Photography for me is not looking, it’s feeling. If you can’t feel what you’re looking at, then you’re never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures.
- Sir Don McCullin, Sleeping With Ghosts: A Life’s Work in Photography
Don McCullin’s most celebrated image is his portrait of a dazed American soldier, entitled Shellshocked US Marine, Hue, Vietnam. It was taken during the battle for the city of Hue in 1968 and, in its stillness and quiet intensity, says as much about the effects of war on the individual psyche as many of McCullin’s more graphic depictions of conflict and carnage. The eyes that stare out beneath the grimy helmet are not staring at the camera lens, but beyond it, into nowhere.
It was monsoon season, February 1968, when this iconic Marine went missing.
In February 1968 Myron Harrington was a 29-year-old Marine officer, a commander of Delta Company; he had already lost more than half of the 120 men under his command in the battle for Hue when he was told that one of his Marines — one who had been found in a nearby ruined house — was “not willing to participate in the action”.
It was early morning on 21 February 1968 when Harrington was called to see the shell-shocked Marine, who was being escorted away from the front by two marines under the command of Staff Sergeant Robert “Cajun Bob” Thoms. “He was in a state of shock,” Harrington recalls. “He had the classic thousand-yard stare, and was kind of frozen. I ordered that he be evacuated. That’s my last sighting of him.”
The Marine was mute, though in his eyes lay a stare best unmet while dreaming: a gaze that was part trance, part fear, but mostly horror. The men who’d located him recall that he neither blinked nor uttered a single word.
His true name is lost and his fate has become a mystery.
The shell-shocked Marine was escorted to the Delta Company command post. He was left there awaiting evacuation as Delta’s most senior NCO, Gunnery Sergeant Odell Stobaugh, tried and failed to communicate with him. McCullin appeared. The photographer, then 32 years old, had arrived in Hue a week earlier on assignment for The Sunday Times. On seeing the frozen Marine he dropped to one knee to photograph him. “I noticed he was moving not one iota. Not one eyelash was moving,” McCullin says. “He looked as though he had been carved out of bronze. I took five frames and I defy you to find any change or movement in those frames.”
Then the British photographer left the yard. Minutes later, at 7.45am, an NVA rocket hit the edge of the wall above the command post, showering shrapnel onto the Marines below. Seven were wounded, including Stobaugh.
In the madness of evacuation no one quite knows what happened. Capt. Myron Harrington had said the shell-shocked Marine never came back to Delta company. Staff Sergeant Robert Thoms later heard the Marine had been sent to a psychiatric ward in a catatonic state. The personal medical records were never made accessible. The trail went cold.
Other journalists have tried to track down the unknown Marine. Some have tried interview the surviving soldiers of Delta Company present that day but most have died or can’t recall. McCullin said he saw the Marine was left with Gunnery Sergeant Stobaugh. Unfortunatley Stobaugh died in 1999. No record of a non-injury evacuation existed during the key fateful week either.
And so the mystery continues.
But I think this picture is perhaps not about the identity of this one mysterious shell shocked Marine. Rather it is a haunting avatar for a generation of soldiers who took up the call of a growing unpopular and socially divisive war and sacrificed their all, if not for cause or country, then for their fellow brother in arms right there in the foxhole with each other.
It was also a time when Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) was little understood - it was officially recognised only in 1980 in authoratitive psychiatric circles - by doctors, by the military authorities, by society, and most tragically of all by the soldiers themselves and the families they were returning to. For these courageous soldiers had to live through nightmares that would haunt them to their graves. For many they never really came home from the war for they were at war with themselves.
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