AP’s “Sal” Veder – Whose Vietnam Homecoming Photo Captured Pulitzer Honors – Dead At 99

We met Slava “Sal” Veder in the 80s while putting together a story on Bay Area photographic luminaries for publications mostly gone now.

We’d just come off an earlier interview with another AP legend – Joe Rosenthal – he of the unforgettable flag-raising shot atop Iwo Jima’s Mount Suribachi, and where we found Rosenthal salty and forgivably crabby (“You wan’ someone to sign that damn picture? Get the Marines to do it… they earned it”) Veder was on the other end of the spectrum, the Berkeley native courtly and free with his time.

We settled in and he told us about his Suribachi-shot of a returning Air Force officer greeted by his family on the tarmac of Travis Air Force Base in 1973 – five years after the officer was shot down and imprisoned in a Vietnamese prison camp.

“The Air Force had us photographers all penned up together, everyone maneuvering for position,” Veder said. “I always hated that. I was getting elbowed pretty good when I saw this officer, his back to me, walking toward what had to be his family – the looks on the kids’ faces unmistakable, overwhelmed at seeing their father again. I gained a position and made the picture when they reached him…”

“Burst of Joy.” Sal Veder/Associated Press

“Burst of Joy” won the Pulitzer Prize for feature photography in 1974, elevating Veder to the rarefied heights of working photographers who found their story and managed to tell it with one history-making snap of the shutter. The pathos of that airfield reunion was not lost on him.

“He (Lt. Col. Robert L. Stirm) has his back to the camera,” Veder told us. “I thought it would be a problem until I saw the expressions on his family’s faces. Looking back on it he became symbolic, one of so many soldiers caught up in the war and fortunate enough to return home when so many others couldn’t.”

As transformative as “Burst of Joy” turned out to be for Veder, it also turned out to be bittersweet, the photographer moved to learn that Stirm’s wife had “Dear John’ed” him upon his release and that the couple divorced a year later.

“I always felt bad about that,” Veder said. “You wanted them to be as happy as they all were in that picture.”

Photographers live on in their pictures and lensmen like Rosenthal and Veder will certainly live on in theirs.

Sal Veder died Aug. 22 at his home in El Dorado County. He was 99.