The photograph of a South Vietnamese general executing a young Viet Cong fighter during the Tet Offensive shocked the world. Details that didn't make the papers paint a different story.
It was one of the most iconic photos of the Vietnam War. At the height of the 1968 Tet Offensive, while prisoners were being rounded up in Saigon, General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan casually strolls over to a young man and shoots him in the temple.
The photo, taken with one-in-a-million perfect timing as the bullet entered the man’s head, won Eddie Adams the Pulitzer Prize and has been reproduced countless times as an example of the brutality of war, and especially of the American war effort in Vietnam.
However, what most people at the time, and even now, don’t know about the events leading up to the “Saigon Execution” photo paint a somewhat different picture from what the public got at first glance.
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