Photojournalist Eddie Adams captured one of the most famous images of the Vietnam War - the very instant of an execution during the chaos of the Tet Offensive. It would bring him a lifetime of glory, but as James Jeffrey writes, also of sorrow.
Warning: This story includes Adams' photo of the moment of the shooting, and graphic descriptions of it.
The snub-nosed pistol is already recoiling in the man's outstretched arm as the prisoner's face contorts from the force of a bullet entering his skull.
To the left of the frame, a watching soldier seems to be grimacing in shock.
It's hard to not feel the same repulsion, and guilt, with the knowledge one is looking at the precise moment of death.
Ballistic experts say the picture - which became known as Saigon Execution - shows the microsecond the bullet entered the man's head.
Eddie Adams's photo of Brigadier General Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting a Viet Cong prisoner is considered one of the most influential images of the Vietnam War.
At the time, the image was reprinted around the world and came to symbolise for many the brutality and anarchy of the war.
It also galvanised growing sentiment in America about the futility of the fight - that the war was unwinnable.
"There's something in the nature of a still image that deeply affects the viewer and stays with them," says Ben Wright, associate director for communications at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History.
The centre, based at the University of Texas at Austin, houses Adams's archive of photos, documents and correspondence.
"The film footage of the shooting, while ghastly, doesn't evoke the same feelings of urgency and stark tragedy."
But the photo did not - could not - fully explain the circumstances on the streets of Saigon on 1 February 1968, two days after the forces of the People's Army of Vietnam and the Viet Cong launched the Tet Offensive. Dozens of South Vietnamese cities were caught by surprise.
Heavy street fighting had pitched Saigon into chaos when South Vietnamese military caught a suspected Viet Cong squad leader, Nguyen Van Lem, at the site of a mass grave of more than 30 civilians.
Adams began taking photos as Lem was frogmarched through the streets to Loan's jeep.
Loan stood beside Lem before pointing his pistol at the prisoner's head.
"I thought he was going to threaten or terrorise the guy," Adams recalled afterwards, "so I just naturally raised my camera and took the picture."
Lem was believed to have murdered the wife and six children of one of Loan's colleagues. The general fired his pistol.
"If you hesitate, if you didn't do your duty, the men won't follow you," the general said about the suddenness of his actions.
Loan played a crucial role during the first 72 hours of the Tet Offensive, galvanising troops to prevent the fall of Saigon, according to Colonel Tullius Acampora, who worked for two years as the US Army's liaison officer to Loan.
Adams said his immediate impression was that Loan was a "cold, callous killer". But after travelling with him around the country he revised his assessment.
"He is a product of modern Vietnam and his time," Adams said in a dispatch from Vietnam.
By May the following year, the photo had won Adams a Pulitzer Prize for spot news photography.
But despite this crowning journalistic achievement and letters of congratulation from fellow Pulitzer winners, President Richard Nixon and even school children across America, the photo would come to haunt Adams.
"I was getting money for showing one man killing another," Adams said at a later awards ceremony. "Two lives were destroyed, and I was getting paid for it. I was a hero."
Adams and Loan stayed in touch, even becoming friends after the general fled South Vietnam at the end of the war for the United States.
But upon Loan's arrival, US Immigration and Nationalization Services wanted to deport him, a move influenced by the photo. They approached Adams to testify against Loan, but Adams instead testified in his favour.
Adams even appeared on television to explain the circumstances of the photograph.
Congress eventually lifted the deportation and Loan was allowed to stay, opening a restaurant in a Washington, DC suburb serving hamburgers, pizza and Vietnamese dishes.
An old Washington Post newspaper article photo shows an older smiling Loan sitting at the restaurant counter.
But he was eventually forced into retirement when publicity about his past soured business. Adams recalled that on his last visit to the restaurant he found abusive graffiti about Loan scrawled in the toilet.
Hal Buell, Adams' photo editor at the AP, says Saigon Execution still holds sway 50 years later because the photo, "in one frame, symbolises the full war's brutality".
"Like all icons, it summarises what has gone before, captures a current moment and, if we are smart enough, tells us something about the future brutality all wars promise."
And Buell says the experience taught Adams about the limits of a single photograph telling a whole story.
"Eddie is quoted as saying that photography is a powerful weapon," Buell says. "Photography by its nature is selective. It isolates a single moment, divorcing that moment from the moments before and after that possibly lead to adjusted meaning."
