Growing up, Dutch photographer Chas Gerretsen noticed a glaring discrepancy between the stories his father told him about World War II and the Hollywood movies he saw. “To find answers about what war is really like, I had to go there and experience it,” he says.
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In the 1960s, Gerretsen traveled to Vietnam, realized the benefit of having a press card, and secured a job a cameraman for UPI television news. A month later he went freelance, selling film stories to ABC. After finding a Browning 9mm pistol in the field after a firefight, Gerretsen traded it with UPI photographer Dana Stone for a Nikon F camera with a 105mm lens.
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Gerretsen documented the war across Vietnam until 1969, when the fighting began to slow down. After returning home, people asked him what war was like. “When I told them what I’d seen and experienced, they would not believe me, because they’d read the newspaper or saw on television the propaganda of the day and that was the ‘truth’ for them.”
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