Nguyen Ngoc Loan

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General Nguyen Ngoc Loan (December 11 1930 [1] – July 14 1998) was the Republic of Vietnam's Chief of National Police.

[edit] Biography

Nguyen Ngoc Loan was a former brigadier general of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam.

Nguyen summarily executed Nguyen Van Lem, a Viet Cong prisoner, in front of an NBC cameraman and Associated Press photographer Eddie Adams on February 1, 1968. The photo (captioned "General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner in Saigon") and film would become two of the most famous images in journalism and started to change the American public's views on their involvement in the Vietnam War.

Nguyen Van Lem was captured, his hands bound and was brought in front of the journalists. General Nguyen pulled out his revolver and calmly executed the prisoner with a single shot to the right temple. Nguyen claimed that this was justified because the prisoner had been the captain of an NLF platoon that (reportedly) had just executed the wives, children and relatives of several South Vietnamese police officers. Thirty-four bound and murdered civilians were found in one ditch.

During the fall of Saigon, Nguyen left Vietnam in 1975. He moved to Virginia and opened a pizza restaurant, but he had to give it up after his past had been disclosed to the public in 1991, with one patron writing "we know who you are" on a door in his restaurant. He died of cancer on July 14 1998 in Burke, Virginia, a Washington, D.C. suburb.

He was married to Chinh Mai, with whom he had five children.

[edit] Prisoner Execution

Eddie Adams's Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing Nguyen Van Lem, a Viet Cong officer.

General Nguyen Ngoc Loan Executing a Viet Cong Prisoner in Saigon is a photograph taken by Eddie Adams on February 1 1968 showing South Vietnamese National Police Chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing Viet Cong officer Nguyen Van Lem in Saigon during the Tet Offensive. The event was also captured by NBC News film cameras, but Adams' photograph remains the defining image.

Lem commanded a Viet Cong assassination and murder platoon, which on that day had targeted South Vietnamese National Police officers, or in their stead, the police officers' families; Lem was captured near the site of a ditch holding as many as thirty-four bound and shot bodies of police and their relatives, some of whom were the families of General Loan's deputy and close friend. (In some accounts, the deputy was a victim as well; in others, the number of murdered relatives were as few as six.) Lem's widow confirmed that her husband was a member of the Viet Cong and she did not see him after the Tet Offensive began.

Though some critics still claim Nguyen Ngoc Loan's action violated the Geneva Conventions for treatment of prisoners of war (Nguyen Van Lem had not been wearing a uniform nor fighting enemy soldiers in the alleged commission of war crimes), the rights of POW status were accorded to Viet Cong only if seized during military operations. Those designated as guerrillas were subject only to the laws of the South Vietnamese government.

During the Tet Offensive General Nguyen and his police kept Saigon out of the Viet Cong's control until the end of the war. During the defense of Saigon, Nguyen diverted his troops from the American Embassy to the Presidential Palace, an act for which Americans in Vietnam never forgave him.

The photo won Adams the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for spot news photography, though he was later said to have regretted the impact it had. The image became an anti-war icon. Concerning General Nguyen and his famous photograph, Eddie Adams later wrote in Time:

The general killed the Viet Cong; 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 and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American soldiers?'

How do you know you wouldn't have pulled the trigger yourself?

Eddie Adams later apologized in person to General Nguyen and his family for the damage it did to his reputation. When General Nguyen died, Adams praised him as a hero of a just cause:

The guy was a hero. America should be crying. I just hate to see him go this way, without people knowing anything about him.<ref>Image Canon - Historic Images</ref>