The true story of “the marine on the tank” and one of the most emblematic images of v

[Boats]

THE TRUE STORY OF “THE MARINE ON THE TANK” AND ONE OF THE MOST EMBLEMATIC IMAGES OF VIETNAM
BY MARK BOWDEN - MAY 20, 2017 8:00 AM
RE: http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/...nk-vietnam-war

(A photo and video on site only) its pretty hard to watch - you may not wish to view it. But this man's will and strength is amazing I wish him the very best his remaining days. I salute you for your bravery and internal strength - God be with you always (Boats).

The Battle of Huế—the bloodiest battle of the Tet Offensive—was launched almost 50 years ago, on January 31,1968, and was fought in close quarters inside a walled city over a period of more than three weeks. In terms of American public perceptions, the Tet Offensive changed the course of the Vietnam War. From the fighting in Huế came an iconic photograph that captured the tragic futility of the conflict. In an excerpt from his new book Huế 1968, Mark Bowden tells the story behind it.

During the first week of the push inside the Citadel at Huế, in February 1968, photographer John Olson was with Charlie Company in the thick of the fighting. Officially he was shooting for Stars and Stripes, but he carried four other cameras to take pictures he hoped to sell elsewhere.

One of the frames he shot that week was a common sight in those terrible days of urban warfare, when for a period of weeks, in seemingly permanent fog and rain, American forces and their South Vietnamese allies were locked in combat with North Vietnamese forces inside the walls of Vietnam’s ancient capital. It was a photograph of a Patton tank carrying wounded U.S. Marines. The picture would become emblematic of the Battle of Huế—one of the most famous photographs from the Vietnam War and one of the great images in the annals of combat photography.

With an artist’s eye for composition, Olson captured seven Marines in a tableau worthy of Rembrandt. The palette is one of dark, muddy greens and blues and browns in a grayish light, with shocking splashes of red. Under their helmets, the eyes of the men who face the camera are wide and anxious. They are looking past the photographer fearfully. One man has his entire face wrapped in a thick bandage, with his arm in a sling. Behind him sits a Marine whose face isn’t visible but whose bare leg is smeared with blood. The most striking figure, at the center of the shot, in the foreground, is supine. He has been shot through the center of his chest. He is pale, limp, and half-naked. His shirt has been stripped away and his wound roughly bandaged. His head is the closest thing to the viewer in the frame. We see him upside-down, his eyes closed beneath dark eyebrows, his head resting on a wooden door that has been used as a makeshift stretcher. He has a full head of wet black hair, and a lean, handsome face with a long aquiline nose and a faint, youthful attempt at a mustache. He looks to be dead, or nearly so.

The photograph would appear on March 8 in Life magazine, part of a six-page color portfolio of powerful images from Huế. Olson would go on to win the Robert Capa Award for these photographs. His shot of the Marines on the tank got the biggest play. It was printed over two full inside pages. The remarkable pictures came with no story line or detailed captions. The scenes were not described; the Marines were not identified. In the brief text that accompanied the portfolio, the magazine noted that the carnage and desolation of Huế “demonstrated the sickening irony into which the war has fallen—the destruction of the very thing that the U.S. is there to save.”

The pale figure shot through the chest was Alvin Bert Grantham. He was from Mobile, Alabama, and he was 18 years old. A year earlier, he and his friend Freddie Prist had joined the Marines. They had been working as bricklayers. Both had dropped out of high school, and when the draft board came calling, they decided to join the Marines. They knew nothing about Vietnam or the war, except that the communists were trying to take over the country and had to be stopped.

