Suboksan mountains, South Korea, September 1951: This image is a favorite of Sgt. First Class Al Chang who photographed Sgt. 1st Class David K. Brood, 5th Regimental Combat Team, on the Masan front, South Korea.

The photo was taken after Brood’s unit was removed from the line for a brief respite after 43 days of continuous battle on the Suboksan mountains. The men were returned to a rear area “for a clean-up, a shave, and a hot meal...,” Chang recalled later.

Al Chang was an Army photographer during the Korean War and joined the Stars and Stripes Pacific Photo Department in 1961.

He went on to cover the Vietnam War for the Associated Press.

Although Stars and Stripes’ Archive staff prioritize the preservation and scanning of our own material, given their historic importance we made an exception for the images in our collection of the Korean War taken by military photographers such as Chang.

Few of our own images from that war survived as almost all pre-1964 Stars and Stripes Pacific negatives and slides were unwittingly destroyed by poor temporary storage in 1963. The prints created by Stars and Stripes Pacific’s photo department to run in the print newspaper are the only images left of Stripes’ news photography from those early decades.