How a Swedish American Marine Grunt Became a Documentary Photographer

I was born in Sweden in 1943. My father was highly educated and very successful in his field. I, however, was pretty much the opposite. An immature loser, I failed to graduate from high school. After working in mines and doing odd jobs I was ordered to enter the Swedish Army in the fall of 1965. Although I had very mixed feelings about serving, it turned out that I really liked the army. For the first time in my life I was the best at something. As a machine gunner, I was my platoon commander’s favorite soldier. Towards the end of my service in April 1966 I decided, just for the hell of it, to fight as an infantryman in Vietnam; for the US or its allies. If they would not take me, my not so realistic plan was to approach North Vietnam.

My first step was to visit the US embassy in Stockholm. The military attache, an Army colonel, thought my idea was a great. “We need guys like you in Vietnam!” he said. My parents of course thought the idea horrible, and my father quickly got me hired as an assistant to Swedish geologists prospecting for iron ore in the wild mountainous rain forests of Liberia. After my adventurous, colonial era-like year in tropical West Africa, in April 1967 I visited the US embassy in Monrovia, where I applied for and obtained a green card.

In May I flew to JFK in New York. After checking into a midtown hotel, I walked to the Times Square recruiting station, and spoke first with the Army recruiter about airborne and Ranger schools, then with the Marine’s about a two-year enlistment. After pondering it for a week, I took an oath to serve two years with the Marines. At 3 AM the next morning I was “welcomed” to Parris Island. Gunnery Sergeant C.D. Mortis, our Senior Drill Instructor, knew that Sweden, led by Prime Minister Olof Palme, was the one nation most critical of the war. Because of that, he liked that I’d joined the Marines, and wanted to fight in Vietnam. Often, while we 90 recruits stood at attention in front of our bunks, DI Mortis would hit each man hard in the chest, sometimes in the solar plexus; but he never hit me. Not once. During a good part of basic I laced my boots horizontally, not crisscrossed, as required. Never a word about that. Though I must say that in the beginning, my fellow recruits and I were treated like shit I didn’t mind it. Even if boot camp was less brutal for me, it was hard. Physically and mentally, it prepared me for combat.

On graduation day, I received a marksmanship medal. I was the best marksman in my platoon. That evening, in the barracks, DI Mortis got so drunk he couldn’t pick himself off the floor. Earlier during the day DI Mortis, assisted by DI Sergeant Savage, arranged the official graduation photo by ordering the black recruits to stand on the bleacher in such a way that they formed a perfect black cross in the midst of the white recruits. Up to then I was gung-ho and pretty brainwashed, but by now my DIs and the training had become less important to me. However, Parris Island was a part of my adventure. And I learnt a lot of good swear words—from DIs and recruits.

As a gung-ho Marine 0311, I arrived in Da Nang on Christmas Eve ’67. What a Christmas present! A few days later I joined the 26th Marines, who held Khe Sanh. I was assigned to 2nd Platoon, Delta Company, 1st Battalion. They called me “Swede. On January 20, 1968, Khe Sanh came under siege by the heavily armed North Vietnamese Army. While it’s true that I was gung ho, I was not really fighting for the US. I was fighting for myself and my platoon. For 2½ months the NVA pounded us mercilessly with artillery fire and rockets. Finally, our overwhelming air and ground firepower annihilated nearly 3,000 NVA, breaking the siege. During that time, my regiment lost nearly 300 Marines. It’s a miracle that my platoon had only one KIA. And miraculously, I wasn’t hit, maimed or killed by the enemy 122 mm rockets, which several times exploded two or three yards from where I stood in our trench on watch.

On June 7, 1968 my platoon walked into an ambush. I was hit by multiple bullets which had lost some of their velocity. One hit the left front of my neck and cut the inner jugular vein. Other bullets lodged in my left lung. One bullet shattered as it hit something hard, likely the muzzle of my M16. It hit my left temple with the force of a sledge hammer, tearing a hole in my skull the size of a silver dollar, and causing ten pieces of the bullet to lodge two to three inches deep in my brain. I was conscious long enough to know that I was dying.

When I joined the Marines, I had vaguely planned to return to Sweden after my two-year enlistment. Three weeks after the ambush, with the right side of my body still paralyzed to some extent, I arrived at Bethesda Naval Hospital for medical care. I healed well and was quick to recover. During my return to health I met a lot of interesting patients and staff. The staff NCOs taught me a lot about military and VA benefits. I decided to live and pursue my education in the US.

