i recently read about the photographer who took the famous picture of the vietnamese officer executing the suspected vietcong soldier on the street-but i swear i saw a film of the same thing and it freezed the frame so you saw the exact moment the guy was shot-so was this really a photograph? or a frame from a film movie camera?
The photographer at the scene was Eddie Adams, who worked for the AP at the time.
There was also an NBC cameraman there named Vo Suu at the scene.
This is from Stanley Karnow’s “Vietnam: A History”, page 529.
It’s a photo.
Taken by Eddie Adams, an AP photographer, it was a case of being in the right place at the right time. It was supposed to be a photo of the solider being taken into custody. At the last second, Nguyen Ngoc Loan, Saigon’s Police Chief stepped into the frame and shot the soldier with his .38. Eddie got the photo, and it was published.
I forget the speed, but it was a normal 35mm he was using that day.
The photo isn’t for those with low tolerance for such things, as it is a shot of the soldier being shot. But these are the links. Beware!
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~buschert/PHL385S/adams.html
or this one, midway down the page.
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/vietnam/photoessay.htm
That do?
There is also a film. It was shown during the multi-part LBJ biography on PBS a few years ago. That clip is probably available somewhere on the Net.
The sequence of the “execution” is also shown in the documentary “Hearts and Minds”.
There was an article in the Washington Post six or eight years ago about the incident that stated that the policeman was living in Northern Virginia, running a restaurant, I believe.
This photo is sometimes cited as contributing to the (growing) anti-war sentiment in the States. It was viewed as illustrating in a most graphic manner, the brutality, the arbitrariness, and the cruelty of The Vietnam War. More specifically, some saw it as evidence of these same traits manifest in the US’ allies - the South Vietnamese.
What is less well known is that the executioner’s godchildren had just had their throats slit. The man being executed, a Viet Cong guerilla, had been captured at the scene of their murder*.
The executioner, Ngoc Loan, died of cancer in 1998.
[sub]*I believe this account may also be from Karnow, but I am not certain.
Karnow does state the Vietnamese police chief was upset because members of his family had been killed and the man shot was considered one of the perpetrators.