French soldiers released by the Vietminh after the fall of Dien Bien Phu, May 1954/Robert Capa

March 19, 2013, 1:00pm / 40

Walter Cronkite reporting in Vietnam.

It would be Walter Cronkite, the most trusted man in America, who broke American commit to the war after the Tet Offensive (even though militarily the US and NATO were on the offensive and had almost destroyed the VC in its entirely in the South) by saying “It is increasingly clear that the only rational way out will be to negotiate, not as victors but as an honorable people who lived up to the pledge to defend democracy.”

After hearing this, President Johnson was quoted as to have said: “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”

And he was right.

November 16, 2011, 3:00pm / 16

This is French combat photographer Catherine Leroy, photographed before taking off with the 173rd Airborne Brigade. At the age of 21, in 1966, boarded a plane to Laos en route to the battlefields of Vietnam. Armed only with her camera, her wits and $100 in her pocket she had the ambition to become a world renown combat photographer.

During the time she covered the Vietnam War she shot some of the most iconic and brutal photographs to come out of the country. She was also wounded by shrapnel while covering a US Marine unit in the DMZ, only having been saved by her Nikon camera. In 1968 during the Tet Offensive she was taken prisoner by the North Vietnamese Army (NVA), and during her time of imprisonment she talked the NVA into being photographed.

She left the war with post-traumatic stress but kept covering war zones from Norther Ireland, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and more. She died in 2006.

July 03, 2011, 5:25pm / 377