AP combat photographer Dang Van Phuoc, who lost an eye in Vietnam War, dies at 91

Dang Van Phuoc, a former Associated Press photographer who lost his right eye to an explosion during the Vietnam War and then returned to the frontlines to keep shooting, died Saturday in Southern California, his nephew said. He was 91.

Phuoc collapsed suddenly, his nephew, Van Nguyen, told the AP, and died with family present.

Phuoc was one of a group of local Vietnamese photographers hired in the 1960s by the AP’s renowned Saigon photo chief, Horst Faas, to cover the war alongside Western correspondents. Faas, himself a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer, brought Phuoc on in 1965 to replace another Vietnamese photographer who had been killed on assignment. In the chaos of the war, the AP’s local hires often faced the same dangers as the troops they accompanied, and their work became an essential part of the global visual record of the conflict.

Once in the job, Phuoc developed a reputation for an uncanny ability to find the heaviest fighting. Journalists and U.S. and South Vietnamese soldiers alike remarked on it, according to accounts from the time. He was wounded multiple times — shot, hit by shrapnel, and eventually struck by an explosion that cost him his right eye. Despite the injury, he went back out with his camera.

Phuoc was born in 1935 in a small village near Quang Ngai, a province south of Da Nang that saw some of the war’s most intense combat. He was the youngest of many siblings. When he was about 10 years old, his father was killed by local members of the Viet Cong insurgency. A few years later, his mother died, leaving him homeless. The war that later made his career had already taken his family.

After the war ended in 1975, Phuoc eventually settled in the United States, living in Southern California in his later years. He remained part of the tight network of AP staffers who had served during the Vietnam era.

His death follows that of another AP photographer of that generation, Jack Thornell, who died in April at age 86. Thornell won a Pulitzer Prize for his photograph of civil rights activist James Meredith lying wounded on a Mississippi highway.