Nguyen Ngoc Loan

Nguyen Ngoc Loan shot a prisoner in a Saigon street in front of a camera, and the photograph did more to change American opinion of the war than any argument made against it. He was a fighter pilot by training, rose to command the national police of South Vietnam, and was known for going into street fighting himself rather than directing it. On 1 February 1968, during the Tet Offensive, a captured Viet Cong officer named Nguyen Van Lem was brought to him; Loan drew his revolver and shot him in the head at close range. Eddie Adams of the Associated Press photographed the instant of the shot, and an NBC cameraman filmed it. The photograph won a Pulitzer Prize and became one of the images by which the war is remembered. Loan said the man had been caught in civilian clothes near the bodies of a police officer's family, and Adams later wrote that the picture had told only half the truth, that photographs lie by leaving out what is outside the frame, and that he regretted the damage it did to Loan personally. Loan was badly wounded in May 1968 and lost a leg. He was evacuated in 1975 and opened a pizza restaurant in Virginia; an attempt to deport him as an undesirable was dropped, and he closed the business in 1991 after being publicly identified. Adams sent a message of apology when he was dying of cancer. The episode is used in journalism teaching as the standard case of an image that is accurate and misleading at once.

• Lived: 1930 CE – 1998 CE
• Nationality: South Vietnamese
• Roles: military