Images of the Vietnam War That Defined an Era

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Ralph Blumenthal

One of Malcolm W. Browne's famed series of photos of a Buddhist monk
setting himself on fire in Saigon in an anti-government protest in June 1963.

NEW YORK---Half a century after the nation’s fateful early missteps into the quagmire, what are Americans likely to remember about the Vietnam War? Mr. Browne’s graphic 1963 photographic series of the fiery suicide of the monk, Thich Quang Duc, exposed the deep hostility to the Saigon regime months before the ineffectual South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem was shot, three weeks before Kennedy’s assassination. Now, amid a flurry of anniversary commemorations of that tumultuous era and a surge of interest in war photography, The A.P. has, for the first time, culled its estimated 25,000 Vietnam photographs and reprinted some 250 in a book, “Vietnam: The Real War,” with an introduction by Pete Hamill, to be published by Abrams on Oct. 1. [link]