Faas: Vietnam Combat Photographer passes

Horst Faas working in Vietnam in 1967, the year he was wounded in the legs by a rocket-propelled grenade at Bu Dop, in South Vietnam's Central Highlands. (AP)

As chief of photo operations for the Associated Press in Saigon for a decade beginning in 1962, Horst Faas didn’t just cover the fighting — he also recruited and trained new talent from among foreign and Vietnamese freelancers.

The result was “Horst’s army” of young photographers, who fanned out with Faas-supplied cameras and film and stern orders to “come back with good pictures.”

He and his editors chose the best and put together a steady flow of telling photos — South Vietnam’s soldiers fighting and its civilians struggling to survive amid the maelstrom.

Faas, a Pulitzer Prize-winning combat photographer who carved out new standards for covering war with a camera and became one of the world’s best-known photojournalists in nearly half a century with the AP, died Thursday in Munich, his family said. He was 79. For more information go to the the LA Times website.