"An Unlikely Weapon"

Eddie Adams/Associated Press, via Morgan Cooper
Productions

A movie review over at Pinch's Dog's Breakfast.

Eddie Adams personally apologized to General Nguyen for that photo.

Oddly NPR has far higher standards of candor and complexity when speaking of this film and Eddie Adams:

But the Pulitzer Prize Adams won for this photograph left him pained and conflicted for the rest of his life.

Because of the draft, says Arnett, most journalists chronicling Vietnam had been in the military. They could relate to the troops and had a better understanding of what was going on. Adams, who had been a combat photographer with the U.S. Marine Corps in Korea, loved the Marines, and many of his best photographs are of Marine operations.

But his most famous and most disturbing photograph was shot on the streets of Cholon, the Chinese section of Saigon. The incident took place on the second day of the Tet Offensive in 1968, a watershed battle that changed public perceptions of the war. Adams saw a soldier drag a man in a checkered shirt out of a building. In the documentary An Unlikely Weapon: The Eddie Adams Story, Adams describes what happened.

"They were taking him by the hand and pulled him out in the street," he said. "Now any photographer, when you grab a prisoner, in New York or something, you just follow him, and it's a picture. You follow until he is put into a wagon and driven away."

But walking into the frame of his camera was Brig. Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan, raising a pistol. Normally, that was a method of interrogation — holding a weapon to a suspect's head and asking questions. As Buell tells it, "This man just raised the pistol and Eddie made a picture of an interrogation, but the man pulled the trigger."

One of Adams' frames was the very instant the bullet entered the man's head — the moment of death.

The picture went around the world. It was held up at demonstrations by members of the intensifying anti-war movement and became one of the two or three iconic photos that symbolized the war for many people. Ironically, there are films of that same execution. But Buell and Arnett both argue that the still photo had more of an impact.

"You can see the gun, you can see the expression on the man's face as the bullet enters his head, and you see the soldier on the left who is wincing at the thing that has happened," says Buell. "With the still picture, you have time to consider all these factors."

Arnett calls the picture a "brilliant piece of photography. He had the courage to stand a foot or two away from a murderous officer who had his pistol out and shot the man in front of him."

But Adams, who considered himself a patriot and a Marine, never came to terms with the fact that the anti-war movement saw that photograph as proof that the Vietnam War was unjustified. In fact, he believed to the end of his life that the picture only told part of the truth. The untold story was that on the day of the execution, an aid to Loan was killed by insurgents. After Loan pulled the trigger, he walked by Adams and said, "They killed many of our people and many of yours."

In An Unlikely Weapon, Adams said he found the attention given to this photo disturbing: "I still don't understand to this day why it was so important, because I have heard so many different versions of what this picture did, like it helped end the war in Vietnam."

More here:

"Except Eddie Adams wishes he never took the picture.

After the photo was seen around the world, the AP assigned Adams to hang out with General Loan. He discovered that Loan was a beloved hero in Vietnam, to his troops and the citizens. "He was fighting our war, not their war, our war, and every — all the blame is on this guy," Adams told NPR (in what may have been the most surprisingly courageous NPR interview I've ever heard). Adams learned that Loan fought for the construction of hospitals in South Vietnam and unlike the popular myths, demonstrated the fact that at least some South Vietnamese soldiers really did want to fight for their country and way of life.

Just moments before that photo had been taken, several of his men had been gunned down. One of his soldiers had been at home, along with the man's wife and children. The Vietcong had attacked during the holiday of Tet, which had been agreed upon as a time for a truce. As it turned out, many of the victims of the NC and North Vietnamese were defenseless. Some three thousand of them were discovered in a mass grave outside of Hue after the Americans reoccupied the area. The surprise invasion, turned out to be a military disaster for the Vietcong, but a huge strategic victory because of its effect on American resolve.

But at the time, all of this was irrelevant to people like Loan. It was an ugly, shocking assault. The execution of the prisoner was a reprisal. It was an ugly thing to be sure, but wars, civil wars especially, are profoundly ugly things.

Adams wrote in Time magazine, "The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon 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 soldiers?'"

The picture that Adams took, the picture that CNN thinks is such an atrocious and ignoble deed, ruined Loan's life. More to the point, it didn't expand on "our right to know." It didn't answer questions, or give us the story. It deceived. It gave no context. It confirmed the biases of the anti-war journalists, and they used it to further their agenda.

Loan fled Vietnam during the fall of Saigon for the US. He eventually moved to Burke, Virginia. He tried to open a restaurant in Northern Virginia, but when the identity of its owner became known, it closed down. Protestors circled the establishment venting their fashionable, safe, outrage.

The two men stayed in touch, and Adams tried to apologize many times.

"He was very sick, you know, he had cancer for a while," he told NPR. "And I talked to him on the phone and I wanted to try to do something, explaining everything and how the photograph destroyed his life and he just wanted to try to forget it. He said let it go. And I just didn't want him to go out this way."

General Loan died a year and a month ago. He left a wife and five kids. Most of the obituaries were, like the photograph that ruined his life, two dimensional and unforgiving. Adams sent flowers with a card that read, "I'm sorry. There are tears in my eyes."

Such a compelling and complicated story so rich in everything involving conflict, influence, power, duty, brotherhood, justice, honor...and on...and on.

The Times does not want to dwell. Compare the above with their consideration of that iconic image and it's profound entanglements:

"Directed by Susan Morgan Cooper, the movie abounds with striking pictures from Mr. Adams’s long career (he died in 2004), but it keeps coming back to the one he snapped on Feb. 1, 1968, in Saigon: a photograph of a Vietcong prisoner being executed on the street, immortalized during the split second before the bullet exited his skull. One of the most famous images of the 20th century, it was a photo that changed Mr. Adams’s life and possibly the course of the Vietnam War. The strongest material in “An Unlikely Weapon” contemplates the import of that shot, and of photojournalism itself, on the events of its time. The rest charts Mr. Adams’s subsequent career, from duck hunting with Fidel Castro to oceanfront sessions with Penthouse centerfolds, with perfunctory admiration. "

The New York Times needs to heed it's own simple narrative at all times. It needs even more for us to be unaware of any other narratives. This perfectly encapsulates their technique. Mention little, so little you encourage your very customer to continue onward without consideration. Leave enough, however, for you to argue that the notion was in the text if confronted.

Don't trust their coverage of Mexico, nor anything connected. Not that any sane person would trust any of their coverage.

By the way, what was that weapon General Nguyen used? Was that a J frame?