Vietnam War photos back in spotlight
Many Southlanders fly quietly under the radar and are mildly surprised at the interest others show when attention is drawn to them. No shrinking violet, Brent Procter of Bluff – just puzzled at our surprise at the release in the United States of a book highlighting his photo journalism work during the war in Vietnam.
Procter is one of a handful of surviving photographers whose wartime pictures and stories appear in glossy print in the hardback We Shot the War produced in tandem with an exhibition of the work.
He was neither a peacenik nor a combatant – a young Southland Daily News journalist puzzled about the war and keen to learn more about it.
He battled through three newspaper jobs in New Zealand and Australia to get to Vietnam, earn the American accreditation needed and get to work.
The Hoover Institute collected, collated and curated thousands of photographs to choose those used in the book, which accompanies an exhibition of Vietnam war material at Stanford University near San Francisco.
Brent Procter has spent the past 20 years back in New Zealand, initially returning to Bluff to care for his elderly dad.
Later this month he goes back to the United States for two weeks, invited to attend the We Shot Vietnam exhibition of photographs and essays and speak of his work and those times.
Like many Southlanders who have gone overseas to nurse, teach, fight forest fires, help after natural disasters, work on leprosy mission stations, run hospitals, build houses, he has talked little of his work away and was surprised to be invited back into a spotlight. Those who served with the Red Cross overseas and in war zones have talked little about their experiences on their return.
‘‘It is all too different from what people know here or really what they want to hear about,’’ said one of her own experience. ‘‘Few people cared about the war in Vietnam at the time and fewer still years later,’’ she said.
Brent Procter, today the lesseeoperator of the Bluff camping ground which marks both the beginning and the end of New Zealand’s national State Highway 1, agrees.
But he is pleased at the chance to return to the United States, take part in this historical retrospective, looking back over a half century to a world very different from the Vietnam popular with tourists today.