When it comes to walking into a warzone, very few people would have the nerve to trek into enemy territory holding both a gun and a camera. On March 17th, 1968, Charlie Haughey was flown into the Tan Son Nhut Air Base in Vietnam at the age of 24 years-old, when the Tet Offensive was an on-going and prominent threat. One moment he was working as a sheet metal plant worker in Michigan, the next, he was receiving his draft notice and arriving as a rifleman for the 25th Infantary Division.

“The flight crew told us to run thirty meters, hit the deck, and wait until somebody came and got us. The guys going home ran over the top of us to get to the jet, yelling at us about being new meat.” Haughey’s tour lasted for 14 months, during which he would conduct search and destroy missions within the rice paddies and bamboo forests of South Vietnam, where the Việt Cộng were operating from an extensive network of underground tunnels. “Sometimes the firefights lasted four or five hours. Sometimes they lasted days.”

However, two months into his ordeal, Haughey was summoned into this commanding officer’s office, and assigned a new task; “He asked me if I had any experience with journalism. I told him I’d done a few things for my college paper – little stuff, like cartoons – and he says, ‘OK, you’re the battalion’s new photographer.’” For the young soldier, it was an opportunity at focusing on something different whilst enduring the hell of combat. However, the conditions of Haughey’s new duty were clear… “It was understood that I was a rifleman first, and a cameraman second.”

The objective of Haughey’s mission was to boost the morale of his troops with newsworthy photographs of soldiers undertaking their duty with pride and honour. Over the next year, Haughey captured nearly 2,000 images of his comrades and the ongoing war. However, he deterred himself from becoming a “true” combat photographer: “I didn’t photograph the gore, or the burning villages, or the bodies. I was interested in what everybody was doing when they weren’t at war.” A truly admirable decision.

It’s true. Although many of the images offer a window to the fear and pain felt by so many during the conflict, some of Charlie’s pictures actually manage to deter the viewer from the ongoing horrors of the war, and instead depict the rare smiles and brotherhood among the soldiers. Haughey would then develop the negatives in a makeshift darkroom in his Vietnam base, gifting the photographs to other soldiers whenever they crossed path on the battlefield.

Nonetheless, Haughey returned back to the US with many negatives still undeveloped. Since then, Haughey had kept the negatives private, stating how he had just wanted to “wall” it off in his brain. But now, with the help of a team of volunteers, Haughey’s images have been released to the world in a digitised format. He says; “These pictures just knocked down those walls. It’s been terribly emotional, but it’s helped a lot.”