Sometimes a picture can influence history. Such was the case for a photo taken on Feb. 1, 1968. It was the second day of the Tet Offensive in Saigon. Just the day before, a Viet Cong sapper squad had attacked the U.S. Embassy and now there were guerrilla attacks throughout the city. A captured VC, who went by the name Bay Lop (born Nguyen Van Lem), was brought handcuffed to the Chief of the National Police. Brigadier General Nguyen Ngoc Loan lifted his .38 caliber pistol and shot Bay Lop in the head. At that moment, AP photographer Eddie Adams snapped a photo that ran in most newspapers in America. (At the same moment, NBC cameraman Va Suru filmed the execution.) The photo was one of the tipping points that convinced most Americans that the war was not worth the effort. It won the Pulitzer Prize for best spot news photograph in 1969. Here’s the rest of the story.
Adams had been a combat photographer for the Marines in the Korean War. He started working for the Associated Press in 1962. He expected Loan to threaten Bay Lop with his gun. If he had known the circumstances, he might not have been shocked by what happened. The captive had earlier killed an aide to Loan and his wife, mother, and five of six kids. Some of their throats were slit. Loan remarked: “If you hesitate, if you don’t do your duty, the men won’t follow you.” However, his main motivation was rage. He pointed out that Bay Lop was in civilian clothes and didn’t deserve respect. (He might have added that Bay Lop would surely have been executed eventually.) Later that year, Loan had a leg amputated due to a war wound and spent some time in America recovering. He returned to South Vietnam, but emigrated to America after the fall of Saigon in 1975. There was talk of deporting him as a war criminal, but Pres. Carter refused, calling it foolish revisionism. He ran a restaurant in Virginia for twenty years. He met Adams, who apologized for ruining his life with the photo. Adams once said that two people died in the photo – “Loan killed the prisoner and I killed the general”. The aide’s son Huan Nguyen, the only survivor although shot three times, went on to become a rear admiral in the U.S. Navy in 2019. He is the highest ranked Vietnamese-American in American History.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Execution_of_Nguy%E1%BB%85n_V%C4%83n_L%C3%A9m
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/01/world/asia/vietnam-execution-photo.html
1 Comment
Keith · February 2, 2021 at 3:13 pm
Thanks for the rest of the story.