Eddie Adams’ iconic Vietnam War photo: What happened next
January 31, 2018 by admin
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AP/Briscoe Center for American History
A series of images by Eddie Adams leading up to the killing of Nguyen Van Lem
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.
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AP/Briscoe Center for American History
“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.
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AP/Briscoe Center for American History
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.”
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Briscoe Center for American History
Eddie Adams (right) holds up his Pulitzer Prize
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.
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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.”
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North Korea will be able to hit the US with nuclear weapons in a ‘handful of months’, CIA director warns
January 31, 2018 by admin
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- Mike Pompeo, the director of the CIA, said Kim Jong-Un was high on his agenda
- He said ‘many things were possible’ to stop North Korea, including removing Kim
- Pompeo also said he expects Russia to interfere in American mid-term elections
Larisa Brown Defence And Security Editor For The Daily Mail
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Donald Trump’s spymaster yesterday warned that North Korea could have the ability to hit the US with nuclear weapons in a ‘handful of months’.
Mike Pompeo, the director of the CIA, also said he wanted America to get back on its ‘front foot’ by stepping up covert action overseas – pledging to do his ‘damnest’ to steal secrets from foreign powers.
Speaking from the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, he revealed the US President is briefed on ‘the most exquisite truth’ that the CIA has learnt almost every day, and is ‘curious’ about the facts.
In a wide-ranging interview with the BBC, he warned that he expected Russia to target the US mid-term elections later this year, but insisted the US would be ready to ‘push back’.
Speaking from the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, Pompeo (pictured) revealed the US President is briefed on ‘the most exquisite truth’ that the CIA has learnt almost every day, and is ‘curious’ about the facts
Mr Pompeo, a Trump loyalist who was handed the job in January last year, said Kim Jong-un and North Korea’s nuclear programme were high on his agenda. Pictured: North Korea’s intermediate-range strategic ballistic rocket Hwasong-12 lifting off from the launching pad at an undisclosed location near Pyongyang last year
Pompeo said: ‘We talk about him having the ability to deliver a nuclear weapon to the United States in a matter of a handful of months.’ Pictured: Kim Jong-Un celebrating a missile launch last year
When asked about President Trump’s use of Twitter and frank language about foreign policy, he said: ‘When you see this language that the president chooses to use, there are many audiences for it… and I assure you Kim Jong-un understands the message that America is serious’
Mr Pompeo, a Trump loyalist who was handed the job in January last year, said Kim Jong-Un and North Korea’s nuclear programme were high on his agenda.
He went on: ‘We talk about him having the ability to deliver a nuclear weapon to the United States in a matter of a handful of months.
‘Our task is to have provided the intelligence to the president of the United States that will deliver to him a set of options that continue to take down that risk by non-diplomatic means.’
The President and senior officials were ‘mindful’ of the fact that all-out conflict could lead to massive destruction and loss of life, but that ‘many things were possible’ in scenarios for removing Kim Jong-Un or preventing him being able to launch nuclear missiles, he added.
When asked about President Trump’s use of Twitter and frank language about foreign policy, he said: ‘When you see this language that the president chooses to use, there are many audiences for it… and I assure you Kim Jong-Un understands the message that America is serious.’
In bullish remarks, he spelled out his vision for an unburdened and unleashed CIA, describing it as ‘the world’s finest espionage service’ in an ever-increasingly uncertain world.
Building on how he wants the CIA to operate, he told the BBC News at Ten: ‘We are going to go out there and do our damnedest to steal secrets on behalf of the American people.
In a wide-ranging interview with the BBC, he warned that he expected Russia to target the US mid-term elections later this year, but insisted the US would be ready to ‘push back’. Pictured: Russian President Vladimir Putin with Trump last year
‘And I wanted to get back on our front foot.’ Quizzed about his relationship with Trump and his capability as President, he revealed he briefs the Commander-in-Chief most days when both are in Washington DC.
He said: ‘We deliver nearly every day personally to the President the most exquisite truth that we know from the CIA.
‘He is very focused in the sense that he is curious about the facts that we present. He is curious in the sense he wants to understand why we believe them.’
He dismissed claims in the recent book ‘Fire and Fury’, which raised questions about President Trump’s abilities as leader.
‘It’s absurd. I haven’t read the book. I don’t intend to.
‘The claim that the president isn’t engaged and doesn’t have a grasp on these important issues is dangerous and false and it saddens me that someone would have taken the time to write such drivel’, he added.
He said there had been no significant diminishing of Russian attempts at subversion in Europe and the US. He also said he was concerned about subversion by Moscow in the upcoming US mid-term elections in November.
‘I have every expectation that they will continue to try and do that but I’m confident that America will be able to have a free and fair election (and) that we will push back in a way that is sufficiently robust that the impact they have on our election won’t be great’, he said.
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