Model of a cluster bomb used in Vietnam War.
Model of a cluster bomb used in Vietnam War. Matyas Rehak/Shutterstock

The Vietnam War was a photographic war. In 1972, John Berger wrote that the "Photographs of Agony" that came out of it were so shocking that they were "utterly discontinuous with normal time."

Viewers were likely to feel stunned by their own "moral inadequacy" at seeing them, and to forget "our own lack of political freedom," confusing confronting the photograph with confronting the more urgent problem itself. "In the political systems as they exist," he wrote, and these words continue to pertain today, "we have no legal opportunity of effectively influencing the conduct of wars waged in our name."

This morning's news is that relations between the U.S. and Vietnam have become so "normalized" that we will begin to take Vietnam's money and give it weapons in exchange. This is what peace looks like: "Obama lifts U.S. ban on lethal arms sales to Vietnam."

The photographs from this news are stately images of the two national leaders on a dais. Along with those, CNN included a slide show of 12 of Nick Ut's historic agony photographs from the time of Berger's writing.

Of course, we will never see a photograph of weapons changing hands from American to Vietnamese. We will never see closeup images of which weapons are sold, how many, and how they work on the human body.

In his essay, Berger provides a chilling description of the weapons that are not pictured back in 1972:

The news from Vietnam did not make big headlines in the papers this morning. It was simply reported that the American air force is systematically pursuing its policy of bombing the north. Yesterday there were 270 raids.

...Among the bombs being dropped are the seven-ton superbombs, each of which flattens an area of approximately eight thousand square meters. Along with the large bombs, various kinds of small antipersonnel bombs are being dropped. One kind is full of plastic barbs which, having ripped through the flesh and embedded themselves in the body, cannot be located by X-ray. Another is called the Spider: a small bomb like a grenade with almost invisible thirty-centimeter-long antennae, which, if touched, act as detonators. These bombs, distributed over the ground where larger explosions have taken place, are designed to blow up survivors who run to put out the fires already burning, or go to help those already wounded.

I searched for photos of some of these bombs and discovered that bombs are largely unphotographable as dangerous objects. They are either static sealed boxes that barely look menacing, or they are the invisible centers of explosions. Explosions are photographable, but not bombs going off.

The other big headline this morning is that the U.S. has killed the Taliban leader in a drone strike while he was riding in a car. Al-Jazeera has "Images of a bombed vehicle in which Akhtar Mansoor was reported to be traveling. Al Jazeera cannot independently verify these pictures."

In the photograph of the car, it is a mangled hulk. There is nobody in it, and nobody for miles around in the desert all the way up to the mountains and in the sky. It's a photograph of a place rather than a person, a place that's a blank slate. The idea that Afghanistan is a blank slate is the folly at the heart of American policy toward that place. So this is a photograph of policy.