La guerra dentro de: Retratos de los veteranos de Vietnam lucha contra la adicción a la heroína

Sonny Martin was only 23 years old when he returned from Viet Nam with a grim reminder of his season in uniform: an addiction to heroin. Martin became the drug to help prevent the memories of his time in Southeast Asia, where they had bribed the villagers for information that will help you to identify and "eliminate" Viet Cong contributors. In the United States, he found few people willing to help heal invisible wounds that remained of his time in that brutal war.

"I had to have it all in," said Martin in a life of July 1971 history of the magazine that illuminated the struggles - and addiction - short so many veterans return to civilian life. According to the life article, "the number of addicts is not yet confirmed. Congressman Robert Steele (R - Connecticut) and many veterans return estimate that 15 percent of men in Viet Nam are hooked to heroin. The army says that the figure is 2 per cent". The actual numbers, not helped because the drug was so easy to find: just two dollars would ensure a dose of heroin of high quality - high that, for a time, anxiety, shock and loneliness that defines life after the war many veterans, Mellado.

Here, on the heels of reports recent about the enormous difficulties (unemployment, horrible suicide rates and more) against American Veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, LIFE.com recalls that article long ago time and stories of the all too familiar of young men struggling to rebuild their lives after serving his country in a divisive conflictendless.

In 1971, addicted veterans who wanted to kick his heroin habit could investigate places such as Ward 4B2 of Palo Alto Veterans Administration Hospital in California. There, doctors and nurses used the synthetic opiate methadone to "buy time" while experimenting with one-to-one and small group therapy sessions, urging the men to put their problems of head and face the. But the veterans will not able to enter in Palo Alto and the hope of a cure: had to demonstrate a genuine commitment to their own recovery. That meant hard times for the men as 22 years Dan Patterson (see Gallery above), that inhaling heroin on a trip to the city since he had been admitted to the program in Palo Alto. The doctors and nurses voted: came out. That could come when I was helping itself seriously.

Hoping to see more places as 4B2 Ward, in 1971 the Nixon Administration set aside $14 million to 13 more programs in place before year's end. The new Ward 4B2 of orientation programs; But 4B2 was, of course, much still his way feels to follow. It was unclear whether the combination of drugs and therapy could become independent truly an addict of both methadone - which is itself addictive - and heroin.

While today the doctors, psychologists and therapists have a firm understanding of mental health and substance abuse problems that made many of his colleagues at the time of Viet Nam, yet much more to address to ensure more productive, stable living for returning veterans. Sonny Martin and Dan Patterson were only two victims in a long line of men and women who suffered and continue to suffer a nightmare grab bag of debilitating emotional, physical and psychological problems after leaving the service. The United States Veterans Affairs Department recently reported a 44 percent increase in suicide rates between 18 to 29 years old male veterans between 2009 and 2011. Between 10 and 18 percent of the troops serving in Afghanistan and Iraq they returned with post traumatic stress, up to a quarter suffers from depression, and others engage in excessive use of alcohol and tobacco.

In this photo gallery, LIFE.com recalls very personal war so many that returned from Viet Nam - as well as internal conflicts plaguing veterans today in the wake of witnessing, direct and personal, unlimited capacity of humanity for brutality.

Thean Tara is a writer and graduate student in biological sciences at the University of Cambridge. Follow her on Twitter @tarathean.
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Marilyn Monroe: The covers of life, 1952-1962

While the legend of Marilyn Monroe always will be closely associated with the life - your first session of cover of the magazine, in April 1952, made by the great Philippe Halsman, remains one of the most famous and collectible covers in the history of the magazine - it may surprise some people to learn how rarely actually she appeared in the magazine itself.

There is no doubt that life had recognized unique and deep appeal of Marilyn from early in his career, but she only graceful cover of living six times while he was alive. (It appeared in several covers more after his death in August 1962, including subsequent editions then ceased publishing magazine as a weekly). Six times - which is less than Dwight Eisenhower, for example, while Liz Taylor holds the record with 14 appearances on the cover of the magazine photo premier of the time.

[Buy the book of life, remembering Marilyn].

And yet... when one considers that it runs six covers Marilyn occurred during a period of just 10 years, and that she had lived could well have challenged the supremacy of Taylor, their close connection with the magazine - and, by extension, its centrality to the American conversation about fame, celebrity, sex and media in the 20th century - is cast in a much clearer, brightest light.

