Awards
My Brother’s War
American photographer Jessica Hines’ brother Gary was drafted to fight the war in Vietnam in the 1970s. He later took is own life. Hines used photography as a way to retrace his “footsteps” using his own photographs and his letters from the war as guides. It’s a remarkable...
Photographs and text by Jessica Hines
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Gary wrote many letters home while he was stationed in Vietnam. Pictures arrived. Although in his letters he spoke of his living quarters and described the helicopters he flew into the front lines, he rarely discussed the dangers.

Discharged from the army in December of 1969 with a "service connected nervous disorder", we later came to know his problem as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

My pre-war brother, a normal and well-adjusted person became, according to the US Veterans' Administration, 50% disabled. He took his own life ten years later.

Twenty-five years after his death, I discovered among his belongings, a memo pad that revealed the names and addresses of his wartime friends, some of whom, with diligence, I managed to contact – 35 years after the war. Through the remembrances of his wartime friends and through my own journeys to Vietnam in 2007 and 2008, I retraced Gary's "footsteps" using his letters and photographs as guides. I continue to make discoveries about wartime in Vietnam as experienced by its veterans. The visual record of those experiences continues to unfold.

— Jessica Hines