Vassar professor’s talk on Vietnam combat photographer takes surprise turn
Robert Brigham spent years using pictures by Marine Sgt. Bruce Allen Atwell – a renowned combat photographer whose images are the main record of some of the harshest fighting of the Vietnam War – in the classes he taught at Vassar College.
It was only natural for a professor who teaches foreign affairs, with a special focus on the U.S. invasion of Vietnam. But what he didn’t know until recently was that early in life Atwell had unknowingly fathered a child, Kevin Allen Garrick.
“Kevin, Bruce’s son, ended up finding out about Bruce through an ancestry.com DNA test” he took 16 months ago, Brigham related during a talk he gave on the Washington & Jefferson College campus on Wednesday.
“By now, you have probably all figured out that I am Kevin,” Brigham said partway through his lecture in Yost Auditorium. Brigham, who’s now working on a book about his biological father, said the event was his first time discussing that connection publicly.
David Kieran, W&J assistant professor of history, organized the event.
Atwell’s photographs are ubiquitous in American scholarship on the 1968 battle for Hue City, during the North Vietnamese forces’ Tet Offensive.
In the ensuing months, Marines and soldiers managed to roll back the widespread assaults, which began during the Vietnamese New Year, but it was a Pyrrhic victory. The brutality of the fighting helped to turn American public opinion against the war, even if U.S. involvement in Vietnam continued until 1975.
Millions of Vietnamese, many of them civilians, were killed on both sides. So were 58,000 U.S. troops.
During the Siege of Hue, Atwell was among the first Marines sent in to retake the centuries-old imperial citadel in a gruesome close-quarters street fight. Atwell’s work is essential to Americans’ historical record of what happened, but also shows skill and technique that hold up artistically.
His photographs are valuable for another reason. Unlike most photographers, Brigham said, Atwell was dealing with subjects who were his fellow Marines.
“I think he gives us a much more human and ground-level of understanding of this,” Brigham said. “So I have become quite attached to his story.”
For Brigham, that story now contains details of his biological father’s life on either end of the Marine Corps, in which he’d enlisted in 1962. His military career ended before he wanted it to, with a discharge because of his wounds from the fighting in Hue.
Atwell, the son of a father who’d been wounded in World War II, was born in 1944 into a Massachusetts family that would eventually include 18 children, plus some “others that are added into the mix,” Brigham said. Atwell’s father’s injuries limited his ability to work.
“They lived really on the margins at a time when most Americans are celebrating the abundance of post-war America. They lived in abandoned houses,” Brigham said. “Atwell’s father would abandon the family regularly. They never lived in a house that had electricity, running water or heat. They foraged for food in the Berkshire hills.”
Eventually, his mother decided she could no longer care for him and his eight siblings, as they verged on starvation. The children would ultimately be placed in foster care in Washington County, in northeastern New York. Atwell, who was 6 when he entered the system, experienced abuse in a series of temporary homes, where he usually was put to work as a farmhand.
It was at the last of his foster homes, before he was sent to Vanderheyden Hall, a boys’ home, that Atwell conceived a child with Barbara Garrick. In another inter-generational wrinkle, their son, Kevin, wound up in the same foster care system where Atwell had spent much of his childhood before Kevin was adopted by the family that gave him a new name.
Atwell himself never found out about the child during his time in the military or his subsequent life, when he settled in North Carolina and raised his own family. Despite having little formal education, he became an engineer for Norfolk Southern Railway. He died in 2006, just shy of turning 62.
Brigham said his adoptive and biological families are socioeconomically very different, but described having something in common with both.
“My family that adopted me is very well educated, very well spoken. Becoming a college professor was the norm. I am the first person in the Atwells to go to college,” Brigham said. “And I’m convinced that my fire in the belly that I have in the classroom is from them.”