Willy Vicoy, war photojournalist
I knew it was a war, but why the babies?”—Willy Vicoy
Forty years ago, around this time, members of the Philippine and foreign media were in shock and in mourning because of the sudden death of photojournalist Willy Vicoy, who had spent years covering the war in Vietnam for the news agency United Press International (UPI). Vicoy captured some of the most unforgettable situations in combat zones and the searing impact of the United States war of attrition against the communist Viet Cong that ended with US troops leaving, retreating in 1975. For his photographs, Vicoy earned a Pulitzer nomination.
Vicoy survived Vietnam, but he died in a hail of bullets in his home country. On April 24, 1986, Vicoy, along with two other journalists, Bulletin Today correspondent Pete Mabazza and Tempo photographer Albert Garcia, were traveling with a military convoy led by then Brig. Gen. Thelmo Cunanan in Lasam, Cagayan Province when communist rebels attacked. Cunanan’s deputy, Col. Alberto Sudiacal, and seven soldiers were killed in the battle. Mabazza died on the spot. Cunanan was seriously wounded but survived. So did Garcia. Vicoy died the next day at the Cagayan Valley Regional Hospital. He was 45.
After Vietnam and back in the Philippines with his family, Vicoy worked for Reuters, which merged with UPI. Younger photojournalists loved and respected him. A whole dedication page of the “Bayan Ko” coffee-table book on the People Power Revolt shows Vicoy in combat gear. At the time of the tragedy, people power that toppled the Marcos dictatorship was only two months in memory, and then President Cory Aquino had barely warmed her seat. She called Vicoy “my favorite photographer.” The communist insurgency was in its 17th year.
Mr.&Ms. Special Edition (May 2 to 8, 1986) was a Willy Vicoy issue. On the cover was a slice of his famous photograph of a bloodied baby that landed on the cover of Time and Newsweek. Although I was a staff writer of Sunday Inquirer Magazine, editor Letty J. Magsanoc (later Inquirer editor in chief), who also edited the feisty Mr.&Ms. Special Edition, asked me to do a Vicoy story (“Goodbye, Willy, Sir”) for the sister magazine. So did Fe Zamora on the firefight and its heartbreaking aftermath: a guerrilla representative turning up at the hospital to apologize. Candy Quimpo wrote on photojournalism. Frances Viana’s 1975 Vicoy feature for Sunburst Magazine provided a great backdrop (“From messenger boy to combat photographer with a message to the world”).
Magsanoc’s editorial was titled: “Why Willy.” “But why so many pages? Because he’s one of our own. Because he is both Mother and Father to the foundling that is Philippine photojournalism. Because he’s one of the world’s greatest photographers. Because for all the honors heaped on him … he was the humblest news photographer we knew. On assignments, he did not swagger about, though it would have been readily explained that he was Willy Vicoy and was entitled. Because for all the wars he had seen, he was gentle and generous … He was free from the journalists’ I’ve-seen-it-all.
“I don’t know much about how photographers make great pictures. I only know what I like—Cartier Bresson’s ‘seize-the-moment’ types. Willy was That type. Wherever he went to photograph—from the hell that was the last days of Vietnam and Cambodia in 1975 to the seething anger in the streets of Manila to the rumblings in the countryside to the People’s Revolution last February, Willy focused his camera on the moments that mattered.”
But not all the time. In a photo, Willy, without his camera, is shown digging his own foxhole. Another shows him helping soldiers carry a wounded comrade.
Former UPI bureau chief Boy del Mundo: “Willy’s death dramatized and drove home the ugliness of it all.”
That said, the reader might be able to read between the lines and not wonder why I am writing about something that happened 40 years ago. Recent tragic events have sparked debates on social media that are toxic, disrespectful, ugly. You can’t weigh in and not be bashed. About young people daring, choosing, if you will, to be in the line of fire and losing their lives; about young, trained soldiers doing their sworn duty to defend the republic. Who dies, who lives? Who kills, who are killed?
This I can say: as journalists in the trenches, we take calculated risks. I say, no story is worth dying for. What story will you tell if you are dead? We were not wide-eyed students doing “research.” We were writing stories for mainstream media, with articles to show that we were indeed there. A long magazine article on communist rebels is included in one of my books. While with three other journalists at a guerrilla training camp in the mountain fastness of Samar, I could not take my eyes off a child soldier carrying an Armalite. I took photos of him and his elders.
Part of journalists’ bragging rights are photos of themselves in combat zones. Ah, I have mine. Proofs of life, as we say.
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