“Saigon. 1968” by Fred Klonsky, FredKlonsky.com. 

This striking drawing by Fred Klonsky reimagines one of the iconic photos from the Vietnam War, which we’ve seen in newspapers and on TV many times in this 50th year after it was taken. The photo, “Saigon Execution,” has been called an image “that changed the course of the war.”  Well, maybe it isn’t, but it did help shape America’s collective memory of the war.

I thought I knew Eddie Adams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of the “execution” — its story and its meaning (see the photo here). But when Klonsky’s art sent me to refresh my memory, I found a history of the kind of mythmaking that mirrors our shifting, politicized cultural memory of the war itself. I also found the photo to be an intriguing example of  how iconic images have been lifted out of history to gain and shift their meaning, and a good teaching example for seeing how we look at photos through ideological lenses.

The photo shows Nguyen Ngoc Loan, chief of South Vietnam’s security services, shooting a Vietcong prisoner point blank during the 1968 Tet Offensive. The photo stood out from the countless images of war we had seen up to then — it showed not the wounded and dead bodies, but the moment of killing and dying itself. That was the “news value” of the photo, which led the Associated Press to rush it to the news media. But what made the photo more unusual, what gave it a meaning beyond its otherwise abstract image of violence, was its context.

The photo’s subversive, moral ambiguity

It also was unusual because, in context, it had a subversive, moral ambiguity — the shot was fired not by an anonymous soldier, but by one of the high officials of the government American soldiers were dying for, and posed the question: Was this murder?  So the photo seemed to stand for something more than the action captured in the frame, and something more than was conveyed by a simple, one-sentence caption.

To understand the importance of the photo, we have to understand the impact of the Tet Offensive. It was a shock to see guerrillas breaching the U.S. Embassy compound and attacking cities and U.S. and South Vietnamese military bases throughout the country. Americans had been told the U.S. was winning the war and the photo seemed to catch the president and the generals in a big and terrible lie.

Americans were shocked to see guerrillas breach the U.S. Embassy compound. Here a prisoner captured in the attack. Photo: Don Hirst, Army photographer.

There had been no photos like this in the “censored wars” of the past, World War II and Korea. In this war, though editors still imposed their filters, photographers and journalists could move independently in the country. Crucially, a surging antiwar movement, coming after the rise of the Black freedom movement, had begun to delegitimize the cold-war framing that had been able to hide, explain away and cover up atrocities in the Korean War. But in February 1968, the mass movements and a growing division in the elites created an opposition ready to extract the subversive meaning out of this morally ambiguous image.

There was also video footage of the killing the next day on NBC news, but it was the photo that became an “indelible image of war,” one of a few powerful images people would always associate with the Vietnam War. The photo was soon on posters in antiwar protests. General Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, later wrote, “The photograph and the film shocked the world.”  In the words of NBC’s Saigon bureau chief, it “showed the horror and insanity of the war.”  Robert Kennedy, a month later and before he officially declared his candidacy in the presidential primaries, said: “The photograph of the execution was on front pages all around the world — leading our best and oldest friends to ask, more in sorrow than in anger, what has happened to America?”

Viewers saw not only the shocking moment of death, but also the general’s casual performance, untroubled by the presence of news cameras. He raised his arm to shoot as soon as the prisoner was brought before him, seemingly without a moment of reflection, signaling routine inhumanity and impunity. The photo came to serve not only as an indictment of the corrupt and brutal South Vietnamese government. It seems to ask not only, are these the people we are dying for?  But also, Is this us?

A powerful antiwar image … or is it?

Eddie Adams didn’t think so, and he didn’t like the use made of his photo by antiwar protesters. He was the AP photographer who took the picture. When it was first broadcast, along with even more shocking film footage the next day, NBC’s John Chancellor called it “rough justice on a Saigon street.” Adams for sure, Chancellor maybe, took the point of view of the killer and not the victim.

Adams didn’t come to the scene to expose the savagery of the South Vietnamese police or military. The exemplary war photojournalist, brilliant, daring, obsessive, he was there … just because.  These guys always had to be where the action was. Then when the photo’s impact was understood, the AP assigned him to follow Loan around.  Adams was a gung-ho soldier-photographer, a marine veteran who supported the U.S. war effort. He naturally soon became friendly with the general, a very smart man who could be charming as well as “ruthless,” “cruel,” “evil.” Adams said, “The guy was very well-loved by the Vietnamese. He was a hero to them, you know.”

Adams was one of two photographers who won Pulitzer Prizes for photography in the war. (The second was Nick Ut, who took that other historic photo, a 12-year old girl burned in a napalm attack, running down the road naked and screaming in a group of children and soldiers.) But Adams would say that he wished one of his other photos had won, maybe one of his photos of boat people, not the execution photo.

“I tell people that two lives were destroyed in that photograph,” said Adams. “The person who was shot and the man who pulled the trigger. America condemned him. They said that he shot somebody in cold blood. And I tried to tell people, there are good guys and bad guys in every war. At that time, he was a good guy. He was fighting for America with America. Aren’t you supposed to shoot the enemy? I mean, that’s what he did. And so he’s condemned?”

Adams visited Loan years later in the U.S. and apologized; Loan graciously deflected, saying that Adams was doing his job, and someone else would have taken the picture if he hadn’t.

Execution of prisoners is normal in warfare. Goya, too, captured the moment of death. The French in Goya’s Spain, like Loan in Vietnam, were the “good guys,” bringing “liberté” to a conquered people. Goya, “The Third of May” (1814).

Losing control of the narrative

Adams  saw how the photographer has no control over the photo after publication; it takes on a meaning and a life of its own. Loan also lost control of the narrative; he became infamous, not only in Vietnam. When he came to the U.S. in 1969 for treatment in Walter Reed Hospital after his leg was shattered in combat, it was a news story. Not because of Loan’s courage in leading his men into the firefight that cost him his leg, but because of the photo.

“A disgraceful end to a disgraceful, murderous episode,” said Sen. Stephen M . Young. “This brutal murderer will be receiving the best medical, surgical and nursing attention available … all at the expense of the American taxpayers.”  A few years later, after Loan reached America in the tide of refugees escaping the fall of Saigon, the INS tried to deport him for “moral turpitude.” He was one of a number of Vietnamese refugees on a list accused of torture and drug smuggling under the Saigon regime.

Loan was attacked in the media, but  was also defended not just by William F Buckley Jr. in  National Review, but also by liberal Murray Kempton in The Progressive. This was after the controversy over My Lai murderer Lt William Calley, also seen as a scapegoat for the “real villains” above him, who went unpunished.  Loan was finally allowed to stay when President Carter intervened to end the controversy.

The General’s Makeover: A model of the “model minority”

The “brutal murderer” looked very different to reporters just a few years later. He had joined the wave of refugees fleeing the fall of Saigon in 1975 and eventually made it to the U.S. with his family. Reporters found him running a pizza parlor in a shopping mall in Burke, Virginia, 20 miles outside Washington, DC. He bought the restaurant with $8000 raised from friends, also working another job in D.C., with his wife and children helping out in the restaurant. He renamed the pizzeria “Les Trois Continents,” serving spring rolls and spicy ground pork meatballs in fish sauce along with the pizza, hamburgers and hot dogs.

Loan’s identity had gone through a makeover, just as the photo had. Loan had remade himself into an example, the Asian-American “model minority,” working 12 hours/day on two jobs, devoted to his family, teaching one daughter French, sending another to college. He was the amiable host chatting up the customers, running after any who didn’t finish their food to ask what he could do better.

“We know who you are, fucker!”

Eddie Adams became a friend and visited him several times. One time in Loan’s restaurant Adams saw this graffito in the men’s room: “We know who you are, fucker!”

Who was he?

People who remember the photo vaguely identify the shooter as some South Vietnamese officer. We can find out some things about him, but it’s odd how the photo is so famous and its protagonist so obscure, as if the image itself says everything.  In the deportation controversy, only the killing in the photo was discussed, and it’s not easy now to find out much more, mostly without certainty. Our histories of the war focus on the U.S. involvement and the battles, not so much on the politics of the South Vietnamese government and the biographies of its officials.

In one place you read that Loan was in the Viet Minh fighting for independence against the French until 1949. In another he went to the prestigious French military academy, St Cyr, and in another not there but to l’Ecole de l’Air, France’s air force academy.  The journalists pass over any details of his time in the new South Vietnamese military, set up by the French in their desperation to hold onto their colony.

