Images of war in the Vietnam era

Eddie Adams on display at Bethel Woods

By FRITZ MAYER

BETHEL, NY — Legendary photojournalist Eddie Adams, whose wife maintains a house near Jeffersonville, won a Pulitzer Prize for his photo of Nguyen Ngoc Loan, then national police chief of South Vietnam, firing a bullet into the head of a Vietcong prisoner standing at arm’s length on a Saigon street. The prize was one of hundreds he won enduring his 45-year career, but this photo was by far his most famous.

According to people who knew and worked with Adams at the time, he was never really that comfortable with the picture, because of the harm it caused to the police chief. Hal Buell, the former head of the Photography Service at the Associated Press, wrote that Adams believed the picture didn’t tell the whole story. Buell wrote, “Not many know that Loan was highly respected by his men and by the Vietnamese. He was an educated man dedicated to the survival of his nation. Earlier on the day he shot the VC, his aide, his aide’s wife and his aide’s children were executed by the Vietcong in the fury of the Tet offensive.”

Fifty of Adams’ black and white pictures from Vietnam are now on display at the Museum at Bethel Woods, part of its season-long focus on the Vietnam War, which included a visit by The Wall that Heals in May. The museum is offering free admission for U.S. Military veterans with sign-in, and U.S. Military active duty, retired, and reserve troops with identification and sign-in during the exhibit.

The exhibit includes Adams’ photos of the “boat people,” shot several years after the Loan photo, with which he was more pleased. In the aftermath of the end of the war, thousands of Vietnamese and other Southeast Asians crammed into boats to try to escape persecution and poverty in their devastated countries, and were refused entry to many other countries. Adams boarded one such boat in 1977 and took a series of pictures.

Speaking about the boat people photos, Adams said, “No matter when you aim a camera at children… I don’t care if there are 15 bodies stacked up… the children will smile. This is the first time in my life that nobody smiled, not even the children.”

Adams’ wife, Alyssa, said those pictures “created more of a positive effect; it helped Congress decide to let some of the boat people, the Vietnamese refugees, come to America.” The United States ultimately decided to allow entry to 200,000 people to the country.

Meanwhile, although Adams died of Lou Gehrig’s disease in 2004, his legacy lives on through the prestigious Eddie Adams Workshop, which takes place every Columbus Day weekend just outside Jeffersonville, and which is now in its 23rd season.

Vietnam film series

Also in the museum’s programming is a series of Vietnam-related films, two of which remain to be screened. One, “The Year of the Pig,” documents the Vietnam War from its French colonialism to the Tet Offensive. The second, “Three Seasons,” examines how struggles arose between traditional values and contemporary life as foreign interests, technology and industry changed Vietnam from a French colonial country into a place of high rises and neon.

Both movies can be seen in conjunction with special meals prepared for the events at The Fat Lady Café and Michele Ristorante Italiano restaurants located in Kauneonga Lake. Go to bethelwoodscenter.org for more information.