Execution of a Viet Cong Guerrilla 1968
With North Vietnams Tet Offensive beginning, Nguyen Ngoc Loan, South Vietnams national police chief, was doing all he could to keep Viet Cong guerrillas from Saigon. As Loan executed a prisoner who was said to be a Viet Cong captain, AP photographer Eddie Adams opened the shutter. Adams won a Pulitzer Prize for a picture that, as much as any, turned public opinion against the war. Adams felt that many misinterpreted the scene, and when told in 1998 that the immigrant Loan had died of cancer at his home in Burke, Va., he said, The guy was a hero. America should be crying. I just hate to see him go this way, without people knowing anything about him.
South of the DMZ 1966
Contrary to the constraints that were put upon the press in subsequent conflicts, and even to the embedded program used in the recent Iraqi war, correspondents and photographers in Vietnam could, as Walter Cronkite wrote in LIFE, accompany troops to wherever they could hitch a ride, and there was no censorship . . . That systemor lack of onekept the American public well informed of our soldiers problems, their setbacks and their heroism. Reaching Out is a quintessential example of the powerful imagery that came out of Vietnam. The color photographs of tormented Vietnamese villagers and wounded American conscripts that Larry Burrows took and LIFE published, starting in 1962, certainly fortified the outcry against the American presence in Vietnam, Susan Sontag wrote in her essay Looking at War, in the December 9, 2002, New Yorker. Burrows was the first important photographer to do a whole war in coloranother gain in verisimilitude and shock. Burrows was killed when the helicopter he was riding in was shot down over Laos in 1971.