How much of this information ultimately derives from questionable sources — journalists who got it from Loan himself, historians relying on the journalists, or hearing it from other South Vietnamese military or police officials then or years later in interviews or memoirs? Historians are careful with such sources, journalists less so, and it’s mainly the journalists who drew our portrait of Loan.

Many of the historians and wartime journalists agree on a few things. Not that “he was well-loved by the Vietnamese,” as Adams told Bob Edwards.  Loan rose to power as a protegé of General, then Premiere, then Vice President Nguyen Cao Ky, who put Loan at the head of the national police, the military intelligence service, and the counter-intelligence agency. Putting his networks at the service of  his patron, Loan was, effectively, the coercive part of Ky’s political organization, intimidating, when not bribing, officials at all levels throughout Vietnam, and backing Ky in his rivalry with President Thieu.

Loan was in charge of the suppression of the Buddhist uprising of 1966. He told Vice President Ky he would lead a coup against the government if they didn’t attack the pagodas in Danang which the dissidents were gathered. Loan led his men to kill hundreds of rebel soldiers, as well as over a hundred civilians who had taken refuge in pagodas in Da Nang, then went on to clear out Hue, rounding up hundreds of students and other protesters who languished in prison for years after, many until the end of the war in 1975. An insight into the nature of Loan and the regime: Of 1870 prisoners in in Chi Hoa Prison, Saigon, 1665 were listed in the daily census as Buddhists, only 50 as communists.

We get more sordid details from Alfred McCoy’s massive investigation of the drug trade during the war, “The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia.” Although it was published in 1972, again in the revised edition (2002), you won’t find McCoy’s findings in the sanitized story that would appear in the many newspaper and magazine articles written about the iconic war photograph.  You might say that the photo itself became Loan’s story, overwhelming not only his makeover as a restauranteur in Virginia, but also his shady past.

You might say that the photo itself became Loan’s story, overwhelming not only his makeover as a restauranteur in Virginia, but also his shady past.

Loan was one of the most powerful single South Vietnamese officials. Ky had no “base, money, connections, intrigue ability,” wrote McCoy. But Loan had virtually the whole national security apparatus — police, military intelligence, the Central Intelligence Organization and handpicked allies in top military positions. He may have been second only to Ky in coercive power, and at one time commanded up to 70,000 men in arms. He was responsible for anticorruption investigations and used his power to destroy Ky’s political enemies and force legislators to his will, even bringing gunmen into the Constituent Assembly to fix a vote.

Saigon rackets and the drug trade

He cornered the extortion rackets and opium traffic. McCoy describes how he invited Corsican and Chinese networks to ship Laos’s opium to Europe from Saigon for a fixed price to Ky’s political organization. McCoy details how he “systematized the corruption, regulating how much each particular agency would collect, how much each officer would skim off for his personal use, and what percentage would be turned over to Ky’s political machine.”  He must have been quite brilliant at his job. Whatever he took for himself, he apparently didn’t bring much to the U.S., where he worked long hours to support his family.  Journalists described him as flaunting power and violence, not wealth, living modestly by comparison with other officials, dressing casually in the style of a cop, not a general.

He said the Americans broke their promise to take him out of Vietnam when Saigon fell, and he was only able to escape with his family squeezed into the cargo compartment of a South Vietnamese Air Force C-130, allowed to bring no possessions aboard.

“The position I hold in Vietnam, I should be billionaire, not just millionaire. I know what other people took, but Ky and I, we are fighting men, and it is not our way. So now I work like a slave and we live, eleven of us, in a little house, and we have nothing, nothing, nothing!” he told reporter Tom Buckley.

“At his command tens of thousands of persons were imprisoned  in the tiger cages of Conson Island and elsewhere.” Statue in the Hanoi War Remnants Museum. Photo by Adam Jones,  (CC BY-SA 2.0) 

Some accounts treat him as a hero. Eddie Adams thought he was, and other correspondents may have feared him but also respected his courage. He was, one pointed out, the only South Vietnamese — or American — general wounded in combat.  That version of Loan has been taken up by conservatives, who still have a political use for mythologizing the Vietnam War. They don’t mention that this chief of the national police in a police state had responsibility for a nationwide regime of suppression of dissidents, mass imprisonment, torture and murder, as well as pervasive corruption at every level.

Tom Buckley, who interviewed Loan a number of times reporting for the Times in Saigon and after in the United States, knew him better than most reporters: “His powers were those of life and death, and at his command tens of thousands of persons were imprisoned in the tiger cages of Conson Island and elsewhere; tortured in the dreaded provincial interrogation centers; were assassinated, executed, or simply not heard from again.”

Eddie Adams’s photo didn’t tell this story, but it became a symbol of the murderous and corrupt regime for which our young people were being dragged into a savage war. If this was the character of the shooter, maybe we should rethink who the “Vietcong terrorist” was.

See Part II, coming soon, for the identity of the “terrorist,” the changing media narrative of his death, how our culture shapes our understanding of the photo, and why it is iconic and will remain so.

Notes on sources

Why source notes? In case some reader wants to follow me down the rabbit hole of history, or in case some reader who doesn’t know me or hates my interpretations wants a reason to trust or question the details. 

Note on illustrations: All images are public domain, Creative Commons, fair use, or used by permission. I link to important images for which I don’t have permission.

The feature image, Fred Klonsky’s “Saigon 1968” — by permission, because, a veteran educator, Klonsky states that “anyone is free to distribute and reproduce original material from this blog unless I have specifically denied them the right to distribute and reproduce it.”

 

Westmoreland quote: Philip Seib, “Headline Diplomacy : How News Coverage Affects Foreign Policy” (Greenwood Publishing Group, Incorporated, 1996). p. 18.

 

“NBC bureau chief”: Ron Steinman, “A Saigon Journal. Inside Television’s First War” (KCM Publishing, 2013), p. 676.

 

NBC’s John Chancellor called it “rough justice on a Saigon street.” All quotes from the NBC  broadcasts here and in Part II: 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.

 

“ruthless”:  “ruthless in Karnow, p. 447; “evil” and “insane” in the view of  many Vietnamese Ron Steinman knew (Steinman, p. 447).

 

“The guy was very well-loved by the Vietnamese”: Interview with Adams by Bob Edwards,  NPR Morning Edition, 7/16/98, in James S Robbins, “This Time We Win: Revisiting the Tet Offensive” (Encounter Books), p. 290.

 

“two lives were destroyed”: Steve Tierney, interviewing Adams for Oliver North’s “War Stories: The Tet Offensive” for Fox News.

 

“A disgraceful end to a disgraceful murderous episode”: “Viet General’s Visit Scored.” Washington Post, May 15, 1969.

 

“on a list of torture and drug smuggling” “U.S. Acts to Deport Saigon Official Who Killed Bound Prisoner in 1968,” Washington Post, November 3, 1978.

 

“Reporters found him running a pizza parlor”: “Saigon Police Chief Now Runs Burke Cafe,” Washington Post, April 28, 1976.

 

“model minority”: Sylvia Shin Huey Chong, Restaging the War: “The Deer Hunter” and the Primal Scene of Violence” Cinema Journal,  Vol. 44, No. 2 (Winter, 2005), p. 101. I’m especially indebted to the portrait of Loan in 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)> Friedman points out the different descriptions of Loan, many of which were efforts to justify his killing.

 

“suppression of the Buddhist uprising”: Robert J. Topmiller, “The Lotus Unleashed: The Buddhist Peace Movement in South Vietnam, 1964-1966 (University Press of Kentucky, 2006), pp. 132, 140, 182n.36. Also,Frances Fitzgerald, “Fire in the Lake (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1972), pp. 288-89; Stanley Karnow, “Vietnam: A History” (New York, 1984), p. 447, 450.

 

“extortion rackets”: Fitzgerald, p. 312. “opium traffic”: Specer C. Tucker, ed.,  “The Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War,” (New York: Oxford U. Press, 1998), p. 300.

 

“McCoy’s massive investigation”: “The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade” (Chicago Review Press, 2003), pp. 161, 210-13, 215-16, 219, 220.

 

“I should be billionaire”: Tom Buckley, “The Villain of Vietnam” (Esquire, June 5, 1979), pp. 61-64.

 

“wounded in combat”: Buckley, 1979.

 

“taken up by conservatives”: William Buckley Jr., “Deport General Loan?” National Review, December 8, 1978, 1526, and Murray Kempton, “Finding a Fall-Guy,” The Progressive, January 1979, 10-11.

 

“His powers were those of life and death”: Tom Buckley, “Portrait of an Aging Despot” (Harpers, April 1972), p. 68.