In the Vietnam War, after the fierce fighting ended on the battlefield in 1963, the bodies of Liberation Front (Vietcong) soldiers lay dead at dawn on the battlefield. Shot by heavy machine gun fire, the bodies were shot through like beehives. around July 1963, guerrilla warfare by anti-government guerrillas had broken out in Vietnam. Military advisors and government troops sent by the U.S. engaged in repeated battles with the Vietcong.
By early 1963, the number of American soldiers stationed in Vietnam had grown from a few hundred to over 10,000 within a few years. It had been less than a decade since the Korean War broke out and a cease-fire was called. The direct impact of the U.S. military's involvement in the conflict in Vietnam, on the other side of the world, was part of the conversation of the American public; in 1963, the growing role of the U.S. military in Vietnam had not yet developed into a comprehensive and divisive issue.
On January 25, 1963, LIFE magazine published a strong cover story and article, "We Wade Deeper Into the Jungle War," accompanied by color photographs, which attracted a great deal of attention; even before LIFE's photographs were published in 1963 and throughout the Vietnam War, LIFE magazine and other publications and the major U.S. mass media were still reporting the story in print The June 12, 1964 issue of LIFE featured Akihiko Okamura's "The Ugly Vietnam War (page 9)," which provoked a photographic response.
The photographs in the magazine vividly documented the horrifyingly expanding conflict and suggested the vividness of the war. Raggedly severed limbs, torched corpses, and walls covered with entrails were too upsetting to the raw and vulnerable American public. For Americans accustomed to the major mass media, gruesome pictures of the Vietnam War were routinely published in popular weekly magazines.
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