In Vietnam, Grantham went to Charlie Company, 1st Battalion of the 5th Marine Regiment, based in Huế, and became part of an M-60 machine-gun squad. He was in Huế at the end of January, when the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong launched the Tet Offensive. The assault against Huế came on the 31st, and the battle for control of the Citadel lasted for 25 bloody days, with the combatants controlling an ever-shifting patchwork inside the three-square-mile precinct. The fighting was inch-by-inch, room-by-room. Grantham’s unit was nearly always directly across a street from the enemy, and each morning rang with action. The unit was repeatedly ordered to send squads across, and the squads were mowed down each time. Then the Marines would spend excruciating minutes, sometimes hours, trying to drag the killed and wounded back. Once, Grantham watched as a sergeant walked out alongside a tank to try to retrieve a fallen Marine. When they got close, he took off his helmet and leaned down to place his ear on the man’s chest, to see if his heart was still beating—and was shot through the head, the bullet entering by his left ear, just below the temple, and exiting through his right jaw. The sergeant, improbably, was still alive. He fell over and rolled around, and the men behind him, Grantham included, shouted for him to crawl back. He made it to a ditch in front of the house where the rest of his squad was hiding, and a corpsman went to work on him there.

This went on for days. The moist air was thick with smoke and diesel fumes, and—because many of those killed on both sides remained unburied all over the city—the smell of rotting flesh. You did not get used to it.

On the day Grantham was wounded, all four of the other members of his machine-gun squad were hit by shrapnel. He was the only one unhurt. He had dragged the men, one by one, from the building they’d been in and pulled them across the street to cover. When he returned for the last one, a bleeding and incapacitated man he knew only as “Snow,” the man refused to let Grantham pull him from the room.

“Take the gun first,” he said.

Grantham could not carry both him and the gun.

“I ain’t got time to come back,” Grantham said.

“Take the gun first,” said Snow. “You can’t let them get the gun.”

So Grantham did as he was told. He carried the gun out and then went back for Snow, whom he picked up and carried out to the others. Then someone down the street started yelling that they needed the machine gun. Grantham ran with it toward the house on the corner, which was set back farther from the street than the others. He stopped behind the last house before that one, looked to his left, and saw an enemy soldier pointing a rifle at him. Grantham ducked into a back door just as rounds hit it behind him. He set up the gun in a rear window and started blasting toward the shooter.

Another Marine ran into the house, screaming for him to stop firing.

“There’s Marines in that house!” he said.

“Well, there might be, but there’s gooks all over the outside of it!”

More enemy soldiers came running across the street toward the corner house and Grantham started shooting at them. He ducked back out of the window just as return fire came through, waited for a few moments, and then peeked back out. That’s when the rifle round hit him square in the chest. It knocked him backward off his feet, and he landed on his back. He still had the machine gun in his hand when he hit the floor. He threw it off to the side and yelled, “I’m hit!”

Then he felt it—as if a hot poker had been stuck through his chest, just to the right of center. It burned all the way through him. He started to have trouble breathing. A Marine who had been in the room started to work on him. His shirt was torn off. Grantham could see blood spurt out of the bullet hole when he exhaled and get sucked back inside when he tried to inhale. The Marine took the cellophane off a cigarette pack and placed it over the wound, then stuffed it into the bullet hole with a finger. He placed a compress over the wound and bound it tightly with a bandage wrapped around Grantham’s chest and neck.

Now he could breathe better, but the wound still burned. Several of his ribs were shattered. Grantham was turned on his right side so that his good lung wouldn’t fill up with blood. The Marine kept slapping him, trying to keep him awake, trying to make him talk. Grantham felt an overpowering need to go to sleep. A corpsman came, fumbled with his arm, and started an I.V. There was a discussion about morphine.

“We can’t give him too much,” the corpsman said. “I don’t want him to pass out.”

He was placed on a wooden door and four Marines carried him from the house and lifted him onto a tank with other wounded men. When it started to move, the pain was excruciating.

He drifted in and out of consciousness. They stopped at one aid station, which couldn’t take more wounded—they were overwhelmed. At the second station, Grantham was removed from the tank and zipped immediately into a body bag. He was only semi-conscious. He could hear people yelling, screaming in pain, but there was not enough help for everyone. He heard someone say, “Wait, this one’s not dead yet.” Grantham felt sorry for that person, whoever he was, only to realize that they must have been talking about him, because the body bag suddenly came unzipped.

Grantham was sure he was dying . . . “not dead yet.” He was not going to make it back alive. A whirl of thoughts went through his head: the people and things he would miss, his parents, his friend Freddie, a girl he liked . . . and then he remembered the truck.

