The True Story Behind an Iconic Vietnam War Photo Was Nearly Erased — Until Now

John Olson’s famous photo of wounded Marines being evacuated during the Battle of Hue in February 1968. John Olson/The LIFE Images Collection, via Getty Images.

The True Story Behind an
Iconic Vietnam War Photo Was
Nearly Erased — Until Now

A celebrated book and a major
museum exhibition revealed
the harrowing tale behind
the image of a wounded Marine.
Their version was wrong.

The fighting in Hue City, Vietnam, was as intense and confusing as anything the Marines there had ever seen. It was mid-February 1968, and American and South Vietnamese forces were desperately trying to counter a surprise onslaught that became known as the Tet offensive. First Battalion, Fifth Marines had breached the city’s historic Citadel. Radio communications were out. From front-line positions, Marines ran back a block or two to give updates to commanding officers and to receive orders. Many of them had already been wounded or killed. As more casualties accumulated, Marines in Charlie Company’s Third Platoon helped lift a gravely wounded and unconscious infantryman onto the front of a tank; the man was sprawled on a wooden door that served as a stretcher. No more than a few blocks away, through streets littered with rubble and alive with gunfire, the tank stopped to pick up three Marines who had been injured by a mortar blast. One man’s face was swathed in bandages. He was helped aboard and situated near the tank’s back end.

A photographer, John Olson, approached and began to document the moment. His photo of the unconscious Marine lying on the tank surrounded by his wounded brothers-in-arms now stands among the iconic images of the Vietnam War. Some of Olson’s photos from the battle were included in a photo essay in Life magazine on March 8, 1968. The picture of the wounded Marine was the largest photo in the feature, published as a two-page spread. Both painterly and heart-wrenching, it was a raw artifact of a hellish 26-day battle that contributed to turning the American public against the war. Fifty years later, with the approach of the anniversary of the battle, that photo gained renewed exposure — by way of a best-selling book, a major exhibition at the Newseum in Washington and numerous articles and videos in the media.

With this new exposure came uncertainty, then controversy. Who was the unconscious man on the tank? In the past three years, two different story lines have emerged. The confusion raises questions of accuracy and identity. It weighs the duties of journalism against the lure of uplifting war narratives. And it brings into question how much the instinct to memorialize truly respects the dead.

The most prominent current depiction of this scene is in a book, “Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam,” by Mark Bowden, an American journalist and author of “Black Hawk Down,” as well as books about D-Day, the mission against Osama bin Laden and the killing of the Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar. Bowden’s account of the fight for Hue was published in 2017, ahead of the anniversary of the Tet offensive. Vivid writing captures the perspectives of Marine infantry platoons as they fought their way to a Pyrrhic victory. The book’s final chapter focuses on the experience of a Marine whom Bowden identified as the unconscious man seen in Olson’s picture, lying on the makeshift stretcher on the tank’s front end: Pfc. Alvin Grantham.

This account of Grantham’s wounding recalls a firefight in which he was shot through the chest, a wound that his fellow Marines tried to seal with cellophane from cigarette packs. It describes his evacuation on the tank and his escape from an even grimmer fate after being mistaken for dead and put in a body bag. Grantham’s survival — in the spirit of “Saving Private Ryan” — becomes something to celebrate. He is a living example of resilience and good luck, and of young Marines saving their own.

The memorialization of this version of events did not end with Bowden’s chapter. In January 2018, the Newseum opened an exhibit, “The Marines and Tet: The Battle That Changed the Vietnam War,” based largely on Bowden’s book and Olson’s photos and research. The exhibit, which has been extended to run through March 17, presents audio interviews with veterans of Hue, including an interview with Grantham that accompanies a large reproduction of Olson’s image. Grantham’s story, Olson’s photo and Bowden’s book were prominently featured in public events and other coverage marking the 50th anniversary, including in Vanity Fair, The Washington Post, on “CBS Sunday Morning” and in many local news outlets.

In early 2017, while Bowden was finishing his book, Anthony Loyd, a British author and long-serving war correspondent for The Times of London, was doing his own research into Marines from Hue. And his reporting began pointing to a different story behind the photo and an entirely different identity for the wounded Marine lying atop the tank — that of Pfc. James Blaine, a young rifleman who died in the battle, leaving no tale of resilience to tell. As Loyd put it, “It’s like his soul got carelessly mislaid.”

Blaine was born in Moscow, Idaho, on March 22, 1949, to Jim and Ann Blaine. His family was Catholic, and his father was a veterinary doctor working in meat inspection for the United States Department of Agriculture. His mother had trained as a nurse. Blaine was the second of nine children; his family was from Spokane, Wash., where James — his family called him Jimmy — played high school basketball and pole-vaulted on the track team before enlisting in the Marine Corps in May 1967.

