A LIFE Magazine War Photographer

in December 1950, five months into the Korean War, Chinese forces drove American colors into retreat near the force in Changjin. “ It was 40 degrees below zero, and the wind was coming down out of Mongolia, ” says war shooter David Douglas Duncan. “ I was indurating. ” As the trouble of a Chinese rush impended in the background, Duncan floated the hutment with his camera. Sixty times latterly he can still flash back approaching one dogface on the verge of freezing who stood clinging a can of food. “ I asked him, ‘ If I were God, what would you want for Christmas? ’” Duncan says. “ He just looked up into the sky and said, ‘ Give me hereafter. ’”

Duncan, now 95, has seen plenitude of hereafters commodity denied to numerous of the men he mugged. During World War II he covered the battles for Okinawa and Bougainville as a combat shooter with the Marine Corps. The strength of his work led to a staff position with LIFE Magazine in 1946. He went on to make some of the most unforgettable images from the Korean War photographer , where he shot the two- week battle of Chosin, and Vietnam, where he proved the deadly clashes at Con Thien and Khe San. At the ultimate battle as in so numerous others — his subjects questioned his reason for choosing to snap amid the losers and pellets. “ The sergeant said, ‘ Get your burro down, ’” Duncan remembers. “ I said, ‘ Do n’t you understand? I ’m trying to perpetuate you! ”
Duncan credits LIFE magazine, which was launched 75 times ago moment, with giving him an unequaled platform for doing what he loved. “ LIFE was it. There was nothing differently. There was no TV, ” he says. “ You walked in nearly and you were a king. ” Three days after joining the magazine’s staff he set up himself in Persia, where Russian tanks were poised to foray Tehran. By November he landed his first LIFE cover on Palestine. He latterly witnessed the British leaving India, came the first Westerner to snap the treasures inside the Kremlin and captured the Egyptian revolution that brought down King Farouk.

He sustained some battle scars along the way. On Okinawa a piece of shrapnel flew into his left wrist. He taped it up and got back to work. And in Vietnam exploding mortar blew out his left eardrum. None of it was ever enough to put him off the profession “ I could walk out any time I wanted to. These guys could n’t. ”
I had no background in war photographer, had noway used a camera. But after I graduated from council, I decided that’s what I wanted to do with my life, because I saw that that work had similar great value to society.
Landing the colors ’ terror — and their will to live — remains a hallmark of his work. One of his most creepy images comes from September 1950. TwoU.S. marines are seen running through a gutter past an adversary cadaver near the Naktong River in South Korea. “ The North Koreans were firing machine ordnance at them from a couple of hundred measures behind me, ” Duncan says. They both failed shortly after the snap was taken.

Despite dodging the veritably pellets that took the lives of those marines, Duncan maintains that there’s nothing special about his sweats to get that print — or the numerous that came ahead. “ I ’m not proud of any of it. I just did my job and showed who the guys were and how they lived their life, ” he says. “ But I'm veritably pleased I showed people what the world was like during my time. ”
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