Saigon, South Vietnam was a chaotic and bloody place in the winter of 1968. On January 30, North Vietnamese forces struck suddenly and with shocking force at targets throughout the South, taking the South Vietnamese and their American allies by surprise and turning the tide of a war that President Lyndon Johnson had assured his people they were close to winning. As the reeling South Vietnamese army worked to re-establish order in their capital, an American photographer captured an image that would come to symbolize the brutality of the conflict.
The Tet Offensive directly countered the American narrative that the North was incapable of mobilizing in large numbers and was on the retreat. Conventional and guerrilla warriors struck targets and areas that had been considered to be safely under U.S./Southern control. As the Viet Cong overran Saigon in the first hours of the Tet Offensive, a fighter named Nguyễn Văn Lém was part of a death squad that targeted the National Police and their families. According to the South Vietnamese military, Lém’s squad had just killed 34 people associated with the police, at least 24 of whom were civilians, when he was captured on February 1st.
Lém, who had worn civilian clothes as he carried out his alleged war crimes, was brought to Brigadier General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan. Associated Press photographer Eddie Adams saw the prisoner being escorted to the general and decided to take a few pictures. “I prepared to make that picture—the threat, the interrogation,” Adams recalled. “But it didn’t happen. The man just pulled a pistol out of his holster, raised it to the VC’s head and shot him in the temple.”
Adams captured the exact moment when the bullet from Loan’s Smith & Wesson entered Lém’s head at point-blank range. The image, which very much appeared to depict the summary execution of an unarmed civilian by a South Vietnamese military official, ran in newspapers around the world, causing a sensation. The story behind the photo was much more complex, but the shot came to encapsulate Americans’ darkest fears about the war: that it was a haphazard, amoral bloodletting in which the United States’ cruelty rivaled that of its enemies.
Indeed, while Lém was not the innocent victim he appeared to be, it was later concluded that his execution had been a war crime. It was far from the only one committed by American and South Vietnamese forces—just a few months later, on March 16, American troops killed somewhere between 347 and 504 civilians in what came to be known as the My Lai Massacre. “Saigon Execution,” as Adams titled his photo, became a symbol of all that was wrong with American involvement in the war and won the Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography for 1969. Four years later, another AP photographer would win the prize for a similar photo, “Terror of War,” which depicted terrified children fleeing after the South Vietnamese air force mistakenly attacked their village with napalm.
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Yeah, stuff like this happens in war. Maybe we shouldn’t show the pictures to the womenfolk.
I remember watching that on the news that night……Dad turned the television off.
Mine too.
When Tel Avi(v)sion was great.
Now, let me try a bit of literary license with this, if we are still allowed to do so in the USSA? Because, in order to believe half of what has happened in our country this past year, the suspension of disbelief has swept over rational thinking like a tidal wave. So, here’s my [updated] version of the incident for posterity:
Indeed, while [George Floyd] was not the innocent victim [MSM portrayed him to be], it was later concluded that his execution had been [an example of police brutality against blacks]. It was far from the only one committed by [white supremacist police forces]—… at this point, I’ve given up because it is so obvious we’ve been lied to again and again and again by these freaks we elect to office. …
[and those evil police forces, along with all the other Trump-supporters, over the next few months, killed enough blacks were to warrant giving BLM its very own Nobel Peace Prize and committing genocide on almost half of the country.]
I’m fairly sure hyperbole has been declared illegal. Which is why I’m being serious.
Even the BBC can still sometimes post non-tainted articles these days
— https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42864421
The brutality of war. There is very little that can be done to spare innocent lives being lost, outside of never going to war. Even if you don’t go to war, the enemy is not going to give you a pass and innocent people will lose their lives. Its a no win situation and tough questions need to be asked and answered.
The evil scumbag dressed in civilian clothing going about murdering others was portrayed as an innocent by the media. Always, the communists portray themselves as the victims while bludgeoning the real victims to death. Expect the propaganda to be escalated in the coming months and even to the point of internet censorship when ICANN starts banning certain ‘hateful’ conservative or sites critical of the communists. Its gonna get worse… Its a war…
In the final analysis, it appears that about 5,000 people were murdered; about 3,000 bodies were found and about 2000 of those were identified. The rest were never found. 4,062 of the victims were eventually identified, and about another 1,000 disappeared into history without a trace.
Atrocities are a part of war. Every nation commits them. However, there is something decidedly perverse about elevating the My Lai story to a heightened level while ignoring the massacre in Tet, which was at least ten times as large. If My Lai was a massacre (and it certainly was), then Tet was a mega-massacre. Yet the media ignored it and so have historians.
https://blog.vvfh.org/
https://blog.vvfh.org/2015/01/the-hue-massacre-a-study-of-communist-policies-and-tactics-in-vietnam/
I wonder –What was the point? What will be the point when it comes here? …and it is coming.
Wasn’t it something about dominoes?
I read a chapter in a War College text book about oil companies technical reasons that oil was in the area of Indo-China; it had been pumped from some island for years (Bruni?) and then for Japan during WWII. TPTB wanted to assure the US held as much of that area as possible so Dominoes, sea lanes, Democracy, religion, trade, history etc, were all good arguments included for Officers to study.
i have a buddy who was an army intel man in vietnam–
they never used torture themselves but when they were interrogating a captured vc or suspected spy who would not cooperate they turned them over to the south viets to do the questioning–
Lem had murdered members of the general’s family. To the media, justice is a war crime.
He’s being vaccinated is all.