hot air, through the green hell of South Vietnam, where the world reeked of sweat and cordite. He carried her in black-and-white snapshots tucked into the band of his helmet, five versions of the same girl, five echoes of a life that still existed somewhere beyond this place.
Her name, maybe, was Susan or Betty or something soft and Midwestern. Maybe she had freckles that only came out in summer, or maybe her laugh was the kind that lingered, the kind that stayed with you even after the music stopped. Maybe he’d told her he loved her the night before he shipped out, and maybe she cried, or maybe she smiled and promised she’d wait, even though they both knew waiting was its own kind of war.
The pictures, they weren’t just pictures. They were a shield against the things that came in the dark, against the ghosts that built themselves from memory and fear. When he was humping through the mud, rifle slung, heart pounding like a trapped animal, the weight of those photographs pressed against his head, an anchor to something real. A reminder that somewhere, in a world that smelled like soap and fresh-cut grass, someone was waiting for him.
Maybe he wrote to her every night. Maybe he told her things he couldn’t say out loud—the way the ground trembled when artillery hit, the way a man could disappear in an instant, just gone, as if he’d never been there at all. Maybe he left those things out, said instead that he missed her, that he couldn’t wait to see her again, that he was fine, all good, don’t worry, baby.
He carried her, because what else was there to carry?
May 1968, South Vietnam. A soldier with a helmet full of ghosts, hoping one of them would bring him home.
U.S. President Lyndon Johnson listens to a tape sent by Captain Charles Robb (his son-in-law) from Vietnam, 1968
The power of the presidency, Lyndon Baines Johnson had long understood, was not the power to do what one wanted, but the power to bear what one must. And so, in 1968, in the twilight of his presidency, when the war that bore his name had become a conflagration beyond his control, Johnson found himself alone in the Cabinet Room, hunched over a tape recorder, listening to a voice that was at once distant and intimately familiar.
The voice belonged to Captain Charles Robb, his son-in-law, stationed in Vietnam. It was the voice of a soldier, steady, measured, trained in the art of concealing fear—but Johnson, with his lifelong instinct for men, for the weight they carried in their words, knew what lay beneath. Knew, too, the sound of the war he had sent so many young men to fight, heard in the crackle of the recording, in the unspoken things between the words.
For years now, Johnson had carried the war on his shoulders, a war that had begun as an inherited obligation but had metastasized into something that defined him, consumed him. He had sent boys to die in rice paddies, in jungles thick with heat and death, and now his own family was among them.
And yet, for all the power vested in the presidency, in the most forceful, towering political figure of his era, there was nothing he could do—nothing but sit, elbows on the table, one hand gripping the edge, the other raised to his face as if to shield himself from the sound.
This was the presidency as he had come to understand it in those final years. Not the power to win wars, to bend history to one’s will, but the power to sit in an empty room, listening to the distant voice of a loved one, and know, with a certainty no speech or policy could alter, that even the most powerful man in the world was powerless against fate.
In the end, Lyndon Johnson had mastered the machinery of government as few men ever had. He had wheeled and dealed, cajoled and bullied, passed laws that reshaped the nation. But here, in this moment, he was simply a father, a man grasping at something he could not change, trapped not just by the war in Vietnam but by the forces of history itself.
A victim of American bombing, ethnic Cambodian guerrilla Danh Son Huol is carried to an improvised operating room in a mangrove swamp on the Ca Mau Peninsula.
The air had smelled like fire and blood, thick with the kind of smoke that clings to your skin long after the flames have died down. The bombs had come screaming down with that awful whistle, the sound that makes a man instinctively duck even when he knows there’s nowhere to hide. The trees had cracked like bones, the earth had opened up, and when it was over, the jungle steamed with the heat of the craters, the mangroves broken and burning, the bodies left behind.
Danh Son Huol had been lucky. If you could call it that.