On top of all that, when one recalls that several of their covers are considered classics - his debut and a subsequent Halsman, since 1959, his back jumps, looking over the shoulder; the Ed Clark fired since 1953 with Marilyn and Jane Russell in tight red sequined dresses; a shot of a smiling Marilyn Lawrence Schiller in a swimming pool in June 1962, just two months before his death — the idea of Marilyn helped define what life looked and felt like in the 1950's it takes more strength.

(Speaking of the 1950s, note what might be the most incongruous clash of Word and image that appears on the cover of life - or on the cover of the magazine, for that matter. On the first slide of the Gallery, and overlook easily by anyone whose eyes are, understandably, made exclusively for the out looking a woman beautiful from the April 17, 1952, theme of life, one can read these something dramatic, if head-scratching, words: there is a case for interplanetary saucers.

In fact? Is there really a case for flying saucers? Good, good. Fascinating. Now, if only we can return to this rising young actress named Marilyn Monroe...)

Ultimately, covers the life that appeared Marilyn - we are presenting seven here in this gallery, so as it extends from the articles that accompanied them - are only reminders of what appeared to be a real movie star six long decades ago. Seen today, more than 50 years after his death at the age of 36, do these photos of Marilyn takes another deep resonance that might have had for, say, a Subscriber living in Minneapolis or Omaha or a small town in North Carolina meeting them for the first time?

Probably, Yes. But if we can, even for a little while, watch these life cover of Marilyn with fresh eyes, keeping the knowledge of what ultimately, is in store for young still, concerned, enigmatic superstar, there is a chance that, too, we can see them again, as if for the first time.
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David Douglas Duncan and the Korea war: To Hell and Back

Missouri native David Douglas Duncan was born on January 23, 1916, in Kansas City. He lived for much of the 20th century, is still alive in the 21st and is still, decades after it ceased to cover armed conflicts, one of the preeminent history war photographers. However, it is much more than a war photographer, he is just one of the reasons why, in his 98 birthday, celebrate his career and his productive life incomparably.

Duncan is known, primarily, as the photographer of the signing of the Korea war. In the pages of LIFE magazine and elsewhere, his paintings to the brutality House countless Americans who, understandably, with memories of the solo-acabado second world war still fresh in many minds - could have wanted nothing more than erases the carnage were inflicted and endured half a world away in its name.

[More: "life in the Korea war: classic photos of David Douglas Duncan."]

Duncan's photographs of Korea transmitted a scorching, inconvenient truth: namely, that the war is still hell and the men, women and children still die horrible deaths, even when the war in question is called "police action". But Duncan (to the left, in Korea in 1950) knew war long before he made his heart-wrenching images at Chosin reservoir and in the center of Seoul rubble-strewn streets. There, too, was in the second world war, covering the battles - and suffering shrapnel injuries, in the Pacific as a marine combat photographer. He was in Viet Nam, a decade and a half after Korea's South, with Thien and Khe San.

Meanwhile, the previous picture, made in Korea in 1950, is not only one of the best photos made during the 'forgotten war', but is one of the best war pictures ever made by anyone, in any conflict. In his classic book of 1951, this is war!, Duncan wrote about the stunned, resolved itself trying to Navy Captain stable after an attack by North Korean troops, as ammunition ran dangerously low and reinforcements were not in sight: "Ike Fenton, soaked with rain running into small droplets of his bearded Chin"He received the news. His Marines shreds of Baker company had only those rounds in his remaining belts. "If the reds were to launch one attack would have to be suspended with bayonets and rifle butts".

In its direct representation, without blinking the futility, madness, resistance and, sometimes, the simple nobility one witness in the midst of a firefight or a prolonged, bloody campaign, photo of Duncan's captain Ike Fenton has been rarely matched and never failed. Like many of Duncan's Korea pictures, it is indelible.

Speaking to Duncan his paintings of Korea, meanwhile, relies not only by the sharpness of the memories of the man, but by the unexpected and unsolicited statements of a congenitally prone artisan to speak his mind.

"Making me right now, now, look at these photos again," Duncan said LIFE.com, "is that at any time - at any time - any Navy felt that I had to look around to see what they were doing behind it [during the war] South Koreans. The Marines in Korea never afraid of 'friendly fire' or - partners - South Korea from artillery as sometimes did later in Viet Nam, fighting with the South Vietnamese. The Koreans could be trusted."

