The execution of Nguyễn Văn Lém

The instant this photo was taken, the man on the right was already dead. A bullet ripped through his brain. Yet, the photographer captured the scene before his legs gave out and the corpse slumped in a pool of blood. His eyes are still open, his mouth twisted in a grimace of disgust, his hair as if blown by a light breeze, actually beaten by the violence of the bullet. We can’t see the executioner’s face, but we can guess he’s emotionless. His skinny arm holds the gun as if it had no weight, as if it were a toy. He does not seem to be holding a weapon he has just fired.

The picture is part of a sequence that the Associated Press photographer Eddie Adams took in Saigon during the Tet Offensive, on February 1, 1968. The cold-blooded execution of a man in civilian clothes, by a soldier in uniform, drastically shaped public opinion and fueled the movement against the Vietnam War. But as Adams later stated, “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”.

Between January 29 and 30, 1968, taking advantage of the chaos for the Tet, the Vietnamese New Year celebration, thousands Viet Cong entered Saigon one by one: on foot, by bicycle, by bus, in stolen trucks. They usually wore simple shoes, suitable for running in the forest. For this occasion, they had bought clean clothes and fashionable footwear. To recognize each other, they had a red bow tied to their left arm. An invisible, silent army with a red bow tied to their left arm. They had collected their weapons while fireworks were shot, then attacked the government building, the police headquarters, the barracks, the prisons, the radio. They failed almost everywhere. Many of them were only peasants. They had never seen a city and weapons before. But there were also trained groups.

The man on the right in the photo, the dead man, is not a civilian. His name was Nguyễn Văn Lém, a Viet Cong officer also known as Bảy Lốp. He was in charge of a death squad that was tasked to attack Vietnamese officers and their families. Shortly before his arrest, he had slaughtered Lieutenant Colonel Nguyen Tuan, his wife, his six children, and his 80-year-old mother. When the media reported this story, part of the American public became convinced that — after all — the man in uniform hadn’t done all that badly to pull the trigger.

The man in uniform is no ordinary soldier, either. He is Nguyễn Ngọc Loan, a general in the South Vietnamese Army and head of the National Police. In her book Nothing, and so be it, Italian war reporter and writer Oriana Fallaci described him as the ugliest man she had ever seen, a lover of roses and piano player. During the war, he violated the Geneva Convention several times but was never prosecuted. By contrast, President Jimmy Carter personally intervened in his defense, and the letter of a reader to the New York Times, in 1978, summarizes well the thought of part of the American public opinion at the end of the war. Loan, the reader argued, had acted under the protection of martial law, so he had every right to do what he had done.

Even Eddie Adams, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his photo in 1969, years later declared that the image depicts the death of two people: the executed Viet Cong and General Loan, a man admired by his people and troops. Sure, he had made a mistake, but what would another officer do if an enemy without a uniform killed his soldiers one by one?

General Loan spent the last years of his life in Burke, Virginia, near Washington, where he had opened a pizzeria with his wife. But not everyone had forgotten. Someone wrote in the bathroom of his diner, “We know who you are, as***le.”

To know more:

• Jason Hudson. «What You Don’t Know About This Photograph Has the Power To Change Opinions». Fstoppers, April 2016.
• Eddie Adams. «Eulogy». Time, June 24 2001.
• «Revisionism and General Loan». The New York Times, December 5 1978.
• Mike Kelly. «How a Bogota Photographer Took One of the Vietnam War’s Most Famous Photos». NorthJersey.
• Oriana Fallaci. Nothing and so be it. Doubleday, 1972.