Vining’s team was deep inside enemy territory, and the helicopter pilots were anxious to return to the relative safety of the sky. But now that the det cord was finally in place, and the charges were all set and ready to go, he still had to figure out how to initiate the explosion. If he pulled it off, the destruction of the supply cache - nicknamed “Rock Island East” after the biggest government-owned weapons manufacturing arsenal in the United States - would amount to the second-largest command detonation of the entire Vietnam War. By this point in his tour, Vining had conducted plenty of EOD missions, yet what he was now preparing to blow up was much bigger than anything he had destroyed before. Mike Vining, was a member of an eight-man explosive ordnance disposal team, one of just 13 such units operating at the time in Indochina and the only one involved in the Cambodian campaign. The cord - nearly 3,000 feet of it - was connected to 300 cases of C4 rigged to destroy a massive stockpile of enemy weapons and ammunition. It was the last roll from the 12th case of det cord the 26-year-old Army specialist needed to complete his mission. One afternoon in May 1970, a young American bomb technician crouched in the Cambodian jungle, unspooling a roll of detonating cord. Each revealed a fascinating story, reminding us that the truth is often far bigger, and more incredible, than what any single image can convey. Which is why we looked into stories of three warfighters who were thrust into the spotlight after photographs of them went viral. Returning to the question of whether the context matters: We believe it does, and we assume our readers do too. But their fame rarely stretches beyond the images, which can take on a life of their own while the context around them often gets lost forever. Just as with the Marines originally identified in Rosenthal’s famous photograph, troops throughout the generations have been transformed into minor celebrities with just the snap of a camera. For those of us on the homefront, photography provides a glimpse across that gulf, and from a safe enough distance that the life of a soldier can appear glamorous. Warfighters inhabit a universe far removed from the daily lives of most ordinary people. And it can be especially potent when the subject matter relates to war and the military. The power of photography cannot be overstated. We also learned later that some of the men in the picture were misidentified by the press, and several of them were killed in action soon after it was taken.īut does that context ultimately matter? After all, it is the image itself, not the story around it, that is ingrained in our collective memory and enshrines the legacies of the Americans who fought and died in the Pacific theater during World War II. It wasn’t until after the photograph had been widely circulated that the public learned the truth of the moment Rosenthal had captured: The photo was actually of Marines raising a flag to replace another, smaller flag that had been planted atop Mount Suribachi earlier that day. Joe Rosenthal’s beyond iconic photo of six Marines raising the American flag over the Japanese island of Iwo Jima grabbed the world’s attention when it was published in the spring of 1945.
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