Eddie Adams
NPR ran a story this morning on Adams photograph of the VC “guerilla” (why not soldier?) being shot. I was struck by Adams’ sincerity about the photojournalists’ role.
“Photographs, you know, they’re half-truths … that’s only one side….” Adams said. “He was fighting our war, not their war, our war, and … all the blame is on this guy.”
Loan [the shooter] moved to the United States after fleeing South Vietnam in 1975. Shortly before Loan’s death in 1998, Adams said he spoke with the former officer. “He was very sick, you know, he had cancer for a while,” Adams said. “And I talked to him on the phone and I wanted to try to do something, explaining everything and how the photograph destroyed his life and he just wanted to try to forget it. He said, ‘Let it go.’ And I just didn’t want him to go out this way.”
It seems Adams is left more with a sense of guilt than Loan who was likely acting as any soldier might, perhaps because Adams’ own country was integral to this war or perhaps because he could not manage to think away the contradiction of a superb photograph of unspeakable horror.
The photograph was celebrated at the time, but I doubt any such one would make the rounds in today’s Iraq, which is not to say, of course, that it these unspeakable horrors do not continue to happen.