[More: see TIME.com Korea war coverage.]

In the years after Korea, Duncan had photographed other conflicts around the world, but also showed a sensitive portrait artist and a master of the place. In the past 60 years has published books on topics ranging from his friend, Pablo Picasso, the Kremlin and the Middle East (the world of Ala, 1983). He has published books on the sunflowers of France, Cartier-Bresson and incredibly moving work of 100 pages about his beloved German Shepherd, Thor - a creature possessed what characterized Duncan as an "Olympic serenity".

In 2003, he published his monumental and, at the same time, somehow intimate autobiography in images, Photo Nomad, with photos and mementos of a through seven decades. Every one of his many books is worth searching; But for anyone interested in photojournalism in the 20th century, nomadic photo is essential. The range of photos contains, and shares ideas invariably acute - in the creative process, relationships and more - suggest that the greatest work of Duncan could, in fact, enviably be lifelong, he has led and continues to lead.

Happy birthday, David Douglas Duncan. And thank you.

-Ben Cosgrove is the Editor of LIFE.com
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The allies at Anzio: rare photos of Italian campaign of the second world war

On January 22, 1944, six months after the Allied invasion of Sicily, the American and British troops swarmed ashore at Anzio, about 30 miles south of Rome. The idea of Winston Churchill and dubbed the attack, operation shingle trapped German troops along the Italian coast largely by surprise; But after the initial onslaught, the entrenched Germans. The next four months saw some of the fiercest, most prolonged fighting in the European theatre of the second world war, as the allies - including French along with the British and the Americans and Canadians - fought German troops for control of the region.

Life photographer George Silk, a native of New Zealand who covered the war in the desert of North Africa, through Rome, to the forests of Belgium and in Germany, spent months with allies after they landed at Anzio, a chronicle of what LIFE magazine at a time characterized as a "fruitless, slow and maddening battle". At the end of may the allies finally managed an assault breakout, supported by the artillery and air force; in early June, the Allied troops entered Rome virtually unopposed.

Here, on the 70th anniversary of the start of the battle of Anzio, LIFE.com presents a series of photographs of the silk - many of them never before - published illustrating graphically the tiring stagnation, always accompanied by deadly violence, which define the operation. Approximately 7,000 Allied soldiers died in those four months. Another 36,000 were injured or missing in combat. The Germans suffered 40,000 injured (5,000 dead) while more than 4,000 surrendered and were taken prisoner.

Note: According to typed legends of the Silk for your photos, slides #16 in the gallery above has a soldier, William P. Chirolas, showing "things you don't like men of company m: dextrose, taste terrible, almost invariably pulled away tablets; Barbasol - not like brushless shaving cream, they say it sticks in the razor; Fleetwood cigarettes - typical of cheap cigarettes that come in rations; processed American cheese - becomes very heavy when eaten every day... "

"Men complain," Silk designated, "cheap brands [cigarette] are distributed only to manufacturers who want to keep their trade names goes, and that good brands are taken up by the 'rear Echelon Boys' until they reach the front".

The role fine, used silk used to write their notes and who survives, yellowish and fragile, in the archives of life (see scan below), one can clearly discern that someone - likely a censor at the United States War Department - crossed out those particular observations with a red pencil. After all, the notion of "American boys" complaining bitterly of shabby tobacco, processed cheese and other humiliations in front doesn't fit the image of the office of public affairs at the Department of war wanted to present the people's House.

The more things change...

-Ben Cosgrove is the Editor of LIFE.com

LIFE magazine

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Syria in 1940: Crossroads of the Middle East During WWII

The ongoing chaos and violence that have come to define the Syrian civil war have not only pushed the names of ancient cities (Aleppo, Homs) back into today’s headlines, but have also served as a reminder that Syria has long been a major player not merely in the Middle East, but on the global stage.
[MORE: See the TIME.com article, "Brief History of Aleppo: A Great World City Now in the Grip of War."]
In 1940, seven months before the United States entered World War II and nine months after Germany invade Poland, LIFE sent photographer Margaret Bourke-White to the young (and, as it turned out, short-lived) republic in order to document Syria’s pivotal role — cultural, geographical, military — in the region. Eight decades later, in photographs that ran in LIFE and many more that did not, LIFE.com recalls Damascus, Homs, Aleppo and other Syrian cities and towns as they appeared in the middle part of the last century.
This is how LIFE described the situation to its readers in the magazine’s May 20, 1940, issue, published mere weeks before Paris fell to the Germans, leaving Syria (briefly) under the rule of Vichy France:

