Incredible photos of the Viet Cong and their allies during the Vietnam War
A Viet Cong guerrilla stands guard at the Mekong Delta, 1973.
The photograph shows a young woman standing guard on the banks of the Mekong Delta, an automatic rifle in her hands. She’s in her early-twenties. She has been widowed twice. Both husbands were soldiers. Both were killed fighting the invading American army.
The picture was taken by a North Vietnamese war correspondent and photographer called Le Minh Truong (1930-2012). He later said, “You could find women like her almost everywhere during the war.” He saw this young fighter “as the embodiment of the ideal guerrilla woman, who’d made great sacrifices for her country.”
This image is just one of thousands of photographs taken by hundreds of amateur and professional Viet Cong photographers. Their intention was to tell their story and document their version of the Vietnam War or rather as they termed it, the Resistance War Against America.
We all know the American side of the story.
It was pumped out on news broadcasts every night during the conflict. It was written about in dispatches, news stories, essays, biographies, and novelistic fictions. It became suitable entertainment material for Hollywood directors to make big, noisy, allegorical tales about the state of America. But it was rarely told from the side that won.
Most of these photographs were taken by people who believed in North Vietnam’s struggle. They were self-taught. Many submitted their work anonymously. The pictures came in hourly from photographers across the country to the Vietnam News Agency, the National Liberation Front, the North Vietnamese Army or their associated newspapers. Some pictures were used for propaganda purposes. Most were not.
In the 1990s, photographer Tim Page and writer Doug Niven began the arduous task of locating as many of these photographers and their work as possible. They collected these pictures into a book Another Vietnam: Pictures of the War from the Other Side in 2002.
Target practice with Company #6 of the Yen My Commune, 1965.
Soldiers on the Ho Chi Minh trail, 1966
New recruits line-up for medical examinations in Haiphong, 1967. The Norh Vietnamese fighting force rose from 35,000 in the 1950s to 500,000 by the 1970s.
A landscape devastated by American Army’s use of Agent Orange, the Mekong Delta 1970.
Laotian guerrillas take supplies by elephant to NVA troops in southern Laos, 1971.
Viet Cong fighting the enemy at the Mekong Delta, date unknown.
The Vietnam-Cambodia border, 1972.
Guerillas scavange through a downed US Navy plane outside Hanoi, 1972.
NVA soldiers during Operation Lam Son 719, 1972.
Guerilla activists wear masks to conceal their identities from each other in case they are captured and interrogated, Nam Can forest, 1972.
Workers repairing the Ham Rong Bridge over the Ma River, North Vietnam 1973.
Women haul fishing nets on the Mekong River, 1974.
A Cambodian guerrilla named Danh Son Huol being carried to an makeshift operating theater among mangrove swamp on the Ca Mau Peninsula, 1970.
Women from North and South Vietnam laugh and embrace in 1975.
Abandoned army boots outside Saigon 1975.