In boot camp I’d taken an aptitude test; my IQ score was high. Eighteen months later, at Bethesda, I took a cognitive test. My IQ score was considerably lower. I took the High School Equivalency Test. It was surprisingly easy. For some reason I became quite interested in depth perception, built structures and architecture.

By early ’69 the Marine Corps didn’t know what to do with me. Officially I was a seriously wounded and disabled Marine. In reality, I was in pretty good physical shape. Primarily to give my hospital bed to wounded Marines, I was told to leave the hospital, get myself a civilian apartment, and find a civilian job. All while still on active duty.

Before long I had a small apartment and a job in Washington, DC, a city I very much liked. To pursue my education, I took the Scholastic Aptitude Test; I did okay. Interestingly, I scored quite high on the Architectural Aptitude Test. In May ’69, I was rated 90% disabled and retired from the Marines. The following day the Veterans Administrated rated me 100% disabled. I now had sufficient funds and resources to pursue my education.

In the early summer of ’69 I applied and was admitted to the University of Maryland’s School of Architecture. In September ’69 I started my first semester at Montgomery College, an extension of the university, and not far from where I lived. At the college I would take core undergraduate courses for two years, followed by three years of only architecture at the campus in Maryland.

I made the dean’s list the first semester. The second semester was hard. Except for art, which I enjoyed very much, the boring undergraduate classes and homework began to wear on me. Also, I was the only combat veteran, and much older than my classmates. During the third semester there were moments when I felt on the verge of a breakdown. In February ’71, a month after I’d begun the fourth semester, I dropped out.

Since childhood, news photography, especially photos of combat, had often thrilled, though at times overawed me. Later, photos of the war in Vietnam, taken in ’65 and ’66, influenced my decision to join the Marines. While living in Africa I’d used a simple 35 mm camera to take run-of-the-mill pictures of people, animals and landscapes. I did take one eerie photograph: I’d gotten hold of a rusty US soldier’s helmet, and together with my shotgun, and my leather boots, I arranged a battle cross, which I photographed in color.

In Vietnam, at the PX in Quang Tri I bought a single reflex camera, and with it took b/w and color photos in Khe Sanh during the siege. They were mostly of heavy weapons, airplanes, bunkers, etc. I did not take any portraits. When I was medevacked someone stole my camera. Oddly, its loss did not affect me.

However, the extraordinary photographs and lives of the famous ’60s photographers tempted me to join their ranks. Photography was an art form, and art was the only college course I really enjoyed. To achieve my goal, in the fall of ’71 I entered the School of Visual Arts in New York, the best photo school in the country. I was thoroughly convinced that its four-year program required only two years of my time.

On the surface, my life in Washington appeared normal. I had a small circle of friends, I had girlfriends, but my move to Manhattan that summer exposed me to a totally new world, and I embraced its radical anti-war sentiments. Quite honestly, I felt reborn, woken from my conventional life. I joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War, participated in their rap groups; at their demonstrations I vented my strong opposition to the American war in Southeast Asia.

My teachers at SVA were professional photographers, darkroom technicians, and photo editors. From the wide ranging curriculum I preferred courses related to photojournalism. Gradually, the initial classroom training evolved to field work. In my first assignment, in lower Manhattan, I photographed bums on the Bowery. In the darkroom I developed and printed my photographs.

Close to 18 months later, in the spring of ’72, my photo editing teacher introduced me to the chief photo editor of Time Magazine. John Durniak needed a photographer for a two-week-long assignment in June that year to cover the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, to be held in Stockholm. That I spoke Swedish was one reason I got the assignment. Time paid for my room in a fancy hotel in central Stockholm. Several times I visited my parents, my brother and my sister. While I was living in Africa my father had a stroke. The right side of his body was paralyzed. When I was wounded, I too suffered right side paralysis, though just briefly. My father, Olof R. Ödman is in the Swedish Wikipedia.

In any event, the UN Conference was covered by more than 1,000 journalists and photographers. My photos were published in two Time Magazine issues. That same year, The Guardian, a radical independent New York weekly, hired me to photograph VVAW’s Operation Last Patrol and their dramatic challenge of Nixon and his likes at the Republican Convention in Miami.

After two and a half years of earnest photography, and being influenced, literally surrounded, by books, magazines, newspapers and exhibits which contained work by excellent documentary photographers and photojournalists, I felt an urge to do something larger, more involving than short assignments. I left SVA in the spring of ‘73.

