"This Strange War Fascinates Me"

I'm no more courageous than anyone else. I just feel that photography is important. And I will do what is required to show what is happening. I have a sense of the ultimate--death. And sometimes I must say, "To hell with that."

--Larry Burrows

Naturally, LIFE Photographer Larry Burrows, two-time winner of the Robert Capa award* for "superlative photography requiring exceptional courage and enterprise," was aboard the first press helicopter to fly into Laos last week. With a few other civilian combat photographers, he had camped on the border for at least four days, frustrated by U.S. and Vietnamese refusal to allow on-the-spot coverage. When a few flights were finally authorized by the Vietnamese, Burrows and the others were given the first seats. Their chopper strayed over powerfully defended enemy territory and was shot down. No survivors could be seen from the air.

Sock of Rice. Missing with Burrows was A.P.'s Henri Huet, 43. Born in Viet NaM. Huet had photographed the Indochinese war for more than 20 years and in 1967 was a Capa award winner. Also missing were U.P.L.'s Kent Potter, 23, a three-year Viet Nam veteran, and Freelance Photographer Keisaburo Shimamoto, on assignment for Newsweek. Their presumed deaths brought to 32 the number of newsmen killed in Indochina since 1965.

Burrows, 44, had covered conflicts across the world--in Iraq, Lebanon, Iran, Cyprus and the Congo. But the lanky, gentle-mannered Englishman had very personal feelings about Viet Nam. "Be it exotic meetings with Madame Nhu, or sleeping on a stretcher on a Vietnamese patrol, or sharing a sock of rice with the Special Forces, this strange war fascinates me," he said. He could be diverted, but not for long. As LIFE Managing Editor Ralph Graves put it: "He spent nine years covering this war under conditions of incredible danger. We kept thinking up other, safe stories for him to do, but he would do them and then go back to the war. As he said, that was his story, and he wanted to see it through."

Two weeks ago, when an American plane accidentally bombed a South Vietnamese unit, Burrows was traveling with it. He rushed into the inferno to get his pictures; the result is this week's lead story in LIFE. Call it instinct, call it bravery, call it a drive for perfection --whatever the quality, it made him a superb photographer. He won his first Capa award for a 1963 LIFE spread showing the unrelenting savagery of the war. He won again after a 1965 flight with a Marine helicopter squadron airlifting a battalion of Vietnamese infantry to an isolated area. The Viet Cong were waiting for them, and the choppers came under heavy fire. Burrows caught the action and the agony of that futile mission.

Away from the battlefield, his most recent assignment was the East Pakistan cyclone and tidal wave. To much of the world, it was Burrows' color pictures that finally translated the enormity of that disaster into reality. For as good as he was with action pictures, Burrows was a master of mood; his pictures of the Taj Mahal and Cambodia's Angkor temples are classics.

Living Extinction. Burrows, a native of London, got into photography in 1942 as a darkroom assistant in LIFE'S London office. He explained his determination to cover wars saying, "I was in blitz-torn London before I had the equipment or the ability to express my feelings. That had a great deal to do with my keenness now to show the interested people and shock the uninterested into realizing and facing the horrors of the Viet Nam War."

Last week, when he was reported "missing," Burrows was seen on the TV program The Photographers as he filmed a story of a crippled ten-year-old war victim, Nguyen Lau. The boy was bewildered because he was returning from U.S. foster parents to a country that was now strange to him. He no longer knew the language and could not even understand his relatives. Burrows obviously yearned to save the child from the living extinction that awaited him. He resisted, and instead fulfilled a more momentous mission: "To show suffering, and hopefully to convey the tragedy that war brings."

*Named for LIFE Photographer Robert Capa, killed by a land mine in 1954 while covering the French war in Indochina.

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