London, England (CNN) -- Don McCullin is best known for the unwavering gaze of his war photography.





For thirty years he traveled to places most people run from, depicting horror unflinchingly and with enormous compassion for the people he captured in unimaginable situations.





Considered one of the greatest war photographers, McCullin's pictures chart conflicts in Vietnam, Bangladesh, the Congo, El Salvador, Biafra, Cambodia and the Middle East, including the Six-Day War in June 1967.





He has, as he puts it, taken "terrible liberties" with his life -- dashing through rice paddies in Vietnam to escape snipers' bullets; jumping up to snap a shot during gun battles -- to bring home images that are, at times, excruciating to look at but often unforgettable.





And yet, as enduring as these images are, forgetting them is exactly what McCullin now wants to do. "That war stuff... I don't even want to print it anymore," he says. "I want to put it right out of my mind."





But, along with his photos of poverty, "that war stuff" has won McCullin a handful of photography awards and filled tens of books and exhibitions across the world, including his latest, "Shaped by War," which opened Friday at the Imperial War Museum in London.





Much of the photography that appears in the exhibition he shot during the 18 years he worked for the UK's Sunday Times Magazine. He went to his first war in Cyprus in 1967 and covered every major conflict of his generation until the Falklands War.





The thrill of war





McCullin, now 76, admits that at first he found war "incredibly exciting."





"You've got to remember I grew up as a child looking at Hollywood films where no one seemed to die," he says.





He liked the thrill of making it home alive and seeing his images published even more: "I felt as if I could levitate and forget gravity as a human being -- I felt really amazing."





How he made it home alive is another matter. As McCullin himself admits: "You can't learn about survival after a certain point. After that, it's sheer luck really."





But his bravery under fire is well known. Harold Evans, then editor of The Sunday Times wrote of McCullin in The Guardian newspaper many years later: "Don McCullin has the bottle. This is the man who, amid a fusillade of bullets, would stop to take a light reading."





Shell shock in Vietnam





In 1968, one of McCullin's greatest moments of "bottle" produced arguably his most celebrated image: A shell-shocked soldier in Vietnam that he photographed during a huge battle for the ancient city of Hue.





The battle raged for two weeks, McCullin remembers. The city was being shelled constantly from navy boats in the Gulf of Tonkin 17 miles away, and phantom bombers were dropping napalm just a few streets from where he was.





He said: "When you saw those napalm tumbling, carrying molten death, you'd say to yourself, 'Keep going. Keep going. Keep going." And he did, staying with the 5th Marine Regiment for the duration of the battle, during which time, he says, they lost 70 men and 300 wounded.





McCullin came away having taken some of the most powerful photographs of his career -- but he was left suffering combat stress, much like the soldier in his photograph.





A personal battle





McCullin himself says he was "completely insane," by the end of the battle. When he finally got back to the press center and changed and showered, he realised some remnants of that fight would be harder to get rid of.





"I thought, you know, it (the shower) could cleanse the filth of war off me. It didn't, really, because by then it had all gotten into my brain.





"I was sleeping next to bodies and things (in Hue)... and then you say, 'What the hell's this
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