Knowing What We Know by Simon Winchester

Author:Simon Winchester
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Would that the two other images, both taken by journalists, had such nobility. The first was also taken in 1968, on February 1, during one of the events that marked the year as unusually eventful, the Tet Offensive, which preceded the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, the unveiling of the Boeing 747, the Paris riots—and the launch, lunar orbit, and safe return of Apollo 8. On that winter’s day in a frazzled and unsettled Saigon, a thirty-six-year-old Vietnamese civilian named Nguyễn Văn Lém was arrested by a US Marine at a checkpoint close to a city-center pagoda and was found to have a pistol on him. He was immediately suspected of belonging to the Viet Cong, a suspicion seemingly confirmed when it became known that a short while before a Viet Cong soldier alleged to be Lém had killed a South Vietnamese army colonel, his wife, six of his children, and his octogenarian mother—although some believe the attribution of those killings to Lém was a later fabrication. In any case, he was promptly marched away, his arms handcuffed behind him, and taken to the local commander, a one-star police general named Nguyễn Ngọc Loan.

The general was in no mood for niceties. A small crowd gathered outside the temple where, it was assumed, the general would begin a short and sharp interrogation of the suspect, who stood frightened and bewildered, dressed in jeans and a plaid shirt, in the dusty center of the roadway. In the crowd were two photojournalists, a film cameraman working for NBC News and a Pennsylvania-born still photographer and former marine named Eddie Adams, who was at the time one year younger than the handcuffed Lém and was working for the Associated Press news agency. He raised his camera to watch for what he expected would be an angry exchange between prisoner and police officer.

What he then saw, and what he captured on a single frame of his 35mm black-and-white film, would become one the most ill-starred images from the Vietnam war. General Loan, his back to the camera, his flak jacket stained, his left arm hanging loose by his side, raised his right arm holding his .38 Smith & Wesson snub-nosed Bodyguard pistol, pointed it at Lém’s right temple, held the muzzle slightly upward, and when he was just inches away, pulled the trigger. At exactly that moment, Adams pressed his shutter release, and the resulting picture showed in cold clinical detail the very moment of a summary execution. In the center of the frame, the general’s arm is tense, the sinews taut with the effort of raising the gun and squeezing its trigger. On the right, the prisoner’s head and mop of black hair are jarred to the right by the impact of the bullet, and Lém’s expression is contorted by the sudden intense pain, a representation of the very final moment of his life. Two other people are in the image: a helmeted soldier on the far left, and a passing officer in peaked cap on the right.

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