Wounded Marine Gunnery Sgt. Jeremiah Purdie (center, with bandaged head) reaches toward a stricken comrade after a fierce firefight south of the DMZ, Vietnam, October 1966.
In October 1966, on a mud-splattered hill just south of the
Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) in Vietnam, LIFE magazine’s Larry Burrows made a
photograph that, for generations, has served as the most indelible,
searing illustration of the horrors inherent in that long, divisive
war and, by implication, in all wars. In Burrows’ photo, nowadays
commonly known as Reaching Out, an injured Marine Gunnery Sgt.
Jeremiah Purdie, a blood-stained bandage tied around his head appears
to be inexorably drawn to a stricken comrade. Here, in one astonishing
frame, we witness tenderness and terror, desolation and fellowship
and, perhaps above all, we encounter the power of a simple human gesture
to transform, if only for a moment, an utterly inhuman landscape.
The longer we consider that scarred landscape, however, the more
sinister it grows. The deep, ubiquitous mud
slathered, it seems, on simply everything; trees ripped to jagged stumps
by artillery shells and rifle fire; human figures distorted by wounds,
bandages, helmets, flak jackets and, perhaps most unbearably, the
evident of it all for the young Americans gathered there
in the aftermath of a firefight on a godforsaken hilltop thousands of
miles from home.
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