The Hidden Truths Within A Picture
By Chris Gibbons – Originally published in the Philadelphia Inquirer, December, 2014
“That wasn’t right! My father yelled as his booming voice filled our living room. “You can’t do that to people!”, he shouted at the TV.
“Jesus”, I thought to myself. “What the heck is up with Dad?” It was sometime in the early 1980’s, and a news program had just shown a video of an infamous incident that occurred years earlier, during the Vietnam War.
It’s a chilling video to watch. A North Viet Cong prisoner is standing along a roadside with his hands tied behind his back. A South Vietnamese officer then quickly positions himself next to him, raises his pistol, and fires a point-blank shot to the prisoner’s head. His lifeless body crumples to the ground.
“He’s a God-damned son of a b****! That wasn’t right.” my Dad said again. I was somewhat stunned by his angry reaction. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought that he knew the man who was shot. I looked at Dad’s hands, and noticed that they were slightly trembling.
2014 marks the 45th anniversary of the awarding of a Pulitzer Prize for a photo taken of one of the most infamous incidents of the Vietnam War as South Vietnamese general Nguyen Ngoc Loan executed Viet Cong officer Nguyen Van Lem. AP photographer Eddie Adams and an NBC cameraman filmed the execution, and Adams’ still picture of the incident soon appeared on the front pages of newspapers and evening news telecasts across the U.S. The picture outraged the American public, and it seemed to galvanize the growing anti-war sentiment. The picture soon became a symbol of the apparent brutality of the U.S. supported South Vietnamese regime. In 1969, Adams won the Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography.
But the picture didn’t tell the whole story, and Adams later came to regret the damage that it did to Loan. The Viet Cong prisoner who he shot was reportedly part of a “death-squad” that targeted the families of South Vietnamese policemen. According to witnesses, the prisoner was captured near a ditch where 34 bound and shot bodies of policemen and their families were found. Adams later said, “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?” Adams later apologized to Loan and his family.
General Loan eventually escaped Vietnam, and opened a pizza restaurant in a Virginia suburb. Unfortunately, he couldn’t escape his past. Word got out to an angry public of who he was. Someone once wrote an ominous message on the restaurant’s walls, “We Know Who You Are F***er.” Loan eventually had to close the restaurant because of the negative publicity. He died of cancer in 1998, leaving a wife and five children. Adams sent a note to the family that read: “I’m sorry. There are tears in my eyes.”
As for my Dad’s reaction that day, I assumed that, like so many Americans at that time, the execution in Saigon was the final straw. The Vietnam War had once sharply divided the nation, but by the late 1960’s even its staunchest supporters had seen enough. I concluded that my Dad finally realized this as well, and seeing the video again that day must’ve brought back those bitter feelings of anger and betrayal. I quickly forgot about the incident, and never asked my father about it.
It wasn’t until many years later that I finally came to understand the hidden truths behind the picture, not only the story of general Loan, but my Dad’s story as well. We had a quiet moment alone in 2008 on the 55th anniversary of the end of the Korean War, and I asked him if he could tell me of his worst experience during the war. He said it would be too difficult for him to tell me the worst, but there was one incident that still haunted him. Shortly after his company had set up a defensive perimeter around their base in South Korea, two frightened and dirty Chinese prisoners were brought before a company sergeant. This sergeant was a WW II veteran who my father and the other young soldiers in his company admired and looked up to. “We were very young, and often scared,” my Dad told me. “But he helped us get through some of the toughest times during the war.”
The sergeant needed to understand how these two Chinese soldiers had gotten through so he could fix the weakness in their perimeter. If they escaped and revealed the weakness to the enemy, the lives of his men could be at risk. “Ask them how they got through!”, he barked to the interpreter. The prisoners replied that they didn’t “get through”, but were separated from their outfit, and simply hid in covered fox-holes when the Americans moved into the area. The American soldiers unknowingly piled the dirt and barbed wire right on top of them, and the prisoners simply climbed out later and surrendered. “I don’t believe them. Ask them again!” shouted the sergeant, as he raised his rifle and pointed it at the head of one of the prisoners. My father believed the prisoners and was shaken by the horrible scenario that was now being played out in front of him and his fellow soldiers. Again, the frightened prisoners told the same story.
The sharp sounds of gunshots echoed across the Korean sky, as two lifeless bodies crumpled to the ground.
“It wasn’t right”, my Dad said softly as he remembered the incident and vacantly stared ahead. I looked down and noticed that his hands were slightly trembling.
(Postscript: I originally wrote this story in 2008. I sent a copy to my Dad prior to publication to ensure that my facts were correct. After reading it, he immediately called me and told me that he didn’t want it published because one of the soldiers who witnessed the incident with him was severely traumatized by it. “He was never the same again, he had a lot of issues from it,” my Dad said. He told me that even after they returned home, his friend continued to struggle and the remainder of his life was difficult. My Dad was concerned that seeing the story in the newspaper might adversely affect his friend’s already fragile psyche.
My Dad passed away earlier this year, and before he died I asked him if I could ever publish the story. He didn’t mention his friend this time, possibly because he had passed away. My Dad simply responded, “When I’m long gone.” It was then that I knew that the picture and its hidden truths would now haunt me as well, as I realized that there were actually two young soldiers who witnessed the execution that day who were never the same again.)
Chris Gibbons (gibbonscg@aol.com) is a Philadelphia writer. gibbonscg@aol.com