"Basic Wedge" wrote in message
news:YOK3d.479176$gE.270681@pd7tw3no...
I'm surprised to hear all this. I always figured that was an incredible
photo - perfectly freezing the decisive moment, as it did. You have to
imagine Eddie Adams would have anticipated the ramifications of that
photo, when he took it from negative to print. He won a Pulitzer Prize for
it, and someone had to have submitted it.

Rob

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According to the story line in the press release, "Drawn by gunfire, Adams
and an NBC film crew watched South Vietnamese soldiers bring a handcuffed
Viet Cong captive to a street corner where they assumed he would be
interrogated." As Adams was about to take a picture of the captive, "South
Vietnam's police chief, Lt.Col. Naguyen Ngoc Loan, strode up, wordlessly
drew a pistol and shot the man in the head." Then the story line goes on to
tell Loan shot the captive because he had just murdered an entire family. Of
Loan's actions, Adams said, "I don't say what he did was right, but he was
fighting a war and he was up against some pretty bad people." Through the
years "Adams found himself so defined ---- and haunted ---- by the picture
that he would not display it at his studio." When speaking of Loan, he
considered Loan to be a hero. Loan died in 1998 at his home in Virginia.

nick

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Apparently Eddie Adams wasn't very proud that he took the picture of the
Viet Cong captive being shot by Police Chief Lt. Colonel Nguyen Ngoc
Loan. He never displayed the picture in his studio and often refused to
talk about the picture. He once said, "Sometimes a picture can be
misleading because it doesn't tell the whole story." He often felt he
"unfairly maligned Loan" and in later years, the picture began to haunt
him. Adams was acquainted with Loan and considered "Loan a hero, given
the circumstances of the time."

What the picture didn't show was that the handcuffed Viet being shot by
Loan was a Viet Cong Captain who a couple of hours earlier had
"personally murdered the entire family of Loan's closest aid, moments
before he was captured." The world pitied the murder and condemned the
grief stricken Loan, and Adams was sorry he took the picture.

(Ref: Associated Press news release)

nick