UMass Magazine Online

Fall 2002

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One Man's War

-Ben Barnhart




	Barr Ashcraft (photo by Ben Barnhart)

We must be more aware of what’s going on beyond our borders,” says Barr G. Ashcraft ’66G, whose images of war in Vietnam are as relevant in today’s world of conflict as they were when he made them 30 years ago.

After receiving an M.A. in history from UMass, Ashcraft immediately left his native Amherst for Asia where he studied and taught in Japan and Malaysia, and traveled extensively throughout the region for the next six years writing and photographing.

“I was a gypsy and just loved it,” he says now.

Ashcraft first visited Vietnam in 1968, calling on friends from the ROTC program at Wake Forest where he was an undergraduate. He returned to the war-torn country four years later and his planned one-week stay grew into three years of photographing the bloody conflict.

Ashcraft worked first as a stringer for UPI, making $15 per photograph, then for Time magazine which paid him $150 per day. His images have also appeared in Life, Newsweek, and daily newspapers around the world, as well as in several television war documentaries.

“Vietnam was the last war that journalists could cover easily,” Ashcraft says. “If you had initiative you could do anything.” To find combat hotspots, he sometimes followed slow-flying “skyraider” observation planes on a rented motorbike, hopped rides on helicopter gunships during medivac rescue missions simply by showing his “bao chi,” or journalist’s card, and even penetrated the deep jungles on the back of an elephant.
Two weeks before the evacuation of Saigon on April 29, 1975, Ashcraft left Vietnam – and photojournalism – behind.

“Everything else paled in comparison,” he says of his return to the states. “I just couldn’t work for a local paper photographing PTA meetings. That all seemed so pedestrian.” Instead, he joined his father, W.J. Wentworth Jr., as a building contractor in Amherst and later assumed the family business. He recently retired after 25 years in the trade.

In 1995, fire destroyed Ashcraft’s Belchertown home and more than 22,000 negatives and prints from his years in Asia, as well as thousands of pages of notes and a 300-page memoir of his Vietnam experiences. These images are among the 106 that survived the blaze.

Ashcraft is now fiercely protective of his photographs and their gruesome honesty. He challenges us as viewers to face the horrific scenes and to confront our complicity in the bloodshed.

“It’s not happy stuff,” he says, “but it’s happening all around the world – even today.”

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