A DRAMATIC series of never-before-published photographs depicting life on the frontlines of the communist struggle against South Vietnamese and United States forces went on show yesterday.
The pictures graphically reveal how the communist guerillas mobilised all generations in the war and the harsh conditions people endured to keep fighting.
The photographs show teenage girls manning trenches with rifles, young boys sharpening bamboo stakes for booby traps on jungle trails, adult snipers firing at US helicopters and old men burying the dead.
In one of the most striking of the shots, a peasant woman with a box of ammunition on her shoulder is dashing across open paddy fields as others fall under heavy fire.
Another shows women up to their necks in a stream in the Mekong Delta forming a human bridge for guerillas evacuating wounded soldiers on bamboo stretchers.
'The pictures show just how hard and long the struggle was,' said exhibition organiser Lam Tan Tai, secretary-general of Ho Chi Minh City's Photography Association.
