military conceded was one of the finest in the world. From a corps of around 35,000 men in 1950, the NVA grew to over half a million men by the mid-’70s, a force the U.S. The North’s volunteer system was transformed into a mandatory system in 1973 when all able-bodied males were drafted.
New recruits undergo physical examinations in Haiphong. The pictures collected in this article are part of the photographic book Another Vietnam: Pictures of the War from the Other Side and show the war from the Vietnamese perspective. The so-called first ‘television war’, the Vietnam war was defined and shaped by cameras and the bold photographers behind them. The history of the war has been a partial one, underscored by the American dominance of the English-language historiography of the war and the focus on American policies and the American experience of the war, coupled with a mostly negative assessment of South Vietnam. The war had a ripple effect that spread outwards from Vietnam to other countries and continents, an effect that was temporal as well as geographic, reaching not only the wartime generations but also the postwar generations. Vietnam was a transformational event and became an international symbol for the protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The echoes of the war extended well beyond Vietnam and the countries that participated in the conflict. North Vietnam had massed support of the Soviet Union and China and their satellite states while South Vietnam had the backing of the United States and its allies. The war involved a fratricidal conflict between the communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) and the non-communist Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam), and extended to neighboring Laos and Cambodia however, it was also a proxy war in a Cold War contest between the communist bloc and the western bloc. The history of the Vietnam War is one that has been complicated by politics, and it is a history that is still being written and rewritten. “Sometimes the photos were lost or confiscated on the way,” said the photographer. From here in the mangrove swamps of the Mekong Delta, forwarding images to the North was difficult. Activists meet in the Nam Can forest, wearing masks to hide their identities from one another in case of capture and interrogation.
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