His brother Rob, now living in Boise, Idaho, tells of a young man’s journey from an active childhood to premonitions of his own death. “Jimmy was a hard worker,” Rob says. “He used to get up and move water pipes at a local fruit farm before going to school. He used to ride bareback broncos in small weekend rodeos in north Idaho and western Montana. He was a tough kid, but kind as well. At the rodeo, an old cowpoke tried to sell Jimmy his coat to get some drinks. Jimmy gave him the $5 he asked for but wouldn’t take the coat.” Jimmy was quiet, but he had a sense of adventure. His parents tried to talk him into joining the Navy or Air Force instead of the Marine Corps, but he wanted to go where the action was. According to Rob, when James was at the airport heading to Vietnam after boot camp, he told their brother Tommy that “he probably wouldn’t see him again. He knew he was going to be in the fray pretty deep.”

James Blaine upon graduating from Marine Corps boot camp in 1967. Via Rob Blaine

When the issue of Life came out, two of his sisters, Kebbie and Theresa, were sure it was Jimmy in the photo. The rest of the family was not quite as certain — until a letter published in People magazine 17 years later confirmed it for them. This felt like it brought the seeds of closure. Rob was 10 years old when Jimmy died, and he was always curious what happened. In 1985, he visited a scale model of the Vietnam Memorial when it came to town, to see his brother’s name. He was fascinated by the photo, and in 1997 sent letters to the Marines identified in the People article. One of them wrote back, but Rob never followed up.

Then came the claim, which Rob and his siblings first saw in Bowden’s book, that the wounded Marine was someone else. “It made me a bit ill,” Rob says, “thinking that someone had tried to steal this ‘moment’ from my brother, a dead war hero. In my research, I came to believe that Alvin Grantham is an honorable man who had a similar experience as my brother, but his experience was not caught on film by John Olson on that February day in 1968.”

John Olson was drafted in 1966 when he was 19 and managed to get himself assigned as a photographer to Stars and Stripes, the official newspaper of the United States military. Two years later, he was dispatched to Hue from Saigon to cover the Tet offensive. He carried five cameras, shooting black-and-white film for Stars and Stripes and color to capture images that he might sell elsewhere. The Hue photos were almost immediately published in Life and soon earned him a job as the magazine’s youngest-ever staff photographer. In 1968, he was also awarded the Robert Capa Gold Medal for his work in Hue, where he spent days photographing the battle. But his encounter with the Marines on the tank was most likely glancing. The battle was so intense that he has no recollection of the individual men, or even of taking the picture.

Olson’s photograph was published a handful of times over the following decades, most prominently on April 1, 1985, when People magazine published it with an appeal for help identifying the Marines on the tank. Through reader replies, People found everyone in the frame except the unconscious Marine. Four weeks later, on April 29, it ran a follow-up story with interviews and new portraits of the men. From left to right, People identified the five Marines as Jim Beals (holding IV bottle), Richard Schlagel, James Richard Rice (bandaged face), Dennis Ommert (bloody leg) and Clifford Dyes. The unconscious man on the door remained unknown, though not for long. After People published the second article, one of their reporters managed to track down Octaive Glass, who identified the wounded Marine as James Blaine. As the Navy corpsman attached to the unit, Glass had treated Blaine immediately after Blaine was shot. Blaine was a member of Third Platoon, Charlie Company, the same rifle platoon as two other Marines on the tank, Schlagel and Beals, as well as Glass — although Schlagel and Beals didn’t know or couldn’t remember Blaine’s name when they were each interviewed for the story in People. On June 3, 1985, the magazine published Glass’s identification in its readers’ letters column with an editor’s note relating that Blaine died on Feb. 15, 1968, “the day the photograph was taken.” The question of the unconscious Marine’s identity, it appeared, was settled.

Olson knew of the first People article in 1985. He had actually been commissioned to photograph Ommert. Three decades later, the approach of the 50th anniversary of the Tet offensive had a powerful effect on the photographer. He started revisiting his old work. “After decades as a journalist, and therefore, as a historian, I began to wonder about these 18-year-old men,” he says. “I wanted to know how the rest of their lives had been affected.” His interest was in part a reckoning with his own experience. In the course of his research, he read a 1968 interview with a soldier in Stars and Stripes. The interview recounted graphic details of Tet. Olson says he was shocked to discover that the soldier in that interview was him.

Olson tracked down nine Marines he had photographed in Hue, including at least three of those identified in 1985 by People as being on the tank. He became aware of Glass’s letter in People, but he had doubts about the reliability of the accounts provided by Blaine’s fellow Marines. In one instance, a disagreement over whether the tank was in the Citadel or not when Olson snapped the photo furthered his skepticism. “A lot of people have contacted me over the years,” he says. “But I would ask a series of questions, and the stories would fall apart.” Tanks ferried many wounded service members away from the chaos and danger in the streets of Hue, so it wasn’t surprising that many people believed they were one of the men in Olson’s photo.

