SAN JOSE — One of Nguyen Ngoc Hanh’s most iconic images depicts a young war widow clutching her late husband’s dog tags — a photograph recognized by almost every South Vietnamese.
Hanh, who died April 11 at age 90 in a San Jose nursing home, documented the war in his homeland for the South Vietnamese government and became an internationally renowned Vietnam War photographer by capturing battle victories and GI grit in portraits aimed at lifting the morale of the troops and their families on the home front.
His photographs were less known than those of contemporaries such as Nick Ut of the Associated Press, who captured the image of a screaming girl hit by napalm that became one of the defining moments of the war. But Hanh’s work represented the perspective of the South Vietnamese army, whose involvement in the war often was ignored by Western media.
Hanh was an officer in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam who rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel. His duty was to portray the heroism, courage and sacrifices of his fellow soldiers.
“He was certainly a photographic genius,” said historian Jean Libby, a friend of Hanh’s who lives in Palo Alto. Libby, 76, said the power of Hanh’s photographs was in his distinct and intimate portraits.
“When you have a portrait done by a master photographer, it’s very special,” she said. “His close-up work is recognizable. I can see something online and I can recognize it as his.”
At age 10, Hanh was taken by French troops from a Catholic orphanage in Ha Dong, outside Hanoi, according to Libby. The troops a year later took him to France, where he was educated in Catholic schools. He returned to his homeland in 1946, when Vietnam was still a French colony.
About a year later, he secretly joined a communist youth group as part of the Vietnamese resistance. But when he was asked to kill a French family of five to prove his loyalty to Vietnamese communist leader Ho Chi Minh, Hanh hid them instead after listening to their pleas.
After the Vietnamese defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, Hanh joined the South Vietnamese army and stayed in the military until North Vietnamese tanks rolled into Saigon in April 1975. Rather than fleeing with other officers, he took photos of the South Vietnamese soldiers left behind, according to Libby.
Hanh’s pictures were soon confiscated by the new regime, and he was sent to a “reeducation” camp along with tens of thousands of other South Vietnamese officers. At one point, he was forced to live 16 months in a metal container in which he couldn’t stand up or lie down. He was allowed out for only two hours a day but was forced to kneel on broken glass and stare at the sun.
When he returned to his home eight years later, Hanh found out that his wife and children had fled the country. His house was occupied by strangers.
“They were raising pigs upstairs,” Hanh told Mercury News reporter De Tran in 1995. “There was unbearable heartbreak.”
Hanh had arrived in San Jose in 1989 as a refugee after fleeing Vietnam by boat four years earlier. Divorced from his wife and estranged from his children, he took a job delivering mail to employees at Cirrus Logic, a computer technology company in Fremont. He learned English with the help of co-workers.
His visual career also took on a new life when he began teaching photography to local youth. It was one of his greatest passions, according to Tam Nguyen, a San Jose city councilman.
“He always had a smile on his face. He was very humble, simple and approachable,” Nguyen said. “That’s why he had a lot of students. They all loved him so much.”
Nguyen said Hanh put his soul into his work.
“It’s a sad loss because he was one of a few of the pioneers who helped establish the art of photography for South Vietnam,” Nguyen said.
Hanh spent much of his post-war life photographing mountains, streams and bridges.
“Mountains may erode, rivers may run dry, ” he once said. “The sky and the moon may change, but I’ll never forgive the communists.”
