after Nguyen Ngoc shot Van Lem in the head he walked over to the reporters and told them that

Saigon execution: after Nguyen Ngoc shot Van Lem in the head he walked over to the reporters and told them that,


“These guys kill a lot of our people, and I think Buddha will forgive me”.

Saigon execution: Murder of a Vietcong by Saigon Police Chief, 1968

After Nguyen Ngoc Loan raised his sidearm and shot Vietcong operative Nguyen Van Lem in the head he walked over to the reporters and told them that:

 “These guys kill a lot of our people, and I think Buddha will forgive me”.

Captured on NBC TV cameras and by AP photographer Eddie Adams, the picture and film footage flashed around the world and quickly became a symbol of the Vietnam War’s brutality.

Eddie Adams’ picture was especially striking, as the moment frozen is one almost at the instant of death. 

Taken a split second after the trigger was pulled, Lem’s final expression is one of pain as the bullet rips through his head.

A closer look at the photo actually reveals the bullet exiting his skull. The gif from the execution (graphic images!).

“Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world”, AP photojournalist Eddie Adams once wrote. 


A fitting quote for Adams, because his 1968 photograph of an officer shooting a handcuffed prisoner in the head at point-blank range not only earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 1969 but also went a long way toward souring Americans’ attitudes about the Vietnam War.


For all the image’s political impact, though, the situation wasn’t as black-and-white as it’s rendered. What Adams’ photograph doesn’t reveal is that the man being shot (named Nguyen Van Lem) was the captain of a Vietcong “revenge squad” that had executed dozens of unarmed civilians earlier the same day.


Regardless, it instantly became an icon of the war’s savagery and made the official pulling the trigger – General Nguyen Ngoc Loan – its iconic villain.


South Vietnamese sources said that Lém commanded a Vietcong death squad, which on that day had targeted South Vietnamese National Police officers, or in their stead, the police officers’ families.


Corroborating this, Lém was captured at the site of a mass grave that included the bodies of at least seven police family members.


Photographer Adams confirmed the South Vietnamese account, although he was only present for the execution.


 Lém was brought to Loan who questioned him briefly then using his personal .38 revolver, executed Lém with a single shot in the head.


Photographer said he had a lot of sympathy for the shooter and wished he had never published the picture.


 He felt so bad for Loan that he apologized for having taken the photo at all, admitting, “The general killed the Vietcong; I killed the general with my camera”. Adams wrote in Time in 1998:


Two people died in that photograph: the recipient of the bullet and General Nguyen Ngoc Loan. The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera.


 Still, photographs are the most powerful weapons 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 people?’…


This picture really messed up his life. He never blamed me. He told me if I hadn’t taken the picture, someone else would have, but I’ve felt bad for him and his family for a long time… I sent flowers when I heard that he had died and wrote, “I’m sorry. There are tears in my eyes”.


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