This is the section of Saigon in which General Loan shot his prisoner. Here residents look for their belongings in the ruins after the Tet Offensive. Photo: Center of Military History, via Wikimedia. Public domain.
Part I of this article tells why photographer Eddie Adams was unhappy with his Pulitzer Prize-winning photo, how he, and General Loan also, lost control of its narrative, and how both his makeover as the model American minority and his sordid Vietnam backstory were forgotten, leaving only the simple story told about the photo.
Iconic photos can touch on our deepest feelings and beliefs, yet even if their meaning seems obvious to us, they are often vulnerable to contradictory interpretations, and they can disturb with their ambiguity. Eddie Adams’s photo of General Loan killing a Vietcong officer in the Tet Offensive has become a teaching example for interpretation and theorizing about what makes photos iconic or enduring images. Like many iconic photos, its subject seems broader than the moment in time and space it captures. Journalists, historians, academics have supplied different stories, different “captions,” over the 50 years since the photo was taken. How do these versions express the way we think about the Vietnam War … and ourselves? If we imagine how differently the story of the killing might be told in Vietnam today, we see not just different narratives, but two worlds, complicating the interpretation.
General Loan will be remembered every time Eddie Adams’s photo is discussed, but the man he killed had no name in the caption and for the most part he has remained a cipher. We can sketch out a detailed biography for Loan, even if it is partly made-up by Loan and his defenders. But his victim? Sometimes he is just “the Vietcong,” “the terrorist,” or “the assassin,” sometimes with a particular atrocity attached.
The story, as it was first told
The AP photo’s caption only identified him as a “Vietcong.” He was a “Vietcong officer” in John Chancellor’s narration, when a series of Adams’s stills, with different scenes of carnage, were first shown on NBC’s Huntley-Brinkley Report:
There was awful savagery. Here [photo 1] the Viet Cong killed a South Vietnamese colonel and murdered his wife and six children. And this [photo 2] South Vietnamese officer came home during a lull in the fighting to find the bodies of his murdered children. There [photo 3] was awful retribution. Here [photo 4] the infamous chief of the South Vietnamese National Police, General Loan, executed a captured Viet Cong officer. Rough justice on a Saigon street as the charmed life of the city of Saigon comes to a bloody end.
—Bailey and Lichty (see source notes at end)
The next day, NBC showed the video footage, with Howard Tuckner’s eyewitness report of the battle around the An Quang Pagoda.
In this part of Saigon government troops were ordered to get as much revenge as possible. The fighting was only one block from the An Quang Pagoda, a Buddhist church the Viet Cong had been using as their headquarters with the reported approval of the militant Buddhist monk Tri Quang. An hour earlier Viet Cong flags had flown from these rooftops. Now snipers were up there and government troops were trying to locate their positions. Crack South Vietnamese Marines considered all civilians potential enemies. No one was above suspicion. The Viet Cong were working their way to the An Quang Pagoda and now the government troops had to clear the area no matter how high the risk. The Viet Cong were now firing from the roof of the Pagoda. For half an hour it was like this. The Viet Cong fled through the back of the Buddhist church but many others were there. Some of these are undoubtedly Viet Cong sympathizers; some are undoubtedly religious Buddhists who felt the temple was the safest place to be in times like these in Saigon. The bullets had wounded at least twenty of them. The government Marines knew that the night before here the Viet Cong had held a meeting and that the Buddhists had cheered when they were told the Viet Cong were in the city to liberate Saigon.
Government troops had captured the commander of the Viet Cong commando unit. [Here the prisoner comes toward the cameras with ARVN Marines.] He was roughed up badly but refused to talk. A South Vietnamese officer held the pistol taken from the enemy officer. [Camera shows the pistol.] The chief of South Vietnam’s National Police Force, Brigadier General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, was waiting for him. (“A camera angle from behind Loan, a wide angle view, showed the general drawing his own revolver and waving it to shoo away onlookers. … Loan moved around to the side of the captive and shot him directly in the side of the head. The corpse dropped to the pavement while blood spurted out his head.”)
The “Vietcong” has been identified differently at different times.When you examine an often-told story to question what really happened, you look especially closely at eyewitnesses accounts at the time or close to the event, before the decades of retelling and embellishment. At the time of the shooting, Adams reported that Loan showed no knowledge of any specific acts by the Vietcong. He said simply, “They killed many of my people, and yours, too,” and walked off. As Howard Tuckner remembered a few months later, Loan had walked up to him and said:
Many Americans have been killed these last few days and many of my best Vietnamese friends. Now do you understand? Buddha will understand.