Should Hitler strike east or Mussolini jump into the war or Soviet Russia pile on, the world spotlight would instantly narrow on far forgotten Syria. Here is now massed a formidable French army under the old warhorse Maxime Weygand, ready to rush either to the defense of Egypt or of Turkey and the Balkans. Here is a sample of the brains, the men and the material of France and its colonies. Here flies the flag of France . . . raised at sunrise to the bugle call Au Drapeau at Aleppo.

The French expeditionary forces in the Levant States, chief of which is Syria, has tanks and planes, motorized guns . . . The army’s numbers and the names of its generals are dark military secrets. Best guess is that it has now at least 150,000 men. It includes men from the far-flung domains of France: Moroccans, Algerians, Tunisians, Senegalese, Annamites, Madgascar Malgaches, Lebanese, Syrians, Bedouin camel fighters, Cherkess Cossacks of Syria and large units of the French Foreign Legion. One of the most polyglot companies ever assembled, these men of many tongues and colors now bathe on Beirut’s one fine beach, shop in the suks, peer into the Tomb of Saladin in Damascus and swelter in the heat of Homs and Aleppo.
The ancient fortresses of Syria could not long stand against air bombing. But the olive groves are just high enough for a small tank to get under . . . Action may come without warning. For Syria, long a crossroads of world trade, has been watered by men’s blood for far longer than Flanders. In this natural cockpit where Asia, Africa and Europe meet, have fought Abraham, David, Alexander, Ramses, Sargon, Menelaus, Pompey, Bohemond, Nureddin, Saladin, Tamerlane, Baibars the Panther, Suleiman, Mohammad Ali, Lawrence of Arabia and [British General Edmund] Allenby.
As it happened, of course, Syria and neighboring Lebanon did see action in WWII, during a month-long Allied campaign in June and July of 1941. The Free French took control of both countries after a rout of mainly Vichy French and German troops, and before the war was over, both Lebanon and Syria had become free states — and had declared war on both Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany.
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Martin Luther King Jr. and the Freedom Riders: Rare and Classic Photos

It’s mid-spring, 1961. In the kitchen of a safe house in Montgomery, Ala., Martin Luther King Jr. is tense. In the house with the 32-year-old civil rights leader are 17 students — fresh-faced college kids who, moved by King’s message of racial equality, are literally putting their lives at risk. These are the groundbreaking practitioners of nonviolent civil disobedience known as the Freedom Riders, and over the past two harrowing weeks, as they’ve traveled across the state on integrated buses, their numbers have diminished at every stop in the face of arrests, mob beatings — even fire-bombings.
Right there along with the riders, capturing the mood of the movement as it swung between exhilarated and exhausted, thrilled and terrified, was 26-year-old LIFE photographer Paul Schutzer, who covered the landmark Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom march and rally in Washington, D.C., four years earlier and witnessed firsthand the courage and determination Dr. King inspired in his followers. (Filed along with Schutzer’s Pilgrimage photos in LIFE’s archives are notes from the magazine’s Washington bureau chief, Henry Suydam Jr., citing the energy and excitement swirling around King even then: “At the end of the ceremonies, a couple of hundred people pressed feverishly on Reverend King — seeking pictures, autographs, handshakes, or just a close look. The jam got so heavy that he had to be escorted to safety by police.”)
[See TIME's multimedia tribute to MLK and the 1963 March on Washington, "One Dream."]
Here, five decades after the Freedom Riders put their lives on the line for dignity and equal rights, LIFE.com presents photos — most of which never ran in LIFE — made by Schutzer during that heady era in American history. Here are images charting a pivotal moment in the historic journey of Dr. King himself and in the nation-changing movement he led, from the monuments of Washington to the highways, rural roads, churches and bus depots of the Jim Crow Deep South.
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Ali, Frazier and the ‘Fight of the Century’: A Photographer Remembers