He had fallen ill when he was five years old. He had a rare enzyme disease, porphyria, which had affected his kidneys. He was afraid of the hospital where his parents had taken him to stay, and where he was confined to his bed. So one day his father brought him the truck. It was a miniature tow truck made of metal, with real rubber tires. It had a hook on the back. You could change the tires and lower and raise the hook. The doors would open and close. He loved that truck.

And then he remembered Krystal’s burgers. He and Freddie, after they’d worked a long morning laying bricks, would drive together to Krystal’s, which sold small, square hamburgers for 10 cents each—you could eat one in two bites. They would order a dozen each, two large fries each, two big Cokes each, and two pieces of pie each.

“Who’s going to eat all this food?” the counter girl asked.

“We are,” they said.

They took the food out to the car and sat there and feasted until it was time to go back to work.

Grantham was taken to an operating room—he wasn’t sure anymore where he was, but it was a huge room with lots of lights. There were many people in the room, and there was a lot of noise, a lot of shouting. He was stripped naked and turned over on his side. A nurse jabbed him with a needle. The doctor lifted one of his arms up over his head and started cutting. He was still conscious, and the blade stung like hell.

When he next opened his eyes, he was on a hospital ship. He was in a tiny room with a number of other beds. The man in the bed next to him was screaming. The man had just awakened to discover that he had lost both of his legs. Grantham went immediately back to sleep. The next time he awoke he was being loaded onto a plane, a C-130, and he was told that he was being taken to the 106th Army Hospital, in Yokohama, Japan.

He would learn more about his wound later. The rifle round had left a small hole in his chest and a larger one under his right shoulder blade. He had an incision that went from his right nipple all the way around to the exit wound in his back. There were tubes in his torso and his arm and up his penis. Six weeks would go by before he was able to get up and walk around. He learned that he had contracted malaria in Vietnam, and that while he was recovering in Japan he came down with typhoid. He dropped 50 pounds. The doctors told him he could not be flown back to the States until his fever subsided, so he started taking the thermometer out of his mouth when it reached 98 degrees. They flew him to Pensacola, Florida. When they discovered he still had a fever, he was placed in quarantine.

He was there when his sister’s former husband, who had also served in the Marines, came for a visit and showed him the picture in Life. He had been at a barber shop, flipping pages in the magazine, when he’d seen it.

Grantham’s full recovery would take more than a year. He got married when he left the Marines, in 1970, and went to work for Scott Paper Company, in Mobile. He and his wife had three children. Twelve years later, he got a job with a company that built circuit boards for computers. In time he became the head of manufacturing. He divorced and remarried, and adopted his second wife’s youngest son, who grew up and joined the Marines, serving two tours in Iraq.

Like most of those who fought in Huế, the slightest glimpse of a photo or scrap of video shot there in February 1968 is enough to bring back the smell, the noise, the days of gray, cold rain, of smoke and cordite, the days of fright and feral anger and pain. Something about the grayness of that month is the battle’s signature, as if the city for nearly a month had literally fallen into the shadow of death.

Grantham never talked about Vietnam. At first it was a difficult subject. The war was ever more unpopular in the years that followed, until it ended—from America’s perspective, not just badly but disgracefully. The war divided two generations and, nearly a half century later, still shapes our politics and foreign policy. Grantham didn’t want to talk about it at first, and in time not talking about it became a habit. He got on with his life. He reset his moral compass. He hid his scars. Olson’s picture became famous, but the Marine at its center did not. No one outside his immediate family and friends ever recognized that the stricken Marine with the hole in his chest was Alvin Bert Grantham. He is like a model who sat for an artist who produced a painting that resonated in the world for larger reasons. In that sense, and in that sense alone, the picture is not about Grantham. And yet, because it is a photograph, because it captures something real, it will always be very intimately, very painfully, about a specific person at a specific moment.

From Huế 1968: A Turning Point in the American War in Vietnam by Mark Bowden. Copyright © 2017 by Mark Bowden. Reprinted by permission of Atlantic Monthly Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc.