February 03, 2008
The Hero Of The Day
My friend Damon sent me a link today. It concerns this photograph:
You've seen it before, but you may not know the history behind it. The photograph was taken in February 1st, 1968, almost exactly 40 years ago. It was the second or third day of the Tet Offensive, the gigantic push by the Viet Cong to sew death and destruction in South Vietnam. Things were so out of hand during those early days that US Marines had a prolonged firefight with VC who had penetrated the grounds of the US embassy in Saigon. When it was over, the Viet Cong were a militarily defeated rabble. But the leftists in this country and their fellow travelers in our media turned a VC defeat into a stunning moral victory. The seeds for our abandonment of South Vietnam were planted in those dark first months of 1968.
The photograph depicts General Nguyan Ngoc Loan, chief of Vietnam's national police, executing a Viet Cong prisoner in Saigon. Stories vary according to source, but most of the journalists present that day say Nguyễn Văn Lém, the man being shot, was found near the bound and gagged bodies of local police officials and their families. According to police, Lem was the head of an assassination squad sent into Saigon with orders to kill police officers and/or their family members during the offensive. Viet Cong members captured during military operations were afforded treatment under the Geneva Convention as prisoners of war; Lem, acting behind enemy lines and dressed as a civilian, was granted no such treatment. The rest, as they say, is history.
From the Times Online article:
This morning, with its admirable instinct for a story, the Today programme told the tale of Eddie Adams's photograph and the impact it made.
Sadly Adams is dead, so the programme featured a different, but also distinguished, war photographer Philip Jones Griffiths. And Jones Griffiths described his feelings about the photo and his own decision to track down and photograph the executed man's widow.
Jones Griffiths had strong views on the photo and gave them to us.
He dismissed the idea that the executed man had been a killer saying both that the idea that the man had just killed others was "kind of propaganda" and that "he wouldn't have been much of a Vietcong soldier" if he hadn't tried to kill people. He clearly viewed the photo's power as being its revelation of the evil of the war and America's involvement.
These were interesting, legitimate, opinions. But it is a shame that it wasn't mentioned that they were not remotely the views held by Eddie Adams of his own photo.
Here's what Eddie Adams had to say about General Loan:
The guy was a hero.
Loan had a sad life after the war. He escaped Saigon in 1975 and moved to Virginia, where he ran a successful restaurant. He had to close it, however, when word of his true identity leaked out. He died in 1998, shunned by those who knew the truth of his actions. Once again, Eddie Adams put it better than I could ever hope to:
America should be crying. I just hate to see him go this way, without people knowing anything about him.
Now you know. We like our heroes to be blameless, clean and spotless. This nation vilified Loan and those like him, men who reacted to brutality with brutality in defense of those things we hold dear. The picture from that terrible day helped shaped American opinion about the war, even though it is fair to say the action it depicts is taken out of context. Forty years on, has anything changed?
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