What struck me reading and dating the many accounts of the killing: At the time, Loan gave no indication that he knew who the “terrorist” was. The newspaper captions to Adams’s photograph identified him as Viet Cong or a “Viet Cong terrorist” (caption in the NY Times). But only the pistol, which an officer said he took from the captive, shows that he was a combatant rather than one of the many civilians who took shelter from the fighting in the Pagoda.
When a cop shoots a suspect …
Later accounts giving background to the photo varied greatly, many describing the victim as a terrorist, some attributing horrific murders. So I became curious. We Chicagoans know better than to believe the official story when a cop shoots a black youth. How much more skeptical should we be about the official story of a political strong man’s wartime killing in a police state?
“Sometimes, when units were short of ‘kills,’ prisoners or detainees were simply murdered.” —Nick Turse. Watercolor by James Pollock, courtesy National Museum of the U.S. Army, via Wikimedia. (The caption is mine.)
There were contradictory claims about the prisoner’s identity. A few days after the shooting, when the political impact had come home in South Vietnam, Vice President Ky said the prisoner had not been in the Viet Cong military; he was a “very high-ranking political official.” Horst Faas, Adams’s photo editor in the Saigon Bureau, later said Vietnamese photographers had told him the prisoner was a traitor working for both the Vietcong and the Saigon police, or that he was a “small-time Vietcong” who put on a clean shirt and tried to slip away.
Years later, we can read that the prisoner used children as a shield while retreating with his squad. Or he had massacred “many family members of RVN servicemen, including army corps Major Tuan, his mother, wife, and two children at their home two days before he was captured, and Loan shot him because he was so overcome with rage for those deaths. Or he was an assassin whose mission was to murder people on a death list that included Loan. Or, Loan killed him just one second after he saw his best friend killed by a Vietcong sniper (Italian journalist Corrado Pizzinelli, who claims to have been there; other eyewitnesses don’t mention seeing the sniper’s kill, or Pizzinelli). Or “just moments” after several of Loan’s men had been killed, one at home with his wife and children.
But my favorite is this Hollywood-style story treatment: The Viet Cong terrorist had just slaughtered General Loan’s own family and one of his assistants.
That was from “The Nam,” a 1986 Marvel comic book.
What did Loan know at the time? Judging from what he said at the scene, only that the prisoner was Vietcong, if that. The stories about the mass grave or the horrific murders of an officer and his family may be later inventions, judging from what Loan told a NY Times reporter only a month later, in 1968. When Tom Buckley asked him why he shot the prisoner, he answered: “We knew who this man was. His name was Nguyen Tan Dat, alias Han Son. He was the commander of a sapper unit. He killed a policeman. He spit in the face of the men who captured him.”
But note that Loan misidentified the prisoner even then — the prisoner is now thought to have been an NLF fighter, Nguyen Van Lem.
Death of the General, as told in the U.S. — and in Vietnam
When Loan died in 1998, there were many obituaries, all mentioning the photo of the shooting. The Times said after his wound and loss of command, “he seemed a changed man, devoting time to showering presents on orphans.” They mention his pizzeria in Virginia, some noting that Eddie Adams mourned his death and regarded him as a hero unjustly vilified.
The “Viet Cong” who had died thirty years before is not even named.
But when Loan died, a different story about his death was told in Vietnam. There the subject was not Loan, but the victim’s widow and son, who still mourned his death thirty years later. Nguyen Van Lem was a revolutionary hero, like his wife, a cadre in the “underground resistance,” a description that appears in none of the U.S. accounts.
On that day in 1968, Nguyen Thi Lop, 30-years old and one month pregnant, saw her neighbors clustered around a newspaper and went up to them. “Look at Loan killing a VC!” one of them said to her. When she looked, she saw the photo, her husband at the moment he was shot. “I knew instantly it was Lem,” she said, “but I couldn’t say anything, I had to hide my grief and shoulder it like a hawker’s burden as I wandered about the city trying to quietly find out what happened. I was too terrified to approach his unit for fear of being identified.”
“All these years I have been waiting and waiting to hear from him [Loan], and now he has died,” she said. “I always told myself that if I ever had the chance to meet him and be told what happened to the remains, I would have forgiven him. If he didn’t tell me, I would have killed him and ripped his heart out.” Ms Lop, now a 66-year-old great-grandmother, has no interest in putting the past to one side. Her simple whitewashed house is surrounded by a vast graveyard and she even re-named her daughter Loan in a bid to cleanse the soul of the man she calls “evil”. …
“If he had been killed in a running battle or by a foreign GI, I would not have minded so much. It was war after all. But the way he was shot after being wounded and captured by another Vietnamese was too much to bear,” she said. ‘The Americans should have returned Loan to Vietnam so he could be tried as a war criminal.”
