Grief and Sorrow in Haktong

Rarely did such an emotional photo emerge from a war. It was taken in the Haktong-ni area of South Korea by career combat news photographer Al Chung on August 28th 1950; the photo showed a grief-stricken American infantryman being comforted by a comrade. The details about his grief were a matter of debate. Some said he just learnt his best friend had been killed, while some say it can be attributed to a more banal reason–he just learnt that his replacement as a radio operator had been killed.

The photo was also a study in contrasts: in the background, it also showed a corpsman sifting through casualty information and filling in the name of the newly fallen, ignoring the emotional outburst besides him as if he was giving his comrades a moment of privacy. The photo was featured in Edward Steichen’s celebrated “Family of Man” photography exhibit in 1955 at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and subsequently been reproduced in many newspapers, magazines, books and museums.

Hawaiian Albert Chang covered three wars; as a dockworker in Honolulu, he saw the attack on Pearl Harbor and afterwards served in the Pacific and went on to photograph the Japanese surrender on the USS Missouri. In Korea, he cemented his reputation as one of the Army’s finest photographers. In Vietnam, he received the Purple Heart after a Viet Cong bullet hit his left eye. Chang’s famous images included a Vietnamese family driven by oxen cart on a road leaving Saigon that is filled with bustling US tanks and a group of Saigon residents detaining and beating a suspect in a parade bombing who was thought to have belonged to the Viet Cong. But not all of his images were serious: a notable one from Korea showed three soldiers sharing canned poi and dried squid as a ukulele nestles in the lap of one man.

 

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5 thoughts on “Grief and Sorrow in Haktong

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  3. That was George (Yoss) Gutzmann, Radar Operator from the DD 841 USS Noa attached to the the 1ST Expeditionary Marines in the Pusan Perimeter in August of 1950. I have a article from I believe a Boston news paper to back up the man from the picture. Dad first saw the picture in 1965 at Luther Seminary in ST Paul MN and was shocked at the picture while in a humanities class he did not even know that there was any taking photos because fighting was so fierce and they were retreating and setting up new lines. My sister is correct about the fate of the man dad was holding, which was killed according to dad. It was one of the few things he talked about Korea along with going to Chosin with Chesty Puller and the 1ST Marines. Pops was pulling shrapnel from his legs till the day he died along with nightmares and never complained or took a dime from the government. Although dad was not a Marine in training, he fought with them and was in one year in hell called the forgotten war.

  4. The soldier holding the crying comrade is my father, George, born in Milwaukee, WI, who served two tours of duty in Korea. The distressed soldier had seen his brother die that day as they were mistakenly assigned to the same unit. My father said that the distressed brother died in combat not long thereafter.

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