Lon Holmberg’s ‘Crossing the Pass of Clouds’

By Kevin Seabrooke

A highly readable and engaging narrative of a University of Virginia English major who quit his teaching job in Brooklyn and found himself drafted into the Army in 1969.

After basic training, Lon Holmberg, who had once illustrated a children’s book on the Civil War, found himself assigned the MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) of 84B20 (still photographer). But rather than send him to the Army’s photo school at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, he was sent to the 221st Signal Company at Fort Ord, California, home of SEAPC (Southeast Asia Pictorial Center) which produced photo-documentation for the Pentagon.

Holmberg is a documentary photographer and filmmaker whose work includes the PBS documentaries Doing Time and Mending Hearts. This collection of 147 photographs of Vietnam have never before been published.

Crossing the Pass of Clouds: An Army Photographer’s Vietnam Journal (Lon Holmberg, University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, MS, 196 pp., 147 b&w photographs, 2025, $40 HC)

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