After refusing to register for the draft in 1967 — at the very height of his career — 25-year-old Muhammad Ali was stripped of his heavyweight championship title and endured a forced layoff from the ring for three years. In 1971, after winning the appeal of his conviction and five-year prison sentence before the U.S. Supreme Court, the former champ returned to boxing, fighting a few bouts against lesser (albeit ranked) rivals before facing the title-holder, Philadelphia’s “Smokin’ Joe” Frazier.
Long before the first bell of their March 1971 fight sounded, the contest was billed as “The Fight of the Century” and, amazingly, it lived up to the hype. That night, a star-studded crowd watched two of the greatest fighters who ever lived battle for supremacy in the world’s premier sports arena.
John Shearer—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
Frazier had earned the heavyweight belt a year earlier. “I often felt bad for Joe,” photographer John Shearer told LIFE.com, recalling the weeks and months he spent with both fighters before the bout at New York’s Madison Square Garden. “He was completely miscast as the bad guy in the fight. In so many of the pictures I made of him that winter, when he’s with friends and relaxed, there’s something genuinely charming there — but something in his face suggests that if you scratched the surface, you’d find a world of other feelings.”
“The pictures I made of Ali training in Chris Dundee’s Miami Beach gym, meanwhile, are incredibly revealing in another way,” Shearer said, “not least because you can see that Ali had a belly. And this is not all that long before the fight. He just wasn’t in the kind of shape he needed to be in to battle a warrior like Joe Frazier.”
Many of Shearer’s photos of Frazier — including several in this gallery — make the clear case that Frazier simply wanted the title more than Ali. He was fighting, scratching and clawing for it long before the two men stepped into the ring.
“When I see the pictures I made of Joe running by himself, for example,” Shearer says, “the one thing that strikes me, maybe even more now than when I was making the photos, is his discipline. He was training, training, training. He was driven. And in many ways, he was a man alone.”
“That fight was the last time Ali took Joe for granted,” Shearer says. “I wonder if, deep down, he hit a point in Miami where he looked for that fire, that drive, and it just wasn’t there. You know — you want to fight, you want to hold that title belt again, but you can’t make yourself run those extra few miles at five in the morning, or spar for twenty more minutes every single day.”
Another aspect of Frazier that Shearer captured before the title belt was his creative self. Frazier was a singer and a performer, with his own band — and with his own backup singers, the Knockouts — and the truth is, he wasn’t bad.
“The two places Frazier communicates best,” wrote LIFE’s Thomas Thompson in a March 1971 cover story for the magazine, “are in the ring, when a cloak of menace and fury drops over him, and on a nightclub stage, where he sings with strength and sincerity.”
“The image of Frazier remained, unfairly and for the longest time, that he was just another fighter,” says Shearer. “That he was just another guy with his nose pushed off to the side of his face. But he felt, strongly, that he was every bit as articulate as Ali and, as importantly, perhaps, that he was every bit the showman that Ali was.”
As for the bout itself, one of the key factors that ratcheted up the rhetoric was the record purse offered both fighters. As LIFE observed in its March 5, 1971 issue: “[Ali] and Frazier are both going to get $2.5 million the morning after the fight whether anybody comes or not. A flat $2.5 million. Guaranteed. The most money ever paid to any man for a maximum 45 minutes’ work.”
“It was electric in the Garden the night of the fight,” Shearer remembers. “It was the night of the great showdown between the era’s two gladiators, and there was a sense that the unprecedented hype for the fight might actually fall short of the reality. And, remember, without a doubt it was a very, very pro-Ali crowd. They all came to see him win, to see him destroy Joe Frazier.”
That’s not the way it worked out, though. The relentless, punishing Frazier stalked and pummeled Ali all night, and in the 15th and final round floored him, for only the third time in Ali’s career, with an absolutely titanic left hook. Ali got back on his feet quickly, but the damage, literally and figuratively, had been done. Frazier won by unanimous decision, and held on to the crown until losing it in spectacular fashion to George Foreman two years later, in 1973.
“Frazier didn’t fight by going for the head, the way a lot of other boxers did against Ali,” Shearer remembers. “He went after Ali’s body the whole fight, pounding away, taking terrible blows to the head himself. You know, you keep whacking at the base of the tree, and the tree is going to come down. And that’s what happened. That’s really the story of that first, unforgettable fight between those two great champions.”
— Ben Cosgrove is the Editor of LIFE.com

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