While in Washington I became acquainted with the Swedish ambassador to the US. During a conversation about Swedish immigration he mentioned a small, nearly unknown colony of Swedes living in Brooklyn, New York. Compared to the work of master documentary photographers, documenting Swedish immigrants in Brooklyn didn’t seem to count for much. I, a Swedish immigrant, had not even visited this somewhat foreign and drab area. But with a bit of research, the idea of chronicling the Swedish American community in this culturally and historically rich borough seemed a worthy project.

In early ’74 I began researching Brooklyn’s Swedish American community by attending a Sunday service at the Bethlehem Swedish Lutheran Church, built in 1894. After the service I spoke in Swedish to the mostly elderly congregation. In spite of my youth and uncommon lifestyle, because I was sincere, and a fellow Swede, I easily gained their trust and permission to photograph and interview them. The fact that I’d served in Vietnam, and had been seriously wounded, was respected by all the Swedes I met. These first contacts led to many more, and my further research gave me a deeper understanding of these people.

Starting around 1890, many Swedes who emigrated to America chose to work in industries, particularly in Chicago and New York. Around 1900 a concentration of Swedes lived along Atlantic Avenue, at that time Brooklyn’s main thoroughfare—often called Swedish Broadway. Swedes also lived and worked in the adjacent industrial waterfront, which made up a significant part of the New York harbor.

In the early 1900s Bay Ridge, a large rural area located in southern Brooklyn along the New York Bay, became increasingly industrialized and urbanized. From around 1910 to the beginning of World War II most Swedish immigrants who worked in the Brooklyn waterfront industries made their homes in Bay Ridge. By 1930, 2.5 million people lived in Brooklyn, including nearly 50,000 Swedes. By the early forties, as a result of declining immigration, children moving away, the older generation dying off, the Swedish American community in Brooklyn had begun to disappear. Thirty plus years later their number had declined to around 5,000.

The documentary photographs I took in ’74 and ‘75 depict some of the remaining Swedes in the historic Atlantic Avenue area, though most were taken in Bay Ridge. I also photographed the same Swedish Americans at Lindbergh Park on Long Island, and Budd Lake in New Jersey, outdoor summer venues used for typical Swedish celebrations and folk-dance. These mostly Swedish born, working class, and mostly retired Swedish Americans were unique. They formed a very small, but distinct segment of life in New York City. I felt it was very important to document their Brooklyn community before it disappeared. About a quarter of a century later, those Swedes and their culture—their Lutheran churches, their clubs and lodges, their stores—had pretty much come to an end. Today nothing is left of their presence.

Spurred by the publication of my photographs of the Brooklyn Swedes in a large circulation Life Magazine-style periodical in Sweden in early ’75, I gave serious thought to having my work published in book form. The hyper-competitive New York publishing world frightened me. Getting published in Sweden seemed less difficult. Pretty quickly I located a possible Swedish publisher, flew to Sweden, and showed them my work. The same day we signed a contract. I titled the book “De sista svenskarna”, “The Last Swedes”. Back in New York I continued to photograph and tape record additional interviews, which a Swedish speaking specialist transcribed. I continued to photograph in black and white, using a 35 mm Pentax SLR, and only ambient light.

In the spring of ’76 I rented a short-term studio apartment located a few blocks from the publisher in Helsingborg, Sweden. In cooperation with the publisher’s editor and art director, I began working on the text, the photo editing, and the layout. “The Last Swedes”, 110 pages, was published in the fall of ‘76. During the next 12 months the book received positive reviews from more than 20 newspapers and magazines, including Sweden’s equivalent of the New York Times. In 2022 and 2023 I pitched American museums to exhibit my Swedes in Brooklyn photographs.

In 2024 a half-century would have passed since I took them. From late May to late September 2024 the Swedish American Museum in Chicago honored me by exhibiting 25 of my photographs. Several of the men depicted served with US forces and saw combat in World War II. Fred Lundberg, who served with a US Army recon unit, was seriously wounded and left behind when his unit was forced to rapidly retreat. During the night German soldiers dressed his wounds. The following morning Fred’s unit retook its position and he was medevacked to the rear.

Fred Lundberg died in 1984 under unknown circumstances. The tenants in his building complained about the smell. The cops found him in his apartment. He lay on the floor, decomposing. Since I was his only friend, the police asked me to visit the building, located at 8th Avenue and 56th Street in Bay Ridge. What a stench! At the morgue I identified him, supposedly. In fact, I did not look at the decaying body. At the end of the siege of Khe Sanh I had picked up and carried away the body parts and bodies of decomposing Marines. I dedicated my book: Till Fred Lundberg och alla andra Brooklynsvenskar. To Fred Lundberg and all other Brooklyn Swedes.

View a slideshow of the exhibited photographs…

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