The heat is palpable. The ground everywhere around them is parched and brown. The sky above is thick with grit and gray exhaust. In that grainy distance a single chopper hovers. Nearby, eight soldiers, their backs to the camera, appear to be loading into a helicopter. Upfront, and staring directly at the camera are a motely group of ten shambling soldiers. Their youthful faces betray an array of emotion, a few uncertain smiles, a few bewildered. One young solider stands off to the side looking deeply dubious. Four of the ten, including Doug Johnson, hold up their hands in the “V” of the peace sign. One man carries a weapon. One clutches a canteen. The radio man holds a phone to his ear. Their gear and helmets and weapons lie on the ground at their feet. These rumpled young men all wear dirty khakis and bright red, long scarves around their necks. They stand, not in any sort of formation, but hanging together casually, their stance, if not altogether relaxed, is generally informal. Except for Doug Johnson. Knees flexed, tensed, Doug looks ready to bolt.

The photo credit belongs to Ennio Iocobucci. The caption reads: “At an airstrip in South Viet Nam Central Highlands, US 4th Infantry troopers await helilift to join Operation Pacify One aimed at rooting North Vietnamese troops out of a rugged base area in NE Cambodia.” The photo is in the May 25 1970 issue of Time magazine. “Operation Pacify One,” is fine, grand title, but Time quotes President Richard Nixon calling it “Operation Buy Time.” When my mother opened this Time magazine, she shrieked, reeling with pain. She immediately called me, long distance, sobbing, “Oh God, they’re sending him into Cambodia!” It was the family’s first word of Doug in months. He had quit writing letters.

Ennio’s photograph is part of Time’s elaborate five page spread that includes maps and insets detailing the American incursion into Cambodia. Or, more correctly, the government’s (at long last) admission that our troops were invading Cambodia. I always wonder what fates awaited the other soldiers there with Doug about to be “helilifted” into Cambodia. Did they live? Did they die? Did they come home broken men like my brother? I wonder what their parents and sisters and brothers and girlfriends thought or did or cried out when they opened the pages of Timemagazine and saw what my mother saw.

Ennio Iocobucci was an Italian, one of a cadre of photojournalists, mostly men, who covered the Vietnam War from the beginning to the bitter 1975 end. Periodicals with huge readerships, like Time and Look and Life, the major newspapers, the wire services like AP, Reuters, UPI, all had their own photojournalists. Ennio Iocobucci was one of a vast number of stringers, independents who then sold their work to the well-known outlets. These photographers, salaried and stringer alike, ran the same risks as the troops. They were a special kind of professional, brash, brave if not fearless, hard-living and high-flying. Some died or vanished into jungles, never to be seen again. Some of them warped into legend.

Ennio Iocobucci’s name does not appear with the best known of the Vietnam photographers. Ennio’s name and reputation seem to have drifted into a sort of netherworld. He died by suicide in 1977 at the age of thirty-seen and it’s unclear to me who owns the rights to his work. Someone does. While I can’t reproduce these photos, many can be viewed. (The photo here I took from Ennio’s Italian Wikipedia page so I’m assuming that’s pretty much public.) An internet search reveals there are people planning to make a documentary film about him, but the most recent additions to the site are in 2022 and though it has a “contact,” email address, no one ever replied to my inquiry.

Ennio’s Vietnam photographs probably number in the thousands. His photos capture American GIs in moments tense and poised (like the Time magazine one) or poignant, like the one of the exhausted, helmeted soldier holding a little fake Christmas tree, its few bangles glowing against a dark background. One photo that shows up frequently on social media is pretty banal: two American soldiers on either side of a sexy USO starlet visiting the troops. He also photographed many ceremonial occasions, the usual boring pomp. But the vast majority of Ennio’s photos delve deeply into the harrowing, everyday lives of the Vietnamese people: their shops and markets, their gardens, their fields, their maimed and their dead. Sometimes their maimed and their dead lie in ditches or on the roadside. Their maimed and their dead include children.

