The exhibition provides valuable glimpses of a key event in post–World War II history. The Vietnam War saw U.S. imperialism suffer a historic defeat, following its setback in the 1950–53 Korean War. Aided by the growth of a massive international antiwar movement, which demanded the withdrawal of all imperialist armies, the Vietnamese liberation forces fought off the full fury of the U.S. military machine.

In Indochina, Washington unleashed more bombs than had been dropped in all previous wars combined. By 1969, more than half a million U.S. soldiers were in the region. Close to 60,000 U.S. troops died in the conflict before their withdrawal in 1973. Millions of inhabitants of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos were killed on the way to victory in 1975.

This triumphant war of national liberation, involving both popular guerrilla warfare and large-scale military offensives, was part of an ongoing revolution by workers and peasants to unify the country and to break the rule of landlord and capitalist exploiters both north and south by making a socialist revolution.

"Another Vietnam" presents a different perspective from the most revealing and well-known photos published in the Western media. These tend to focus on the horrific impact of Washington's relentless aerial bombardment, as well as the degrading social effects of imperialist occupation. By contrast, most of the pictures on display are part of the record of a revolutionary struggle, depicting the daily lives and military resistance of the Vietnamese people.

The exhibit includes pictures taken by photographer-soldiers dispatched by news agencies of the government of the North and by the National Liberation Front (NLF) based in the south. As the photographers shared the life of the guerrilla troops and Northern soldiers, said Nguyen Dinh Vu, "We lived in the border between life and death." The death toll of photographers of the liberation struggle was high, with some 160 killed in the wars against the French and U.S. invaders.

One reason was that they had to be close to the action. "We worked with rudimentary equipment, no zoom lenses like nowadays, so we had to get close to the subject," said Le Minh Truong.  
 
'World's largest darkroom'
Photographers frequently constructed simple darkrooms to develop their shots in the fields by the light of kerosene lamps. Others worked with even less equipment, processing their film in the "world's largest darkroom," as Vietnam at night was described. With film or prints in hand, the photographers then had to "deliver our babies ourselves" to the news services, said Doan Cong Trinh.

The results are powerful and instructive. Photos of individual and collective dedication to the struggle include a soldier receiving treatment for shrapnel wounds, clutching a grenade as he demands to return to the battle. Another is of an officer leading a close-quarter attack through jungle foliage, armed only with a pistol.

From the period of the war against Paris, a photo of the "fighting holes" that people knocked into their house walls that allowed liberation forces to move through a village without appearing in the street is particularly striking.

Although they frequently fought in bare feet, with inferior equipment or weapons captured from the enemy, the Vietnamese soldiers and working people built a powerful fighting force. The North Vietnamese army grew from 35,000 troops in 1950 to half a million by the mid-1970s. Together with the National Liberation Front, they were able to stand up to the U.S. air and ground forces, and the huge and well-equipped U.S.-backed southern army.

The key role played by women in military and economic life is well depicted. Many fought in antiaircraft units, in the infantry, and in the militia which guarded villages and communities. They also took on other "nontraditional tasks" in agriculture and fishing. In one shot, young women work alongside men to fill in bomb craters.

Several other photos show the devastation wrought by the U.S. air war. Seeking to deprive the liberation forces of cover, U.S. officers ordered the dropping of 40 million pounds of the defoliant Agent Orange, leaving vast tracts of the Mekong Delta and other forest areas as a wasteland of bare tree trunks.

Napalm, designed to suck oxygen out of an area and kill by suffocation as well as by direct contact with the skin, was widely used. U.S. planes dropped hand grenades on flimsy bomb shelters in areas where swampy conditions made it impossible for the Vietnamese to dig the tunnels that elsewhere frequently thwarted the U.S. attacks.

One shot shows a militia member with binoculars counting bombs as they fall. Those that did not explode on the spot would later be located and defused.

The scale of the liberation war can be seen in the section of the exhibition on the Ho Chi Minh trail. What was in 1964 little more than a network of jungle trails was built into a major link between north and south, with buried diesel pipes and telephone wires along its entire 12,000-mile length. Trucks and elephants carried both foodstuffs and military materiel along this road. By 1969 some 10,000 troops a month were moving from north to south.

Volunteer teams from Cuba helped in the construction of the trail, a fact not reported in the exhibition. One shot shows Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro during a clandestine visit to the front, celebrating the 1973 victory over U.S. and South Vietnamese forces at Khe Sanh.

Spontaneous celebrations also broke out in the southern capital of Saigon two years later, as city residents welcomed the victorious Northern and NLF fighters. Outside the city, the highway was strewn with boots and military clothing abandoned by south Vietnamese soldiers as they fled and tried to blend in with the crowds. The shot was captured by a soldier-photographer from the back of a truck as it sped its way into the liberated city.

"Another Vietnam," on display until March 17, is an opportunity for working people and youth to learn more about this historic struggle .  
 
 
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