—”War secret dies with killer of Saigon,” South China Morning Post, July 23, 1998.
Nguyen Thi Lop was photographed by another great Vietnam War photojournalist, Phillip Jones Griffiths, who returned to Vietnam many times after the war to document Vietnamese in peace time. In his photo, she is holding a newspaper with the photo of Loan shooting her husband and with one finger holds a medal against a corner of the newspaper. Adams’s photo there appears in a different narrative, embedded in the narrative of the heroic NLF fighter.
The photographer shoots the picture, we supply the caption
When you have seen a photo often enough, it needs no caption. It carries its own meaning.
Or so it seems. Usually we aren’t confronted with alternative readings of the image; but the same image in a different time and place can have a different meaning. When Bruce Franklin showed the Adams photo on college campuses in 1992, he found that almost everyone recognized it, but three quarters of his audiences thought it showed a communist or North Vietnamese officer shooting a prisoner. The street execution had to be the act of an enemy, not of our anticommunist ally in the Saigon government.
In Vietnam, the execution photo hangs in the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. There it may still be iconic, but its meaning is quite different. The photo’s context in Vietnam is not the free world’s struggle against communism, but the war for national liberation — a different context which, officially and unambiguously, makes Lem a hero and martyr.
In Vietnam, the meaning of the image is unambiguous. But in the U.S., there’s ambiguity. It may have been taken up by the antiwar movement at the time. But for Eddie Adams, who took the photo, and for conservatives since then, Lem is the terrorist and Loan is the hero — and also a martyr to the American betrayal of our Vietnamese allies.
Liberals can rewrite history also
The Burns and Novick treatment provides a good example of liberal revisionism in their PBS series, “The Vietnam War.” In their framing of the war’s history, there was no victory for North Vietnam and the NLF; the war was a tragedy with terrible suffering for both sides. This is a more acceptable story than the one told in the rest of the world — that the U.S. superpower was defeated, humiliated by a small, poor, peasant nation.
When Burns, Novick and their writer Geoffrey C. Ward tell the story of the photograph, Loan becomes “a tough-minded anticommunist” and Lem was an NLF “agent” who “may have been the head of an assassination squad” and “had been found with a pistol adjacent to a hastily dug grave that held the bodies of seven South Vietnamese policemen and their families.” So Loan assassinated an assassin, all things becoming equal and sad in the fog of war. (I discuss the Burns and Novick series here, where I am not so dismissive of their achievement.)
This exculpatory balancing goes back to the first publication of the photo. The AP sent it over the wires along with a photo of a South Vietnamese officer carrying his dead child, which the Times ran just below Adams’s photo. The caption: “HIS FAMILY SLAIN BY VIETCONG.”
The master frame for the photo, the war, and the U.S.
The balancing is not so much to exculpate Loan, but to exculpate the United States. The problem posed by the photo, its subversive implication, is that the U.S. was fighting at great cost in lives to keep people like Loan in power, propping up a police state and destroying a country in the name of democracy and “the free world.”
Our culture, like all imperial cultures, is pervaded by this master frame: Our country, our country’s military, “we,” are essentially a force for good in the world, a force for freedom. The U.S. is the “leader of the free world,” and the wars the U.S. fights are “just wars” and not crimes of aggression. As Burns and Novick describe the U.S. war in the beginning of the TV series: “It was begun in good faith, by decent people, out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence, and Cold War miscalculation.”
By the end of the war, this myth was deeply contested. It was challenged not only by antiwar activists and intellectuals, but also by an increasingly large public grown distrustful of government and military. No amount of false balancing could hide, in the end, the grotesque imbalance in power and destruction when the most powerful military in history invades the land of a small, far off impoverished, country, fighting a peasant army.
What made the photo iconic
The photo is not iconic because of its formal qualities, its dramatic action, or even its uniqueness in capturing the moment of death. Some commentators, discussing the photo’s iconic status, emphasized that uniqueness, capturing the moment of death. It is truly unusual — another example usually mentioned is another iconic photo, Robert Capa’s “Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death.” There is a closer comparison in a photo taken a few years before, in 1962, by another distinguished war photographer, Dicky Chappelle. She also captured an execution of a Vietcong suspect, only two years before she died struck by mortar shrapnel in Vietnam. The newspapers wouldn’t run that photo. It came too soon in the war, before the moment when the Tet Offensive shocked millions with the understanding that the U.S. was not winning the war, and our government could not be trusted. The particular context made the difference; history didn’t give her photo those additional layers of meaning.
Photographers can almost never capture the moment of death … but artists can, whenever. Hans Holbein, from Dance of Death, 1538.