Olson came to feel that Grantham was different. In 2016, a local ABC news reporter in Fresno, Calif., reached out to Olson seeking a comment for a story about a reunion between two former Marines who claimed to be on the tank. One, Richard Hill, said he was the man at the far right of the photo. The other was Grantham. Olson spoke to Grantham and, after two exact retellings, he was convinced Grantham had been the unconscious Marine. Around the same time, Bowden was talking with veterans from Hue, and with journalists who covered the battle, as research for his book. He interviewed Olson, who sent him several photos and also told him about Grantham. After interviewing Grantham himself, Bowden chose to highlight his story — of one Marine’s grievous wound and remarkable recovery — as a way to bring readers up to the present.

Alvin Grantham at his parents’ house after being wounded in Vietnam and returning home in 1968. Via Alvin Grantham

In interviews for this article, Bowden said he had no knowledge of Glass’s identification of Blaine in People. The information pointing to Grantham, he said, came from Olson’s research and Grantham’s own account. That, combined with a photo of Grantham and other Marine Corps records, made him confident of his narrative.

But this version of events soon faced a challenge. In June 2017, shortly after Bowden’s book came out, he was contacted by Loyd, who was on a quest of his own. Loyd had worked with another well-known photographer of the Vietnam War, Don McCullin, and taken an interest in McCullin’s work. He assigned himself the task of uncovering the identity of McCullin’s “shellshocked Marine,” the subject of another famous photograph from Hue. That effort proved futile. But in the process, Loyd’s attention shifted to the wounded Marines on the tank — a scene that McCullin had photographed just minutes before Olson. Whereas Olson had photographed the unconscious Marine almost in passing, McCullin had been present with Third Platoon when the Marine was shot, and had photographed his initial treatment by Glass and other members of his platoon. McCullin had witnessed and documented almost the entire sequence of events, and still retains vivid memories of it. In 30 images on two rolls of film, he followed the unconscious Marine and members of Third Platoon from the moments just after he was shot until he was lifted onto the tank. This sequence, including images that show the wounded man from different angles, combined with other information he gathered, convinced Loyd that the wounded Marine was Blaine.

To Loyd, it was all there: clear views of Blaine’s face and the bandages indicating the location of his wounds, the telltale white door that was used as a stretcher. The presence of Schlagel in several of the frames was also a decisive clue. He wore a distinctive rubber octopus tucked into his helmet band, which was visible in several of McCullin’s photographs and also in the one shot by Olson. These signature elements clearly tied McCullin’s sequence of images and the Olson photo to the same event, and to the same wounded man. And Loyd knew that the man in Olson’s photo had been credibly identified more than 30 years previously in People magazine as James Blaine.

When Loyd presented his findings to Bowden, Bowden pushed back. He had established that Grantham was shot on Feb. 17, 1968, and he informed Loyd that he had information from a second man, Richard Hill, who also said he was in the photo and “says he was wounded on the 16th and picked up by the tank on the 17th.” With Grantham and Hill as his corroborating witnesses, Bowden was confident that Olson took his photo on Feb. 17, not on Feb. 15, the day that Blaine was shot. It was, as Bowden presented it, a matter of record. Loyd conceded that he must have been mistaken. “I took Bowden and Olson on their word for this,” he says. “They are serious and respected figures.” In September, Loyd favorably reviewed Bowden’s book in The Times of London. But the question hung there, nagging at Loyd, who kept analyzing the records and studying McCullin’s photographs. “As I continued further with my own research on Hue, the more Blaine began to haunt my thoughts.

Then there was the matter of Bowden’s published account of Grantham’s wounding. There was no reason to doubt that Grantham believed he was the stricken Marine. His story had evocative roots: Grantham has said he had first been shown Olson’s photograph by his sister’s ex-husband as he was recovering in a hospital almost a year after being shot. But Grantham’s experience, as is described in Bowden’s book and as Grantham related it in later interviews, did not match what befell the man in Olson’s and McCullin’s images. Grantham described a scene that was different, a treatment that was different and an injury pattern that was different from what was suffered by the man in the photos. And yet Olson and Bowden had superimposed his story over Blaine’s.

That story was spreading. Olson approached the Newseum about a Tet offensive anniversary exhibition based on his photographs. Again, Blaine was left out. Carrie Christoffersen, executive director and curator of the Newseum, says that Olson’s research, along with Bowden’s book, served as the museum’s primary sources as they made their exhibit. When the Newseum went through its own fact-checking process, she says, she had not been made aware of any alternate explanation of the identity of the wounded Marine, was not familiar with Loyd and had never heard of Blaine. In January 2018, the Newseum opened its exhibit and hosted a panel discussion including Bowden, Olson and Grantham.

A month later, Loyd published an article in The Times of London about the Marines at Hue, asserting that the unconscious Marine was Blaine. Loyd’s research raised enough concern in Bowden’s mind that he included a postscript to the paperback edition of “Hue 1968,” which was published in April 2018, citing Loyd’s research and the possibility that the wounded Marine was Blaine. In the postscript, Bowden lays out Loyd’s case and his own reasoning and concludes by writing, “I have left my version the same.”