Adams went on to an expansive photography career, winning more than 500 photojournalism awards and photographing high-profile figures including Ronald Reagan, Fidel Castro and Malcolm X.
But despite all he achieved after Vietnam, the moment of his most famous photograph would always remain with Adams.
"Two people died in that photograph," Adams wrote following Loan's death from cancer in 1998. "The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera."
A story of an iconic 'Nam photo
A story of an iconic 'Nam photo
Massive stalker
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So he shot the still, so who filmed the incident?
Unforgettable photo, just as the one of the napalm kids on the road.
Unforgettable photo, just as the one of the napalm kids on the road.
- Phuket2006
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I dont recall any film of the event,Nasty Canasta wrote:So he shot the still, so who filmed the incident?
Unforgettable photo, just as the one of the napalm kids on the road.
all these photos were shot by Eddie.
Nic Ut's photo
the whole photo before NIck edited it and made it more dramatic.
Ironically when it was first posted on FB , it was taken down as being pornographic,
But later put back up
"We are turning into a nation of whimpering slaves to Fear—fear of war, fear of poverty, fear of random terrorism, or suddenly getting locked up in a military detention camp on vague charges of being a Terrorist sympathizer." HST
The girl in the photo lives in Toronto now iircPhuket2006 wrote:I dont recall any film of the event,Nasty Canasta wrote:So he shot the still, so who filmed the incident?
Unforgettable photo, just as the one of the napalm kids on the road.
all these photos were shot by Eddie.
Nic Ut's photo
the whole photo before NIck edited it and made it more dramatic.
Ironically when it was first posted on FB , it was taken down as being pornographic,
But later put back up
- Lucky Lucan
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There is footage of it, I guess the still image became better known. Warning - It's not pleasant viewing:
And there is footage of the NLF guy getting zapped:
And there is footage of the NLF guy getting zapped:
Romantic Cambodia is dead and gone. It's with McKinley in the grave.
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That footage of the guy getting shot in the head was played on TV decades ago. It's been burned into the back of my eyeballs ever since. Something that you never ever forget.
Thread about the napalm kids here:
http://www.khmer440.com/chat_forum/view ... ic#p289739
Thread about the napalm kids here:
http://www.khmer440.com/chat_forum/view ... ic#p289739
- Lucky Lucan
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I was very young when the Vietnam war ended. I remember LIFE magazines and TV reports showing pretty gruesome stuff though. I was a bit older when the Kampuchean crisis came along but we were shown films about that in school by this rabidly anti-communist support teacher. I was only ten and innocently asked her what was wrong with these communists and she went full on bananas shouting about my parents being murdered and stuff. That was funny, not the film but her attitude.
Romantic Cambodia is dead and gone. It's with McKinley in the grave.
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Can't vouch for the veracity, but I had to answer my prior question about who shot the footage.
Excerpt from Wikipedia:
Nguyễn Ngọc Loan (Vietnamese: [ŋʷǐənˀ ŋâwkp lʷāːn]; 11 December 1930 – 14 July 1998) was South Vietnam's chief of National Police. Loan gained international attention when he executed handcuffed prisoner Nguyễn Văn Lém, a Việt Cộng member who had killed the wife and six children of a South Vietnamese military officer. Lém was executed on 1 February 1968 in front of Võ Sửu, a cameraman for NBC, and Eddie Adams, an Associated Press photographer. The photo (captioned "General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner in Saigon") and film became two famous images in contemporary American journalism.[2]
(italics and bold text mine)
So Vo Suu must have been standing next to Eddie Adams. Seems he got no recognition.
Link here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nguy%E1%B ... B%8Dc_Loan
Excerpt from Wikipedia:
Nguyễn Ngọc Loan (Vietnamese: [ŋʷǐənˀ ŋâwkp lʷāːn]; 11 December 1930 – 14 July 1998) was South Vietnam's chief of National Police. Loan gained international attention when he executed handcuffed prisoner Nguyễn Văn Lém, a Việt Cộng member who had killed the wife and six children of a South Vietnamese military officer. Lém was executed on 1 February 1968 in front of Võ Sửu, a cameraman for NBC, and Eddie Adams, an Associated Press photographer. The photo (captioned "General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner in Saigon") and film became two famous images in contemporary American journalism.[2]
(italics and bold text mine)
So Vo Suu must have been standing next to Eddie Adams. Seems he got no recognition.
Link here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nguy%E1%B ... B%8Dc_Loan
Watch the recent series "The Vietnam War" film footage of both of discussed above plus loads more.
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