Sorting through the 60 photographs that make up the exhibit “A Thousand Words: Photographs by Vietnam Veterans” the imagery is at once iconoclastic — the olive shirts, sandbags, jungle foliage, teen-age faces smeared in green and black — and disarming.

Some photos resemble those taken on any vacation — man with his arm around his buddy’s neck, blue-sky landscapes, local children’s smiling faces.

Others, those where men, or in most cases adolescent boys, carry guns through flooded rice paddies, or a group clusters around a downed helicopter, or a sweaty, shirtless man stands glaring in front of a homemade poster that reads “War is not healthy,” speak more to the conditions that were Vietnam.

Trained photojournalists did not take these photos. Their candid earnestness came from the soldiers who preserved these snapshots of day-to-day life from jungle warfare to air raids, orphanage visits to mail call.

“I tried to make the exhibit as universal in appeal as possible,” said Martin Tucker, a photographer and instructor at the Sawtooth Center for Visual Art in Winston-Salem, who organized the exhibit.

“A Thousand Words” will go on display at the Haywood County Arts Council July 1, with a reception held from 7 to 9 p.m. in the new gallery on Main Street. Tucker will speak about the exhibit and possible plans for photographs that were not included in the show.

But the making of this exhibit was not a conscious effort. It began as a classroom project.

Tucker, himself a Vietnam veteran, issued a call for fellow N.C. veterans to bring in their photos so that his students would have new material to work with in the darkroom and perhaps learn a little history along the way.

Photos immediately began pouring in, mostly brought in by veterans themselves, each with a story to tell. These stories, paired with the sheer quantity of photos the class received, gave Tucker an idea.

“I didn’t feel like the veterans really had a voice,” he said.

So he began weeding the photos down — 400 were scanned and archived, 60 chosen for what would become the exhibit “A Thousand Words.”

“The question that I always asked was, would veterans be able to walk into this exhibit and look at a photograph and say ‘that’s exactly the way it was’,” Tucker said of his selection process.

Tucker seems to have accomplished his task.

“They’re very accurate, they’re very similar to what I saw,” said Lawrence Braxton, a Waynesville resident and former Air Force sergeant who served two years in Vietnam as a military instructor, interpreter and linguist.

Braxton was drafted into the military; however, having just graduated with a business degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he was older than many of his fresh-out-of-high school compatriots.

“They were taking everybody because they were killing everybody,” Braxton said.

With his position as a military instructor, Braxton didn’t see much combat, but he did serve as an interrogator. The mental and emotional onslaught of war in a foreign country and the constant adrenaline flow from being on edge all the time changed boys into men and men into soldiers.

Tucker worked in the Navy’s personnel department driving soldiers to and from the airport, one of the last legs on the journey from America to Vietnam and back.

“I saw a ton of them come and go in various states of mind,” Tucker said. “You couldn’t help but feel what was going on in the van on your way to the airport. It was kind of a cold detachment they had, there wasn’t a lot of conversation.”

While no one was desperate to leave the U.S., many were desperate to return.

“I saw guys who had literally shot their fingers off so that they could come home,” Tucker said.

Bound together by the common bond of their uniform, American soldiers, despite their age, rank or training, also shared something more, said Jim Joyce, a Waynesville resident who became an Army helicopter pilot in the First Cavalry Division after joining ROTC in college.

“We were all from time to time scared shitless,” Joyce said.

Joyce’s tour in Vietnam served as the basis for his own memoir, Pucker Factor 10. After the book was published, Joyce said the most common two sentiments he heard were “thank you” and “I will always regret that I maneuvered myself out of the war,” whether by draft dodging, marriage, college or whatever. These same people were often the ones who had protested the war and soldiers’ involvement, Joyce said.

“One of the reasons we were ridiculed perhaps more than in other wars was because there were so many draft dodgers and so many hippies, ‘make love, not war,’ who knew in their heart of hearts they were chickening out and those of us who did do our duty made them look bad,” Joyce said.

However, with time the perception of Vietnam has changed. The U.S. has lost nearly all its World War II veterans, so Vietnam-era soldiers are taking their place as the most senior combat veterans, Joyce said.

“Korea was kind of a shit war, nobody paid much attention to it anyway,” he said.

With the emergence of these elder statesmen, Vietnam is being looked at to teach younger generations about the ramifications of prolonged conflict. Officially speaking, Vietnam lasted seven years. The war in Iraq is nearing the two-and-a-half year mark.

“A Thousand Words” has traveled outside the state and into high school classrooms, where Tucker said teen-agers are making the connection for themselves.

“This is not so much an exhibit about the Vietnam War, as much as it is about what it was like to be 18-year-old and all of a sudden in a foreign country in a fox hole in the middle of the night,” Tucker said.

To learn more about the exhibit or to view it online, visit www.nchumanities.org.