Behind him sits a Marine whose face isn’t visible but whose bare leg is smeared with blood. One man has his entire face wrapped in a thick bandage, with his arm in a sling. They are looking past the photographer fearfully. Under their helmets, the eyes of the men who face the camera are wide and anxious. The palette is one of dark, muddy greens and blues and browns in a grayish light, with shocking splashes of red. With an artist’s eye for composition, Olson captured seven Marines in a tableau worthy of Rembrandt. 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. It was a photograph of a Patton tank carrying wounded U.S. 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. Officially he was shooting for Stars and Stripes, but he carried four other cameras to take pictures he hoped to sell elsewhere. 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.
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