Vietnam through the Media
One of the first images to startle Americans about the South Vietnamese government
supported by the United States was the 1963 photo of a Buddhist monk burning himself
to death in a Saigon intersection to protest President Diem's oppression of the
majority Buddhist population. The photograph of the burning monk won Malcolm
Browne a Pulitzer Prize. Because of copyright restrictions on the photo, we instead look
at a video of the burning.
Caution: This video is very disturbing. [5:19]
Another photograph that grabbed the American public's attention about the South
Vietnamese government came from 1968 at the start of the Tet Offensive. Here
General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, chief of South Vietnam's national police, shot a prisoner in
the head. During Tet, Viet Cong fighters brought the war to the streets of Saigon. This
Viet Cong lieutenant had just murdered a South Vietnamese colonel, his wife, and six
children. The peace movement in the United States adopted the photo as a symbol of
war's brutality. But the photographer Eddie Adams, who stayed in touch with Loan, said
the photo wrongly stereotyped the man: "If you're this general and you just caught this
guy after he killed some of your people … how do you know you wouldn't have pulled
that trigger yourself? You have to put yourself in that situation … It's a war."
Here is Adams discussing the photograph along with some analysis of its impact. [3:02]
Vietnam was the first televised war. War correspondents reported into Americans'
living rooms each evening. Here CBS correspondent Dan Rather reports from Vietnam.
[0:38]
The My Lai incident in 1968 occurred during a "search and destroy" mission to find all
Viet Cong in an area. The soldiers of Charlie Company killed over 500 Vietnamese
civilians, many women and children. The incident took place shortly after the Tet
Offensive when Charlie Company suffered many casualties. The Army covered up the
brutality of the incident until the letters of a helicopter gunner who had seen the killings
from the air prompted a congressional inquiry. Army investigators identified 33 of the
105 members of Charlie Company as participants in the massacre and 28 officers who
helped cover it up. In the end, only one soldier – Lt. William Calley - was convicted. The
My Lai massacre became a defining symbol of the Vietnam War.
Below is a photo from the report of that inquiry of Vietnamese bodies on the road, 16
March 1968.
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Ronald Haeberle, photographer. Report of Army Review into My Lai Incident, Book 6, 14 March 1970, 45,
Web. http://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/Military_Law/pdf/RDAR-Vol-IIIBook6.pdf
The famous Vietnam war photo titled "The Girl in the Picture," symbolized the horrors
of war and the effect it can have on innocent civilians. The victim Kim Phuc suffered life
threatening napalm burns after a South Vietnamese aircraft bombed the village where
she lived with her family. AP photographer Nick Ut took the photograph in 1972 of Kim
Phuc and her family running for their lives. Kim Phuc is naked, having stripped her
napalm-drenched clothes off and thereby probably saving her life.
Kim Phuc later studied in Cuba where she married a Vietnamese man and they sought
asylum in Canada. Here she speaks about her experience to a Canadian audience.
[7:04]
The last images of the Vietnam War for most Americans are those of the evacuation
from the U.S. Embassy as North Vietnamese troops marched into Saigon (now Ho Chi
Minh City) in 1975. [6:06]
©2011 Susan Vetter
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