Eddie Adams: "I'm sorry. There Are Tears in My Eyes "

After the photo was seen around the world, the AP assigned Adams to hang out with General Loan. He discovered that Loan was a beloved hero in Vietnam, to his troops and the citizens. “He was fighting our war, not their war, our war, and every — all the blame is on this guy,” Adams told NPR (in what may have been the most surprisingly courageous NPR interview I’ve ever heard). Adams learned that Loan fought for the construction of hospitals in South Vietnam and unlike the popular myths, demonstrated the fact that at least some South Vietnamese soldiers really did want to fight for their country and way of life.

Just moments before that photo had been taken, several of his men had been gunned down. One of his soldiers had been at home, along with the man’s wife and children. The Vietcong had attacked during the holiday of Tet, which had been agreed upon as a time for a truce. As it turned out, many of the victims of the NC and North Vietnamese were defenseless. Some three thousand of them were discovered in a mass grave outside of Hue after the Americans reoccupied the area. The surprise invasion, turned out to be a military disaster for the Vietcong, but a huge strategic victory because of its effect on American resolve. But at the time, all of this was irrelevant to people like Loan. It was an ugly, shocking assault. The execution of the prisoner was a reprisal. It was an ugly thing to be sure, but wars, civil wars especially, are profoundly ugly things. Adams wrote in Time magazine, “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?’” The picture that Adams took, the picture that CNN thinks is such an atrocious and ignoble deed, ruined Loan’s life. More to the point, it didn’t expand on “our right to know.” It didn’t answer questions, or give us the story. It deceived. It gave no context. It confirmed the biases of the anti-war journalists, and they used it to further their agenda. Loan fled Vietnam during the fall of Saigon for the US. He eventually moved to Burke, Virginia. He tried to open a restaurant in Northern Virginia, but when the identity of its owner became known, it closed down. Protestors circled the establishment venting their fashionable, safe, outrage. The two men stayed in touch, and Adams tried to apologize many times. “He was very sick, you know, he had cancer for a while,” he told NPR. “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.” General Loan died a year and a month ago. He left a wife and five kids. Most of the obituaries were, like the photograph that ruined his life, two dimensional and unforgiving.

Adams sent flowers with a card that read, “I’m sorry. There are tears in my eyes.”

Source: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/204511/there-are-tears-my-eyes-jonah-Goldberg