Sam Castan 12 May 1935 - 21 May 1966

45 years ago Look Magazine senior editor and journalist Sam Castan was killed trying to break out of an ambush that, save two men, wiped out an entire platoon on Hereford Mountain in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. Castan's body was looted of cameras and film only to be recovered from Viet Cong killed in a fight later the same day. These photographs were taken moments before Casten and the men in these pictures were killed.

I grew up staring at the images and wondering about Sam Castan. In many ways I felt like I knew him but it was a romantic image I created. Belted safari jacket. Nikons hanging from his neck. A cigarette dangling from his lips. War photography speaks to me in a terrifying but alluring way.

The photographs were published in S.L.A. Marshall's 1967, 'Battles in the Monsoon.' Castan stayed at my father's Special Forces camp the night before the ambush and remembers the journalist winning at a card game with soldiers of the 1st Air Cavalry and his A Team.

Fran Castan, a poet from Brooklyn and Sams's widow remembers Sam in her poem, 'Operation Crazy Horse.'

A grand Kowloon hotel. A hedge

of red hibiscus. A tiled pool.
A masseuse who pressed fragrant
oil of almond into my body
in the full heat of the sun.
Elsewhere, northeast of Saigon,
a man beheld you, and fired.

At the undertaker's you were
all made up and your hair
was parted wrong, so I smoothed it
the way you would have liked.
Someone shouted Stop, as if we were
caught making love on the couch
in my father's house. God knows

what they feared. Unfamiliar
streaks in your hair must have paled
at the moment of terror
and grown longer in the time since,
eerie as strands of ticker tape
still printing. Such dark hair
shocked white. How afraid you were.
All I could do was hold you.