Ennio Iocobucci

Ennio Iocobucci was born in1940 in Morello, Italy, a mountainous region. His brutal childhood was spent working as a servant in a monastery. As a teen he went to Rome where he cadged a living by any means possible. A chance encounter with journalist Derek Wilson crucially altered his life. How/why he came to Vietnam, I do not know, but he seems to have landed there in 1968. He stayed. In 1975 he was nominated for Pulitzer Prize. In 1977 he committed suicide in Rome. He was thirty-seven.

But in May 1970, Ennio was on an airstrip in the South Viet Nam Central Highlands, as was Doug Johnson. This photo might well have been taken just hours before Doug Johnson made a fateful decision. I try to imagine, to animate the scene after Ennio, with a nod and a wave, moved on. What then? The helicopter hovering in the distance would have landed. The guys in the near background, the men loading on to the helicopter, would have completed their tasks and, with a roar, up they went. Doug and his motely compatriots were next. Did they load their gear and weapons and bodies onto the just-landed helicopter? Were they the next to take off for a “rugged base area in NE Cambodia” ? Is that why Doug looks like he is ready to bolt?

You see, Doug Johnson and the 4^th Infantry had already been sent into Cambodia several times prior to this much-publicized, public announcement in May. The psychiatrist who treated him after his return home wrote that Doug’s madness was the result of “living in combat experiences…Most of which was spent on patrol with his platoon in situations of very great hazard and terror.” Doug himself put it more succinctly as “scared shitless.”

Moreover, in mid-to-late May, 1970 Doug was but twenty days away from when he ought to have rotated out of Nam, to finish his enlistment elsewhere. Doug Johnson had been shooting up speed and heroin regularly for months and had suffered multiple bouts of malaria and hepatitis. There at Camp Radcliff in the South Viet Nam Central Highlands, Doug had already gone to an army shrink who ignored him. He found a medical doctor, Dr. Cantrell to whom he confessed he was “strung out on speed,” and his health badly undermined. Dr. Cantrell gave him a handwritten note saying that medically he should not be sent into combat.

Doug was ordered to give this note to a sergeant and he complied. When his unit was chosen for another foray into Cambodia, Doug protested that he had a doctor’s signed release. He was told to produce the note or join his unit. Sleepless, speeding, and desperate, Doug racketed all over Camp Radcliff looking for the note or the man to whom he’d given it. No luck. Dr. Cantrell had been transferred to Cam Rahn Bay and Doug was denied use of a telephone to try and find him. With Cantrell’s note vanished, Doug had no choice; he lined up there with the other 4^th Infantry men in the photograph awaiting their helilift. Perhaps that’s why he looks ready to bolt. Because once over the border into Cambodia, he did bolt. Doug Johnson did not follow the other men in this photo. He did not follow orders. He went AWOL.

Doug was caught, arrested, imprisoned in early June 1970. The AWOL (and an additional charge of sleeping on guard duty after he had been returned to Camp Radcliff ) were crimes for a court martial. (His first court-martial was in November 1969, also for AWOL.) To avoid a second court-martial—and what would surely have been another prison sentence—Doug accepted the Undesirable Discharge on August 20, 1970. This choice also allowed him to leave the Army altogether. He returned to States on August 23^rd. His father , Bill Johnson, was on the tarmac to meet him. Doug clutched the sandal of a Viet Cong he had killed. He would not be parted from it.

In Bill Johnson’s long fight to get Doug’s Undesirable changed to Honorable, my father contended that had Dr. Cantrell’s medical release note been heeded, Doug would not have been sent into Cambodia, would not have gone AWOL and thus, would not have deserved a second court-martial, or the Undesirable Discharge. The Undesirable was undeserved. Unjust. In December 1970, Bill Johnson found Dr. Cantrell, then in private practice in Central California. Cantrell remembered Doug and wrote a signed statement to the truth of Doug’s recollection. My father believed that victory was thus assured, but that was not to be. That struggle lay ahead.

Despite the pain his photograph gave my family, I wish I could offer Ennio Iocobucci some little rose of gratitude for his having preserved that crucial moment before Doug’s final, fateful foray into Cambodia. Any life that ends in suicide demands our pity, so most of all I hope Ennio found the peace he so desperately sought in death.