Adams’s photo became iconic partly because it captured a moment of intense drama, but even more because it captured the moment of understanding in February 1968 that the U. S. could not win the war. The photographer took the photo, but what made it iconic was the ferocity of the Vietnamese resistance, the surging global antiwar movement, and the demoralization and divisiveness among the elites that forced President Johnson to decide not to run for a second term. Without that complex dynamic, the photograph, like Dicky Chappelle’s, might never have been published.
If you read descriptions of the photo by journalists and writers, and government officials, they understood it was powerful because people felt it embodied the violence, savagery, inhumanity of the Vietnam War. But like all iconic images of war, in photography or in art, Adams’s photo was not just about one war; it was about war itself. You look at the enduring war photos, and you think, “This is what war is like.”
It endures also because of the image’s ambiguity, its vulnerability to interpretation, because the Vietnam War is still an open, scalding wound and because our ideas about Vietnam touch a deep sense of identity, personal and cultural, in America, and maybe also in Vietnam.
The American superpower cannot accept that it was defeated by a small peasant nation, or that its moral pretensions were exposed by the barbaric carnage it wreaked. It cannot relinquish the imperial binary of “us and them,” that there are, as Eddie Adams and so many soldiers have said, the “good guys” and “the bad guys,” and we are the good and the noble. The photo has come to say so much about the Vietnam War that it will be looked at, talked about, taught for as long as the war troubles America’s idea of itself, as long as America survives as an imperial power.
Sources
Why source notes? In case some reader wants to go down the rabbit hole of history, or in case some reader who doesn’t know me wants a reason to trust or question the details.
Note on illustrations: All images are public domain, Creative Commons or fair use. I link to important images for which I don’t have permission.
“John Chancellor’s narration”: George A. Bailey and Lawrence W. Lichty, “Rough Justice on a Saigon Street: A Gatekeeper Study of NBC’s Tet Execution Film.” Journalism Quarterly, Summer 1972. John Chancellor is quoted; my description in brackets, from “Rough Justice.” The quote in parentheses is commentary from “Rough Justice.”
Howard Tuckner’s eyewitness report”: Bailey and Lichty.
“As Howard Tuckner remembered”: Bailey and Lichty.
“Contradictory claims”: Andrew Friedman, “Covert Capital: Landscapes of Denial and the Making of U.S. Empire in the Suburbs of Northern Virginia” (University of California Press, 2013), pp. 197, 200.
Image: “Waiting Interrogation.” Watercolor by James Pollock, U.S. Army Combat Art Program, CAT IV, 1967, Courtesy of the National Museum of the U.S. Army, via Wikimedia.
Image caption: “detainees were simply murdered”: Nick Turse, “Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam” (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2013), p. 334.
“used children as a shield”: Nguyên Truong Toai interviewed in Larry Engelmann, “Tears before the Rain: An Oral History of the Fall of South Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 233-34.
“massacred many family members”: Nguyen Cong Luan, “Nationalist in the Viet Nam Wars: Memoirs of a Victim Turned Soldier” (Indian University Press 1990), p. 325.
“best friend killed by a sniper” and “murder people on a death list”: James S Robbins, “This Time We Win: Revisiting the Tet Offensive” (Encounter Books, 2012), pp. 324, 155.
” at home with his wife and children”: Jonah Goldberg, “There Are Tears in My Eyes,” National Review, August 26, 1999.
“a 1986 Marvel comic book”: Edwin A. Martini, “Invisible Enemies: The American War on Vietnam, 1975-2000” (University of Massachusetts Press), pp 150-51.
“His name was Nguyen Tan Dat”: Tom Buckley, “Portrait of an Aging Despot” (Harpers, April 1972), p. 72.
“Bruce Franklin showed the Adams photo”: Christian G. Appy, “American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity” (New York: Penguin Books, 2015), p. 267.
“assassination squad”: Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns, “The Vietnam War: An Intimate History” (New York: Knopf, 2017), p. 274. I quote from the book. You can see the actual NBC film footage in Burns and Novick’s “The Vietnam War,” Episode 6: “Things Fall Apart,” streaming on Amazon.com or PBS.com. The film footage is at 37:10-38:10. They also show Adams’s photo in an unfamiliar uncropped image, showing a man walking away in the right hand corner. Because of that irrelevant detail Adams would be dismissive of the aesthetic quality of his photo. But it adds authenticity, showing you what actually happens in the background of war and violence, and also something about the nature of photojournalism. If it were a painting by a master, that guy paying no attention to the drama in the foreground would be seen as a brilliant and meaningful detail (cf. W H Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts,” on Breughel’s “Icarus”).
“Dicky Chappelle”: John Taylor, “Body Horror: Photojournalism, Catastrophe and War” (New York: New York University Press, 1998), p. 22.