They carried him through the waterlogged earth, his head wrapped in gauze, his body limp, an arm dangling off the edge of the crude bamboo stretcher. He was just a boy, really. Couldn’t have been more than seventeen, maybe eighteen if you counted the hard years, the kind that make young men old before their time. He had fought with the others, an ethnic Cambodian guerrilla, one of the faceless thousands resisting the American-backed South. He had watched villages burn. Had fired his rifle. Had run through the same swamps now carrying him toward an improvised hospital that smelled of antiseptic and sweat.
The women waited inside, standing in water up to their knees, their surgical gowns soaked from the waist down. Their hands, still steady despite the war and the hunger and the filth, held whatever tools they could scavenge. A rusted scalpel, a needle and thread, a saw if it came to that. They would do what they could. That’s what war was—doing what you could with what you had, patching together the pieces and sending men back out to die another day.
Danh Son Huol’s eyes fluttered. He moaned something low in his throat. Maybe he was calling for his mother, maybe for a friend who was already gone. Maybe it was just the sound a man makes when he knows he’s got no real way out.
The war didn’t care. The war just kept moving.
A Vietnamese mother and her children wade across a river, fleeing a bombing raid on Qui Nhon by United States aircraft on September 7, 1965.
War doesn’t care. It doesn’t care that she is a mother, that the baby in her arms has never spoken a word, never taken a step. It doesn’t care that the boy behind her—wide-eyed, drenched to the bone—was playing with sticks just hours before the sky split open and the bombs began to fall. War doesn’t care, because war is indifferent. It is not good or evil. It is just a machine, churning up lives in its path, grinding flesh and bone into something unrecognizable.
The mother moves forward, water surging around her waist, gripping her youngest child as tightly as she dares, because to hold too tightly means sinking, and sinking means death. The others cling to her, hands grasping at whatever they can—her clothes, her arms, her certainty, if she has any left. Their hair is slick against their faces, their breaths quick and panicked. She keeps moving. Because if she stops, they die.
Somewhere behind them, the village is gone. Or burning. Or flattened. It doesn’t matter. What matters is the river, this filthy, rushing current that is now the only thing between them and the next moment, and the next. She doesn’t look back. Looking back means seeing the things that will never be again. The home that was there, the neighbors who might be dead, the husband who went out that morning and may never return.
She doesn’t think about the pilots. The Americans in their steel birds, high above, safe from the screams below. Maybe they see her. Maybe they don’t. Maybe to them she is a smudge, a black dot moving through the green. Maybe one of them—just one—will sit in a quiet room after the war is over and remember her, remember this, and wonder what became of the woman in the river.
But right now, there is no time for that.
She moves forward, through the mud and reeds and gunmetal water, because there is no other choice. Because she must. Because war doesn’t care—but she does.
Prostitutes in Can Tho, Vietnam, 1970 by Philip Jones Griffith
The war came, and it took everything. Fathers, brothers, uncles, and sons—it swallowed them into its machine of bullets and bombs, leaving behind empty houses and hungry mouths. For some, survival meant running, hiding, slipping into the jungle with the guerrillas or waiting in refugee camps for a future that never came. For others, it meant staying, standing in the neon glow of bars filled with soldiers who laughed too loud and drank too much, men who wanted to forget the war for an hour, maybe a night.
The girls in Can Tho knew this. They knew it when they smiled, when they touched an arm, when they let their laughter carry through the thick air like a song they had never wanted to learn. They wore American fashions, tie-dye shirts and leather skirts, their hair teased and long, like the women they had seen in magazines left behind by GIs. They were young, too young, their faces still holding traces of the children they had been before the war taught them what it meant to be desperate.
She crouched low, her fingers pressing against the thin skin of a balloon, her eyes downcast. Maybe she was thinking about home, about the smell of rice cooking, about a mother who once combed her hair with gentle fingers. Maybe she was thinking about the soldier who promised to take her away, to marry her, to give her something other than this life, even though deep down she knew better. Maybe she was thinking of nothing at all, because it was easier that way.
Around her, the night carried on. The bars, the music, the men with money in their pockets and war in their eyes. The other girls stood, waiting, watching, ready to become whoever they needed to be.
Because war didn’t just kill with bullets. Sometimes, it killed slowly, in places like this.
