CAMP PENDLETON -- When Marine Cpl. William Perkins dove on an enemy grenade to save his buddies in Vietnam in 1967, he was the last Marine Corps combat cameraman to be killed in action for almost four decades.

That was until almost two weeks ago -- 37 years later, almost to the day -- when cameraman Cpl. William Salazar shattered the long stretch of good luck for this select and often-forgotten clique of military professionals.

Salazar, 26, a Camp Pendleton Marine from Las Vegas, was killed by a suicide bomber on Oct. 15 near the Syrian border in western Iraq.

His death highlights the dangerous duties of the Marines' combat cameramen, whose job is to document Marines in action.

From the Allied landings at Normandy to the jungles of Vietnam, Marine Corps cameramen have exposed themselves to more than their share of combat as they hop from firefight to firefight to document war.

Now they are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the battlefields have no clear boundaries and where such anonymous killers as roadside bombs and suicide bombers only add to the list of dangers the military correspondents face to get their shots.

Colleagues at Camp Pendleton said that Salazar -- or "Salad Bar," as they called him -- was always first to volunteer to document the fighting in Iraq.

"He was a take-charge kinda guy," said Lance Cpl. Michael McMaugh, 20, who said he recently accompanied Salazar on patrols in western Al Anbar province.

McMaugh was one of several cameramen from Camp Pendleton who have received Purple Hearts for being wounded while covering the combat in Iraq.

"He always wanted to go out (on patrol)," he said. "Sometimes he'd go two, three times a day if he could."

Cameraman's legacy

Being in the middle of the action was Salazar's job, said Capt. Michael Lujan, who heads the Marine Corps "Combat Camera," the unit that trains and places combat correspondents with Marine units around the world.

"It's a young man's game. That's for sure," Lujan said, adding that Salazar's death saddened -- but did not appear to shake -- the tight-knit group of some 400 photographers, videographers, editors and graphic artists in the Marine Corps.

"It inspires us to continue that legacy, that role, that he had," Lujan said in a phone interview Tuesday from his office in Quantico, Va. "His (Salazar's) enthusiasm was unbelievable. He was a wonderful young Marine."

Lujan said combat cameramen differ from their civilian counterparts. They are not just out to get the story, he said. They are combatants, and their footage and photographs are used for intelligence gathering and planning military operations as much as for historical documentation, he said.

'From the camera to the gun'

Some of Camp Pendleton's cameramen who recently returned from Iraq said they were integrated into front-line infantry units and were always riflemen first, correspondents second.

"It's a delicate balance," said Staff Sgt. Paul Anstine, who was Salazar's supervisor in Iraq and who documented the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He and a few of his men recently gathered at their Camp Pendleton studio to talk about Salazar and their experiences documenting the war in Iraq.

"You switch back from the camera to the gun all the time," Anstine said. "We're Marines just like everyone else."

Lance Cpl. Jordan Sherwood, another of the Pendleton-based videographers who was wounded in Iraq, said he shot some of his most memorable footage when he encountered an ambush in the making.

He said he was filming in Ramadi -- a major city west of Baghdad where dozens of Marines have died in the last six months -- during a patrol to hunt insurgents who had just shelled a Marine position with mortar fire.

Speeding through an abandoned neighborhood in Humvees, they spotted several Iraqi men running away from a street corner.

When he and several other Marines piled out to capture them, they discovered that the men were plotting an ambush complete with a heavy machine gun and other weapons. The mortars had been fired as bait to lure the Marines into the kill zone, Sherwood said.

After he documented the rebels' capture, as well as the evidence of their intentions and tactics, he rushed his footage back to headquarters so that the information could be used to save other Marines' lives.

"That made it all real to me -- seeing them in person like that," he said. "And I got the whole thing (on video)."

'A kinder face'

With the daily cycle of car bombings, beheadings and other violence topping the mainstream media's reports from Iraq, some of the Marines involved in documenting the war said they were assigned to get the "other story" out, Anstine said.

Lance Cpl. Kenneth Madden, 22, said he was one of the Marines who were told to put a kinder face on the Marines' mission in Iraq.

"They sent me in to contradict the media," said Madden, who recently documented the Marines working in villages and training Iraqi forces around Fallujah. "They sent me out to prove that we weren't just shooting people."

His colleague, Lance Cpl. Kevin Quihuis, 21, said one of his best photographs from the war was a noncombat shot.

In June, when the Marines and newly trained Iraqi forces re-entered Fallujah for the first time after a bloody siege in April, Quihuis said he photographed an Iraqi Civil Defense Corps soldier standing on a truck bed waving an Iraqi flag in celebration.

"He was so proud of holding that flag," Quihuis said. "A lot of people liked that picture for some reason."

Lujan said the film and photos these Marines have captured will be used by military analysts and historians for generations to come.

"People forget that when you look back to history and for lessons learned, it is these images and videos that are used," he said. "It makes you appreciate what they're doing out there. It's a very important role."

Contact staff writer Darrin Mortenson at (760) 740-5442 or dmortenson@nctimes.com.