Vietnam Summer 1967 Essay
Vietnam Summer 1967
Cambridge, Massachusetts 1967
lithograph
63.5 cm x 42.5 cm
Special Collections and College Archives, Musselman Library, Gettysburg College
Gift of Mary Margaret Stewart
This illustration of a crying woman carrying two babies was printed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1967 for a campaign protesting the Vietnam War. Widespread antiwar movements in the United States in the 1960s included intense protests, demonstrations and activism, sparked by the most unrestricted journalistic coverage of any war to date.(1) Grizzly photographs of the consequences of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam flooded American media, outraging thousands and sparking movements on college campuses around the country.(2) In comparison to previous wars, more attention was paid by the media to numbers of civilian casualties, due to the explicit evidence provided by the work of American photojournalists stationed in Vietnam. What was often referred to as “collateral damage” was now given a face, a change that dramatically affected the public’s support for the war.(3) This movement sparked a shift in the American pathos as the fate of children and innocents in Vietnam era antiwar propaganda became dramatically more important.
In this poster a woman moves quickly across a barren, black plane, struggling to grasp the two children in her arms. The abstracted landscape in the composition and the deliberately political, explicitly violent representation of the figures reveal marked similarities to Käthe Kollwitz’s World War I and Peasant War prints and Francisco Goya’s Disasters of War series; these artists directly evoke the widespread consequences of conflict. In Vietnam Summer the darkness of the figure’s dress and hair is starkly contrasted with the sickly yellow background and the red-orange explosion on the horizon, as well as the delicate contour lines of the naked children she is carrying. While one might think of a male soldier when picturing a “body in conflict,” women and children were tragically affected by the war in Vietnam and are often targeted in warzones across the world.(4) This woman’s pained expression and desperate attempt to save her children certainly depicts a body in conflict, as terror and loss is emphasized by the centrality of the figure and the enigmatic, violent landscape. The depiction of this woman and her children brings resolute attention to the bodies that are often forgotten about or rendered unimportant in times of conflict.(5)
1 According to historian Daniel Hallin, the media had extraordinary freedom to report the war in Vietnam without direct government control: it was the first war in which reporters were routinely accredited to accompany military forces yet not subject to censorship. See Daniel Hallin, The “Uncensored War”: Media in Vietnam (London, England: University of California Press, 1986), 6.
2. Hallin states, “No televised war can long retain political support.” Ibid.,4
3. Hallin discusses an “ethic of responsibility” that became integral to journalists and photojournalists in Vietnam and states, “The journalists that went to southeast Asia in the early 1960s were in fact intensely committed to reporting ‘the story’ despite the generals and ambassadors who were telling them to ‘get on the team.’” Ibid.,8
4. Susan Sontag reiterates, “Men make war. Men (most men) like war, since for men there is ‘some glory, some necessity, some satisfaction in fighting’ that women (most women) do not feel or enjoy.” She claims, “War is a man’s game - that the killing machine has a gender, and it is male.” Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York, New York: Picador, 2003), 3, 6. Furthermore, according to Guenter Lewy in his book America in Vietnam, “The number of North Vietnamese civilians killed by Americans bombing was 65,000. This figure is more than twice as many as the U.S. government estimate of 30,000 people killed in North Vietnam. However, according to the official estimate of Hanoi in 1995, the number of civilian deaths in the entire war were almost 2 million people, which is four times higher than other estimates.” See Ku Bia, “How Many People Died in the Vietnam War?,” The Vietnam War, n.d., http://thevietnamwar.info/how-many-people-died-in-the-vietnam-war/.
5. Gender theorist Judith Butler explains, “Specific lives cannot be apprehended as injured or lost if they are not first apprehended as living. If certain lives do not qualify as lives or are, from the start, not conceivable as lives within certain epistemological frames, then these lies are never lived nor lost in the full sense.” See Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (Maple Vail: Verso, 2009), 1.
