While the Cannon fire was raging through the forest near Walker, Calif. Dewey Dodson of Topaz Ranch Estates had to fight off the urge to take his camera into the area to capture the scene.

A retired combat photographer for the U.S. Marines, Dodson, 69, served in the Vietnam and Korean wars.

"I really enjoy it (photography)," he said. "I miss it."

Dodson volunteered to shoot pictures of the blaze for The Record-Courier and the Nevada Appeal, but his services were not needed.

While stationed at Camp Pendleton, north of San Diego, Dodson shot pictures of a fire at a ranch house at the Marine Corps base.

"I went right in front of the fire and took pictures," Dodson said. "The fire came so fast it came right through us." Dodson's body was doused with water and he was not burned.

Dodson's wife, Elizabeth "Liddie" Dodson, is a retired guard matron for the U.S. Border Patrol.

As a guard matron, she strip searched female illegal aliens at a holding area of a border inspection station between San Clemente and Oceanside, Calif.

The Dodsons have three children.

A staff sergeant for the Marine Corps Air Wing, Dodson served in Vietnam from 1969 to 1970.

Dodson was shot five times and earned two Purple Hearts while documenting fighting in the jungles of Vietnam.

Despite being hit by shrapnel in the upper chest and carrying shrapnel between his shoulder blade and chest, Dodson said he wasn't scared.

"I was concerned, but I had to work," he said.

Dodson recalled narrowly escaping death during an assault by his battalion on a training center the North Vietnamese Army used to acclimate its soldiers to the climate and to teach them to counter American attacks.

On the first day of the assault, there was no incoming fire, Dodson said.

The second day of the assault, Dodson and the other battalion members encountered enemy fire.

"I was number four in the column," Dodson said. "The first man in the column was cut in two by machine gun fire."

The second soldier in front of him was also shot and killed. The soldier directly in front of him was hit by a bullet that went through his pack, causing him to slump to the ground.

"I got down on the ground," Dodson said. "All I had was a 16 mm movie camera."

Dodson grabbed the soldier in front of him, who was still alive, and tried to pull him back, out of the line of fire. Suddenly, a North Vietnamese Army soldier threw a grenade that hit the soldier between the arm and chest, fatally wounding him.

Dodson knew he had also been hit.

"It threw my arm back and (the force of the blast) lifted me off the ground," he said.

Dodson said he was afraid to put his hand on his head because of the severity of the bleeding. "I didn't know how big it (the wound) was," he said.

Dodson suffered a shrapnel wound and still has a grenade fragment lodged in his head.

"The doctors told me if it had gone one-quarter of an inch further I would have been dead," he said.

Dodson served as advisor in 1969 for South Vietnamese forces and went into combat with ground forces for the Vietnamese Air Force. He completed 25 missions over the southern part of North Vietnam.

He became known as Sgt. Bao-Chi, meaning newsman in Vietnamese, to U.S. South Vietnamese allies.

Dodson's job was to show Marines in combat through still photography and motion pictures. Some of the footage was used in training films or for the historic record for the Marines, while some was released to the press. The still pictures Dodson took were also used internally and distributed to the media.

Dodson learned to make combat motion pictures while attending the U.S. Navy Motion Picture School in Florida from 1962 to 1963 and working as a motion picture and television film editor at the Army Pictorial Center in Long Island, N.Y. in 1963. He later cut training films for the Marine Corps in a base at Anacosta, in Washington, D.C.,. in 1967.

The Marine Air Corps provides assault forces for the Navy.

He learned to take still pictures while on the job in the Marines.

Dodson retired from the Marines in 1973 and returned to school that year at Mira Costa Community College near San Diego. He completed an associate's degree in mass communications in 1974.

After earning his degree, Dodson worked as a traffic control safety officer in Escondido, Calif., before moving to Show Low, Ariz., in 1976. He opened a photographic studio in Show Low and ran it for one year before becoming a deputy sheriff in training as a correctional officer in Pinetop, Ariz.

He completed training and became a deputy sheriff in Pinetop in 1978 until taking a job as a photographer for the Arizona Department of Public Safety in Phoenix. He held the photography job, in which he photographed evidence during drug raids, until 1980.

Dodson moved to South Bend, Wash., in 1985 and worked at a shrimp cannery. He lived there until 1993. The cold, damp weather there exacerbated his arthritis, so the Dodsons moved to Barstow, Calif., and lived there for one year.

The Dodsons bought vacant land at Topaz Ranch Estates in 1994 and had a modular home built on the land later that year.

"I didn't want to live in Reno or Carson," he said. "They are too urban."

Dodson, who describes himself as a loner, retired in 1996.

His days of late have been filled with yard work.

"My whole life lately has been landscaping," he said.

Dodson enjoys reading military history and firearms magazines and taking still photos of scenery such as that found in Wilson Canyon, southwest of Yerington.

"I take pictures of leaves on trees there," Dodson said.

He got his first camera, a 35 mm Ziess Contax, in the early 1950s while in Korea.

While he tries not to dwell on the past, Dodson said some people don't understand how he has kept himself emotionally detached from the carnage he witnessed and photographed.

"I have feelings but I just don't show them," he said.



n Laura Brunzlick can be e-mailed at lbrunzlick@swiftnews.com