Image of a US Marine, Tet Offensive by Don McCullin HonFRPS, used on the front cover of the Sunday Times Magazine, 24 March 1968
In March 1968 the Sunday Times Magazine ran a picture on its cover taken by the photographer Don McCullin under the banner ‘Vietnam: old glory, young blood’.
It was at the height of the Vietnam War, during the bloody Tet Offensive, and McCullin – who is now Sir Don McCullin CH CBE HonFRPS – was embedded with US Marines in the imperial city of Hué.
The Marines were trying to capture the city. US ships were shelling it. American planes were dropping napalm on it. The American soldiers were having to fight street to street. Casualties were high.
Constantly under fire, McCullin spent 11 days dodging sniper bullets to take the photographs that would form a 14-page feature in the magazine. The image on the cover showed an American soldier sitting beside a wall, his back against a tree trunk stripped of branches. There are soldiers in action behind him, but he seems to be in his own world. What is he seeing? What has he already seen?
On top of the wall sits a chair and attached to the chair is a Stars and Stripes flag. It feels almost too good a detail to be true.
“You suspect I maybe put the chair on the wall?” McCullin asks me when mention the image. “I would never do a thing like that.
“One of the soldiers put that flag on the chair. As a photographer all one was waiting for was the wind to bring the full American flag in all its glory.
“But that soldier …” he continues. “It’s very interesting you bring him up because there are other pictures of him in one of the other spreads firing away.
“I got a letter from his brother, who was an offshore fisherman from Seattle, with a $10 bill inside saying, ‘Would you be kind enough to send me a picture because my brother was killed a few months later in another battle?’
“So, that young man sitting by the tree never came out of the war alive. He died later on. I sent his brother the picture. And his $10 bill as well.”
Portrait of Don McCullin HonFRPS
War and the morality of war. It’s a subject McCullin, who turned 91 in October 2026, has been actively engaged in throughout his seven-decade professional life.
Speaking from his home in Somerset, he admits there was one image he did construct during that murderous assignment in Vietnam. A photograph of a dead North Vietnamese soldier, his belongings arranged beside his corpse by McCullin.
“His body had been vandalised by souvenir hunters – two American marines,” he recalls. “They threw all his possessions down and they walked away and I brought them together because I wanted it to become the voice of that dead soldier. He was only about 18 or 19.”
McCullin is revisiting his Vietnam images for a new book – his last, he says. Published by GOST Books, Vietnam features around 100 black-and-white images of the conflict and more than 20 colour pictures, of which this cover image is one.
McCullin’s days on the front line are long behind him. He is rather glad of that now.
“War photography has become so much more dangerous with the drones. I wouldn’t run across battlefields like I did when I was a young man.”
Vietnam by Don McCullin HonFRPS is published by GOST Books. McCullin is interviewed in the October-December 2026 issue of the RPS Journal.
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