Henri Huet

Biography

A series of twelve pictures of a young medic, Thomas Cole, bandaging his fellow soldiers while wounded himself appeared in Life magazine on 11 February 1966, and one of the frames made the cover. The photographer was Henri Huet, who by then had been with the Associated Press for a year.

He was born on 14 April 1927 in Da Lat, in French Indochina. His father, Gilles Huet, a Breton, was an engineer in the public works administration; his mother came from a Vietnamese family of scholars. He was five or six when he and his brothers were sent to France to receive a European education. He attended the primary school at Roz-sur-Couesnon and spent his holidays at Dinard and Saint-Malo. From 1945 to 1948 he studied at the regional school of fine arts in Rennes, in the studio of Mathurin Méheut, and learned perspective from the architect Raymond Cornon. Among his fellow students were Jacques Villeglé and Frédéric Back. He began as a painter.

The only way back to his birthplace was through the military, and he joined the navy. After a course in photography he was sent to Indochina in 1949 or 1950; by one account he became a combat photographer, by another he took charge of the photo laboratory at the Cat Lai base in 1950 and shot aerial pictures for naval aviation, and sometimes ground fighting. In February 1952, disapproving of the actions of the French army, he resigned and took a job at a photo studio in Saigon, where he made portraits and wedding pictures.

Then, for about ten years, he worked as a photographer for American agencies, first in the photo lab of the United States Operation Mission (USOM) from 1955 to 1960, under Charles Thomas, a former combat photographer of the Second World War. Thomas’s influence can be seen in several of his pictures. In November 1963 Huet photographed the coup against President Ngo Dinh Diem, and Paris Match printed six pages of his photographs. His career as a photojournalist is usually counted from that moment.

Next came United Press International and, from 1965, the Associated Press. In November 1965 he photographed the last moments of the American war photographer Dickey Chapelle, who was killed by a mine near the American base at Chu Lai. For the series on the medic Cole, the Overseas Press Club of America awarded him the Robert Capa Gold Medal; the sources disagree on whether this was in 1966 or 1967. The prize went to the best published photographic reporting from abroad, requiring exceptional courage. At some point he worked in Cuba and Japan, and in 1970 he returned to Vietnam, where the war had flared up again. His wife and children had by then left for France, since staying was too dangerous.

Huet’s pictures are in black and white, and it seems to me that the Rennes training shows in them: he composes carefully and looks at the war as an artist would. At the same time he was constantly concerned with the lives of Vietnamese civilians. Colleagues valued him for his courage and skill, and for his kindness and sense of humour. Dirck Halstead, who headed the UPI photo desk in 1965, said that he “always had a smile on his face”.

On 10 February 1971, during the South Vietnamese invasion of southern Laos (Operation Lam Son 719), Huet and three other photographers boarded a helicopter with the operation’s commander, Lieutenant General Hoang Xuan Lam, to fly along the front line. The pilots of the South Vietnamese air force lost their way and came out over one of the most heavily defended sections of the Ho Chi Minh trail. Hidden North Vietnamese 37mm anti-aircraft guns shot down Huet’s helicopter and a second one flying alongside; all eleven people aboard the first were killed. With him were Larry Burrows of Life, Kent Potter of UPI and Keizaburo Shimamoto of Newsweek. Huet was 43.

The crash site was found in 1996, and two years later a search team excavated the mountainside and found wreckage, camera parts, film and traces of human remains too scant to be identified. In 2002 the case was closed on the basis of group identification. The remains were passed to the Newseum in Washington, and a ceremony was held on 3 April 2008, attended by relatives of Huet, Burrows and Potter and by former colleagues from the Vietnam War.