Sam on the right with his unit, Vietnamese children and women.
I said it before, I’ll make a few timeline exceptions for family and when the pictures are worth sharing. Yet these are still vintage and Sam was brave. Samuel Parker isn’t blood related but he was a medic in my husband’s regiment, and as such he is my husband’s brother.
I told him I collect vintage pictures of gents and have this blog I then showed him. He smiled and said “I wasn’t too bad once upon a time. I have pictures if you want.” Of course I didn’t refuse the offer. He gave me copies of pictures from the Vietnam war in 1968 and these are great. Sam was 17 when he enlisted so he was 18 on the pictures.
I warned him: “Heh, you know I’m going to scan these and put them on my blog!” I was only half joking but he replied, “Put me on it then!” to which my husband had a chuckle, turned to me and said “Oh, here we go!”
I told Sam he’s off my timeline by eight years but “yes I will! Just know you’ll get into wordpress and tumblr jungle this time!” He got giddy!
Sam has a passion for horses. After the war he dedicated the next decades of his life to them.
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- Samuel Parker. 1968.
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- Sam by army truck
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- On the right
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- On the left
Bowlers And High Collars 
July 14th, 2015 at 1:22 pm
Sometimes the interest is much more important than the age.
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July 14th, 2015 at 1:27 pm
Very well said! These pictures are too interesting not to share. I especially like the ones with the children, it is almost journalistic in nature.
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July 14th, 2015 at 1:44 pm
They are, I think that I still have a copy of a Time-Life magazine which I bought with similar pictures, I think that it’s the one with the Buddhist Monk who set himself alight.
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July 14th, 2015 at 1:45 pm
Now I remember *that* picture. Iconic.
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July 14th, 2015 at 1:55 pm
It’s like the picture of the young Vietnamese girl running naked burning from napam, they are the images that you never forget and are probably the images of nightmares for the people there. The dreadful thing is that now such images are “common place” I doubt that they have the same impact.
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July 14th, 2015 at 3:00 pm
I guess you would call them ‘viral’ pictures now. But yes, we’re so overcrowded with instant info I can’t recall too many recent iconic pictures. The firemen raising the American flag by a pile of rubble at 9/11 ground zero is one though.
But there are images today that still shock, like Al Qaeda beheading David Pearl. As much as I want it I’ll never get that one out of head. Yet ISIS has made such a habit of advertising their atrocities even that one’s powerful impact got lessened.
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July 14th, 2015 at 3:41 pm
That’s similar to Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima which is iconic.
The ISIS images are shocking but probably because of the internet and social media their “shock value” is decreased, I think that it’s because we like in a “disposable” age where things aren’t really valued as much, or don’t seem to be. I can’t think of any image I’ve seen in the news recent;y that I would describe as iconic; perhaps I’m just too cynical lol
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July 14th, 2015 at 4:38 pm
Maybe it is that the older we get the less shocking images become. We get numb having seen more.
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