Chicagoan Lazlo Kondor got his job as a war photographer by fibbing to army recruiters. He told them he was the official photographer for the first Mayor Daley. Trained as an infantryman and equipped with battle gear he sometimes used, Kondor spent two years in Vietnam on missions that civilian photographers were barred from because–unlike Kondor–they could not fight.
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“War is an emotion. If you can capture emotion in the faces of the participants you capture war.” In the photo L.R.R.P. Team Arkansas Waiting for Extraction With Wounded N.V. Soldier, a group of men resolutely watch for a helicopter to evacuate a wounded enemy. “That’s a team. They look in the same direction. They even look alike,” Kondor observes. It’s the last part of a series of four photos that reveal war’s contradictions. First the soldiers are in a helicopter “smiling and having fun,” notes Kondor, but then just before landing two faces, now quite grim, look in opposite directions, as if already surveilling hostile country. Kondor’s wife looked at this sequence–which ends with the North Vietnamese soldier’s evacuation–and told him, “This is crazy. First you shoot him up and then you’re risking your life to save him.”
Kondor understands the toll war takes on civilians. Born in 1940 in Hungary, he remembers the end of World War II. “The Germans and the Soviet troops were fighting over our village,” he says. “Most of the time we were down in the basement because for weeks on end they were pushing back and forth for one lousy village–captured, recaptured, captured, recaptured.” In Scorched-Earth Policy, Quan Tin Province, a girl of about eight or nine stands in front of her burning home holding her younger brother in her arms. Kondor says the crying girl is “screaming, “Don’t burn my house!’ But the little boy is totally uncomprehending.” Pointing to the boy, Kondor says, “I see myself–that’s me.”
