Real heroes are even better

Four days ago I wrote about some of my idols--Charlie Chaplin, Dmitri Shostakovich and David Halberstam. We all have a personal stable of historical figures who we identify with and look up to.

But today I received an email that reminded me that sometimes are heroes can live right down the block. It came from Jodi Rush, the mother of Heather Sigmon, one of my brides from October, 2005. Jodi was writing to tell me that our mutual friend Frank Johnston, one of the great news photographers of all time, was recently honored with the White House News Photographers Association's Lifetime Achievement Award at WHNPA annual dinner this past weekend. (Once upon a time, I would have been at that dinner, but weddings have replaced photojournalism dinners as my weekend activity. C'est la vie.)

Frank was a guest at Heather's wedding to Jose Vargas back in the fall of '05, and I've bumped into him occasionally since then, almost always at the Apple Store in Clarendon. To say that he's is one of the greats doesn't really come close to giving him the respect he deserves. Frank was in Vietnam, he covered Watergate, he was in Dallas the day Lee Harvey Oswald was shot, he photographed the Jonestown massacre in Guyana. The list goes on and on and on. Three times he was named White House News Photographer of the year.

But as I'm sure he knows all too well, you can't really talk about Frank Johnston without talking first about Peace Church.

Back in 1967, while shooting for United Press International--where I would begin my career 25 years later--Frank found himself trapped inside a tiny Catholic church in An Hoa, South Vietnam. It was known simply as Peace Church. Needless to say, peace was nowhere to be found that day.

Quite simply, I believe--and I'm not alone--that Frank's photograph of the haggard and scared Marine looking up from inside of Peace Church, the large wooden crucifix of Jesus looming behind him, is the most haunting photograph to come out of the whole war. 72 dpi on a blog can't do this photograph justice.

Now, certainly there are other great photographs from Vietnam, most of which I don't even need to link to. They are fixed in our brains: Eddie Adams' Saigon execution, Nick Ut's tragic photo of a naked girl running down a street after being napalmed, and Catherine Leroy's image of a Marine realizing his buddy is dead are among the greatest news photographs ever captured. But Peace Church is different. For all the action of those three famous photographs, Peace Church is just so darned quiet.

As Phil McCombs would write in the Washington Post's amazing 1998 multi-part story about Frank and Peace Church, "It was a butcher shop in that church. In the fading light, the moans of wounded Marines mingled with the explosions of incoming mortar rounds. Men were dying in one another's arms. Bodies lay on the floor. Shrapnel sprayed the cement walls outside like handfuls of nails hurled by a giant. A few hundred yards away, Marine units struggled in mortal combat with North Vietnamese Army regulars. One 200-man company had 15 killed and 60 wounded in a few hours. Medevac choppers couldn't get in. Wounded and dead were taken to the church."

Everyone should read this series. There's little I can say that could supplant McCombs' prose. You'll read about the man who called Frank in 1998, believing himself to be the brother of the young Marine in the photo. You'll read about the bond the two men form, and of their emotional trip back to Vietnam together to retrace the steps of that young Marine, thought to have been killed not long after Frank made his picture. And then, like a foul ball from out of nowhere, you'll read about the man who, as fate would have it, would finally step forward, some 30 years after the photograph was taken, to say that he was in fact the Marine in Peace Church. I remember reading the Post series and feeling proud just to know I worked side by side with Frank. For someone who has recorded so much history he is a remarkably humble man--always smiling, always laughing.

In fact, when I photographed Frank and his wife Nancy dancing at Heather and Jose's wedding a few years back, he kept deflecting all of my admiration and praise for him, instead asking me questions about what I was doing in wedding photography and the like. A real life hero, for sure.

So let's all salute a true legend of photography, Frank Johnston, winner of the White House News Photographer Association's Lifetime Achievement Award. No one is more deserving than you, Frank!

Matt


(Peace Church by Frank Johnston, courtesy UPI/Corbis-Bettman)