Pat Hamilton, a photojournalist who specialized in conflict zones from Central America to Somalia to the Persian Gulf region, and who may have helped alter a presidential election with a whimsical picture of Gerald Ford eating a tamale incorrectly, died Aug. 13 at his home in San Antonio. He was 74.

The cause was lung cancer, said his wife, Sylvia Hamilton.

Hamilton began his photojournalism career in the early 1970s after three years of combat as a Marine Corps veteran in Vietnam, where he endured withering enemy fire at close range and once saw a platoon-mate hauled off in the jungle by a tiger.

Throughout his photojournalism career, Hamilton also covered natural disasters such as hurricanes, tornadoes and major sporting and political events. He was on the staff of the San Antonio Express-News in 1976 when, during that election year, he captured President Ford campaigning near the Alamo and biting into a tamale with the corn husk still on.

The culinary faux pas, sometimes called “the Great Tamale Incident,” was regarded as a factor in Ford’s losing Texas to the Democratic nominee, Jimmy Carter.

Hamilton joined the Associated Press in Mexico City in 1979 and moved to Reuters in the same city in 1985 as chief photographer for Mexico and Central America – a region aflame in civil war and Cold War proxy battles.

In Nicaragua, he traveled to combat zones either with the Sandinistas led by Daniel Ortega and sometimes with the U.S.-backed right-wing guerrillas known as the contras.

One of his closest friends, American photographer Bill Gentile, wrote in his 2021 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 was born in Madison, Wis., on July 17, 1949. His father was a real estate agent, and his mother was a onetime legal secretary at Time-Life who raised six children.

Growing up in Gladewater, Tex., Hamilton lettered in basketball and golf in high school. He attended community college in San Antonio, edited the school newspaper and worked part time for a door manufacturing company before enlisting with the Marines two days before his 19th birthday.

He made at least 30 parachute jumps into combat zones, once landing in the sea and swimming a distance to shore in full gear while surrounded by sea snakes.

He often found himself as “point man” at the head of long-range reconnaissance patrols to flush out the Viet Cong through the jungles of Danang province. At one point, he recalled, he was yards from a Viet Cong patrol when a burning tree branch fell on him, and he was forced to stifle his scream to prevent alerting the enemy to his patrol’s location.

Another time, the Viet Cong sprayed the brush with gunfire near where his platoon was hunkered down for two 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,” said 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, Hamilton worked mostly in the pre-digital age. That meant he had to lug two heavy silver aluminum suitcases of equipment from assignment to assignment – and set up a dark room, usually in the bathroom of his hotel room, sealed with duct tape to keep out the light.

Colleagues recall him developing his prints under a red light, with a bottle of Wild Turkey by the bathtub. “Hell, any idiot could do this sober,” was one of his frequent remarks.

Later in life, however, in the words of one of his favorite singers, Hank Williams Jr., he “rowdied on down” and became a quiet-living husband and father. Survivors include his wife of 44 years, the former Sylvia Browne; three children; three sisters; and three granddaughters.

After leaving Reuters in 1994, Hamilton worked as a photo editor at the Texas newspaper the McAllen Monitor and completed a bachelor’s degree at the University of Texas Pan-American in Edinburg, followed by a master’s in English at the same university. 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 Hamilton was at the AP, accompanied a major feature in the New York Times in April.