On February 1st, 1968, South Vietnamese Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan, Chief of the National Police, shot Vietcong officer, Nguyen Van Lem in the head. After taking the shot, he walked over to the reporters and told them: “These guys kill a lot of our people, and I think Buddha will forgive me”.
It was caught on camera by NBC TV and AP photographer Eddie Adams. The picture and film footage went viral and became popular around the world. Soon enough, it became a worldwide symbol of the brutality of the Vietnam War.
The picture taken by Eddie Adams had the most profound effect as it was taken a split second before the Vietcong officer died. The captured expression showed pain as the bullet went through his head. A close inspection of the picture shows the bullet leaving his skull.
Eddie Adams wrote: “Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world”. This was all the more notable as his 1968 photograph of an officer shooting a handcuffed prisoner in the head at point-blank range earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 1969.
However, the reaction the image received painted it black and white and the reality wasn’t so. The photograph doesn’t tell its viewers that the Vietcong officer, Nguyen Van Lem was the leader of a Vietcong “revenge squad” that killed dozens of unarmed civilians earlier the same day.
The photograph made out the South Vietnamese Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan to be a villain and he suffered the effects even after the war.
The South Vietnamese sources said that Nguyen Van Lem had carried out an attack on police officers’ families earlier that day. A picture of Lem in a mass grave with the bodies of at least seven police family members supported the report.
Eddie Adams who also confirmed the report said he was only present for the execution. The backlash Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan received made the photographer regret taking the picture at all.
He wrote in the 1998 Time: “Two people died in that photograph: the recipient of the bullet and General Nguyen Ngoc Loan. The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still, photographs are the most powerful weapons in the world. People believe them; but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths…
What the photograph didn’t say was, ‘What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two, or three American people?’…
This picture really messed up his life. He never blamed me. He told me if I hadn’t taken the picture, someone else would have, but I’ve felt bad for him and his family for a long time… I sent flowers when I heard that he had died and wrote, “I’m sorry. There are tears in my eyes”.
Gen. Nguyen Ngọc Loan died of cancer on 14 July 1998, at the age of 67, in Burke, Virginia.
