I thought of Vietnam many times while I worked on my drawings, models, ideas around Hero’s Hill.
Partial photo from the book Under Fire was taken by David Burnett, 1971 at a USO concert in Da Nang.
Vietnam was the war I grew up with. My cousin did multiple tours. Older brothers of friends were drafted. A number of times I went with my mother to drop something off at one house or another, and right before we knocked, she would say, don’t say anything, their son was just killed in Vietnam. We saw the war happening on the news, in LIFE magazine. I remember the photos, but mostly I remember the stunned reaction of adults. As photo editor, Peter Howe said about Cathy Leroy’s photos, “These are not portraits of a warrior class but of ordinary, frightened, and often bewildered young men trying desperately to stay alive, and relying upon each other to pull off this seemingly impossible feat.”