Under the helmets, the faces are young and tormented, stubbled and dirty, taut with the strain of battle. They sob over dead friends. They stare exhausted into the fog and rain. They crouch in a muddy foxhole. This goddamn cigarette could be the last.

There are no heroes in David Douglas Duncan’s images of war.

Dark and brooding, mostly black and white, they are the stills of a legendary combat photographer, an artist with a camera, who brought home to America the poignant lives of infantrymen and fleeing civilians caught up in World War II, the Korean conflict and the war in Vietnam.

“I felt no sense of mission as a combat photographer,” Mr. Duncan, who was wounded several times, told The New York Times in 2003. “I just felt maybe the guys out there deserved being photographed just the way they are, whether they are running scared, or showing courage, or diving into a hole, or talking and laughing. And I think I did bring a sense of dignity to the battlefield.”