David Douglas Duncan

This is War! is a book which happens to have been made possible by the war in Korea. It is in no way a report on the progress of that war, nor does it make any pretense of telling the reasons behind the United Nations’ decision to intervene and try to stop the Communist invasion by force. There is neither climax nor ringing conclusion to this book. It is simply an effort to show something of what a man endures when his country decides to go to war, with or without his personal agreement on the righteousness of the cause. This book is an effort to completely divorce the word “war” as flung dramatically down off the highest benches of every land, from the look in the man’s eyes who is taking his last puff on perhaps his last cigarette, perhaps forever, before he grabs his rifle, his guts and his dreams – and attacks an enemy position above him.

Believing that the look in that man’s eyes tells more clearly what he felt, I am presenting this book to you without a single caption, for any caption that I might write would just mirror what I was feeling, or thought I felt. To sit down now to write subtitles for these pictures, telling what that man thought, would be a mockery of the worst order, for I didn’t even know what he was thinking when I made the picture. Thus the photographs reflect only what the men in this book did, something of what they felt, and probably very little of what they thought.

The book is divided into three chapters. Each chapter deals with a military combat problem… the first, an attack upon a hill… the second, the capture of a city… the third, a fighting retreat. Wishing that it might have been possible to publish this book without a single written word so that the men might tell their own story, yet understanding that there are many people, like my own mother and father, who lack the necessary background for comprehending the ordeals through which these men passed, or the conditions under which they perished, I have prefaced each picture-chapter with a short textblock. Each explains in considerable detail the military situation confronting the troops and their activities as they lived through their days, and nights, while trying to solve those immediate problems. I have tried, in every possible way, to present only a word screen upon which these men project their own story.

I want you, the reader, to understand that I have not put this book together unknowingly or half-heartedly. I want you to feel something of what I felt, and, possibly, to think some of the things that I thought during those dreary months before the pictures of the book made it possible for the men to tell of themselves. Yet, to learn their stories, each page of photographs must be read as carefully as you might read a page of written text in a novel. Asking you to read the story in their faces and hands and bodies, as they were feeling it themselves at the moment of impact, is only fair to them – and is asking more of you than ever before has been asked of the picture-viewing audience.

Nearly every man in this book is a U.S. Marine. It is no accident. I was one of them in World War II. Having shared their lives, as they did mine, during three years while moving up out of the South Pacific islands and right into Tokyo Bay for the surrender of the entire Japanese Empire, I took it for granted, when they arrived in Korea, that I would photograph their battles.

I want to show what war did to a man. I want to show something of the comradeship that binds men together when they are fighting a common peril. I want to show the way men live, and die, when they know Death is among them, and yet they still find the strength to crawl forward armed only with bayonets to stop the advance of men they have never seen, with whom they have no immediate quarrel, men who will kill them on sight if given first chance. I want to show something of the agony, the suffering, the terrible confusion, the heroism which is everyday currency among those men who actually pull the triggers of rifles aimed at other men known as « the enemy ». I want to tell a story of war, as war has always been for men through the ages. Only their weapons, the terrain, the causes have changed.

D.D.D
9 May 2008
(From the introduction to “This is War!”)

The exhibition is being presented with the kind support of the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.