The magazine did publish a number of other pictures Burrows made during that same assignment, in October 1966. The scene, which might have been painted by Hieronymus Bosch if Bosch had lived in an age of machine guns, helicopters and enormous, mechanized military interventions on the far side of the globe possesses a riveting, nightmare quality that’s rarely been equaled in war photography.Īll the more extraordinary, then, that LIFE did not even publish the picture until several years after Burrows shot it. The deep, ubiquitous mud slathered, it seems, on everything trees ripped to jagged stumps by artillery shells and rifle fire human figures distorted by wounds, bandages, helmets, flak jackets and, perhaps most unbearably, the evident normalcy of it all for the young Americans gathered there in the aftermath of a firefight on a godforsaken hilltop thousands of miles from home. The longer we consider that scarred landscape, however, the more sinister and unfathomable it grows. Here, in one astonishing frame, we witness tenderness and terror, desolation and fellowship and, above all, the power of a simple human gesture to transform, if only for a moment, an utterly inhuman landscape. Jeremiah Purdie, a blood-stained bandage on his head appears to be inexorably drawn to a stricken comrade. In Burrows’ photo, commonly known as Reaching Out, an injured Marine Gunnery Sgt. In October 1966, on a mud-splattered hill just south of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) in Vietnam, LIFE’s Larry Burrows made a photograph that, for generations, has served as the most indelible, searing illustration of the horrors inherent in that long, divisive war and, by implication, in all wars.