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The Burst of Joy is a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph by Association Press photographer Slava “Sal” Veder. It symbolised the end of the United States involvement in the Vietnam War and the sentiment that military personnel and their families could start a process of healing after facing the horrors of war.
Prisoners of war who were freed from the prison camps in North Vietnam landed at Travis Air Force Base in California and even though there were only twenty Prisoners of war on the plane, more than four hundred family members arrived for the homecoming. Slava Verder was part of big press show and explained that “you could feel the energy and raw emotion in the air”.
The photograph showed the Lieutenant Colonel of the United States Air Force, Robert L. Stirm reunited with his family at Travis AFB on March 13, 1973 after spending more than five years as a captive of the war in North Vietnam.
The centerpiece was Stirm’s fifteen year old daughter,Lorrie who greets her father excitedly with outstretched arms as the rest of the family approached directly behind her. Even though the outward appearances of the reunion was a joyous
one, it was an unhappy one for Lt. Col. Stirm as his wife had sent him a letter that she wanted a divorce, three days before the picture was taken and the Colonel arrived.
His wife took one hundred and forty thousand of his pay, took his two younger children, house, car, forty percent of his future pension, and three hundred dollars a month in child support while Stirm was a prisoner of war.
She only paid back one hundred and fifty dollars of the money which she spent on trips with other men. Stirm fought and lost against her in court and had to live with his mother in San Francisco while taking care of his older children.
After thirty years of the Burst of Joy photography, the story have appeared in many books, anthologies, and exhibitions, and has remained a part of the nation’s collective consciousness.
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