EDDIE ADAMS, combat journalist, achieved international fame for his photo of the instant when a South Vietnamese general fired a bullet into the head of a Vietcong prisoner in an impromptu execution on the streets of Saigon. The shocking picture won him a Pulitzer Prize, became an enduring symbol of the brutality of the Vietnam War — and haunted him for the rest of his life.
It was February 1, 1968, the second day of the Tet offensive. Adams, working for Associated Press, saw police walking out of a building with a bound prisoner. “All of a sudden, out of nowhere, comes General (Nguyen Ngoc) Loan, the national police chief. I thought he was going to threaten the prisoner. So as quick as he brought his pistol up, I took a picture. But it turned out he shot him.”
The general, his sleeves rolled up, approached his victim and said nothing. Then, standing at arm’s length, holding a snub-nosed pistol, he pressed the trigger and the bullet entered the man’s skull at the exact moment that Adams pressed his shutter button.
The black and white picture, published on newspaper front pages around the world, helped to inflame the growing opposition to the Vietnam War which two months later brought about the decision by President Johnson not to seek re-election. The other Vietnam War picture of similar impact was taken later by Nick Ut of a terrified, naked girl fleeing her napalmed village.
Adams, in taking his picture, later told Parade magazine: “I had destroyed Loan’s life. For General Loan had become a man condemned both in his own country and in America because he had killed an enemy in war. People do this all the time in war, but rarely is there a photographer there to record the act.”
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Adams accepted Loan’s explanation that the man he shot was a Vietcong captain who had murdered several civilians. But he could not look at the picture again for years. “We don’t use it in my shows, we don’t use it anywhere,” he said.
Years later, when Loan, who lost a leg during the war, was running a pizza parlour near Washington DC, Adams visited him. He was told by Loan: “You were doing your job, and I was doing mine.”
Despite efforts to deport him, Loan lived out his life in the US, and died in 1998. “Photographs, you know, they’re half-truths,” Adams said a day after Loan’s death.
Adams was much more proud of other Vietnam photos he shot, including a series of Vietnamese refugees in a 30 ft boat that reached Thailand only to be towed back to sea by Thai Marines. The pictures were presented to Congress and helped to persuade President Carter to admit 179,000 boat people to the United States.
“I’d rather have won the Pulitzer for something like that,” Adams told the Washington Post. “I did some good and nobody got hurt.”
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As a photojournalist Adams covered 13 wars, from Vietnam to the Gulf. He earned 500 awards, including the Robert Capa Award and three George Polk Memorial Awards. Yet Adams took no joy in the one picture that overshadowed his career.
Adams was born in 1933 in New Kensington, Pennsylvania. While at high school he began photographing local events and weddings. He was a combat photographer while serving in the Marine Corps during the Korean War. He later worked on newspapers in Philadelphia and then spent a decade with Associated Press, including several assignments in Vietnam. He also worked for Time and Life magazines from his home in Greenwich Village, New York. Among his black-and-white portraits were those of Presidents Nixon and George W. Bush, Pope John Paul II, Fidel Castro and Mikhail Gorbachev. In 1988 he founded Barnstorm, a workshop for tutoring novice photographers.
In May he was found to be suffering from the neurological disorder Lou Gehrig’s disease, but continued to photograph until two months ago.
He is survived by two wives from previous marriages and four children.
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Eddie Adams, photojournalist, was born on June 12, 1933. He died on September 19, 2004, aged 71.