The motive used to be lung most cancers, mentioned his spouse, Sylvia Hamilton.
Mr. Hamilton started his photojournalism occupation in the early Nineteen Seventies after 3 years of struggle as a Marine Corps veteran in Vietnam, the place he persisted withering enemy fireplace at shut vary and as soon as noticed a platoon-mate hauled off in the jungle by way of a tiger.
Throughout his photojournalism occupation, Mr. Hamilton additionally coated herbal failures similar to hurricanes, tornadoes and primary wearing and political occasions. He used to be at the group of workers of the San Antonio Express-News in 1976 when, throughout that election yr, he captured President Ford campaigning close to the Alamo and biting right into a tamale with the corn husk nonetheless on.
The culinary fake pas, also known as “the Great Tamale Incident,” used to be considered an element in Ford’s shedding Texas to the Democratic nominee, Jimmy Carter.
Mr. Hamilton joined the Associated Press in Mexico City in 1979 and moved to Reuters in the similar town in 1985 as leader photographer for Mexico and Central America — a area aflame in civil war and Cold War proxy battles.
In Nicaragua, he traveled to struggle zones both with the Sandinistas led by way of Daniel Ortega and once in a while with the U.S.-backed right-wing guerrillas referred to as the contras.
One of his closest buddies, American photographer Bill Gentile, wrote in his 2021 e-book “Wait for Me: True Stories of War, Love and Rock & Roll”: “When I drove around in a war zone in northern Nicaragua with a guy like Hamilton sitting shotgun, I had a sense of security that I did not enjoy if riding around with some everyday John Doe.”
Patrick Ward Hamilton used to be born in Madison, Wis., on July 17, 1949. His father used to be an actual property agent, and his mom used to be a onetime prison secretary at Time-Life who raised six youngsters.
Growing up in Gladewater, Tex., Mr. Hamilton lettered in basketball and golfing in highschool. He attended group faculty in San Antonio, edited the varsity newspaper and labored section time for a door production corporate earlier than enlisting with the Marines two days earlier than his nineteenth birthday.
He made at least 30 parachute jumps into struggle zones, as soon as touchdown in the ocean and swimming a distance to shore in complete equipment whilst surrounded by way of sea snakes.
He ceaselessly discovered himself as “point man” at the top of long-range reconnaissance patrols to flush out the Viet Cong throughout the jungles of (*74*) province. At one level, he recalled, he used to be yards from a Viet Cong patrol when a burning tree department fell on him, and he used to be pressured to stifle his scream to stop alerting the enemy to his patrol’s location.
Another time, the Viet Cong sprayed the comb with gunfire close to the place his platoon used to be hunkered down for 2 hours. “My dad said they all just had to sit still and silent, hoping no one got hit and that it was just mentally tortuous,” mentioned his daughter, Alina Hamilton Mangum. “When the group of Viet Cong grew tired and decided to move on, he called an airstrike in on them.”
As a journalist, Mr. Hamilton labored most commonly in the pre-digital age. That intended he needed to lug two heavy silver aluminum suitcases of apparatus from project to project — and arrange a gloomy room, normally in the toilet of his lodge room, sealed with duct tape to stay out the sunshine.
Colleagues recall him creating his prints beneath a purple mild, with a bottle of Wild Turkey by way of the tub. “Hell, any idiot could do this sober,” used to be certainly one of his common remarks.
Later in existence, then again, in the phrases of certainly one of his favourite singers, Hank Williams Jr., he “rowdied on down” and become a quiet-living husband and father. Survivors come with his spouse of 44 years, the previous Sylvia Browne; 3 youngsters; 3 sisters; and 3 granddaughters.
After leaving Reuters in 1994, Mr. Hamilton labored as a photograph editor at the Texas newspaper the McAllen Monitor and finished a bachelor’s stage at the University of Texas Pan-American in Edinburg (UTPA), adopted by way of a grasp’s in English at the similar college. He taught English at UTPA and South Texas College in McAllen.
His journalism lived on. An evocative photo of Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez, taken when Mr. Hamilton used to be at the AP, accompanied a significant characteristic in the New York Times in April.