Nguyen Ngoc Loan, 67, Dies; Executed Viet Cong Prisoner

World|Nguyen Ngoc Loan, 67, Dies; Executed Viet Cong Prisonerhttps://www.nytimes.com/1998/07/16/world/nguyen-ngoc-loan-67-dies-executed-viet-cong-prisoner.html

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Nguyen Ngoc Loan, the quick-tempered South Vietnamese national police commander whose impromptu execution of a Viet Cong prisoner on a Saigon street in the Tet offensive of 1968 helped galvanize American public opinion against the war, died on Tuesday at his home in Burke, Va. He was 67 and had operated a pizza parlor in nearby Dale City.

A son, Larry Nguyen, said the cause was cancer.

In a long war that claimed two million lives, the death of a single Viet Cong official would hardly have seemed noteworthy, especially in a week when thousands of insurgents were killed mounting an offensive that included the beheading of women and children in Saigon.

But when Brig. Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan raised his pistol on Feb. 1, 1968, extended his arm and fired a bullet through the head of the prisoner, who stood with his hands tied behind his back, the general did so in full view of an NBC cameraman and an Associated Press photographer.

And when the film was shown on television and the picture appeared on the front pages of newspapers around the world, the images created an immediate revulsion at a seemingly gratuitous act of savagery that was widely seen as emblematic of a seemingly gratuitous war.

The photograph, by Eddie Adams, was especially vivid, a frozen moment that put a wincing face of horror on the war. Taken almost at once with the squeeze of the trigger, the photo showed the prisoner, unidentified and wearing black shorts and a plaid shirt, in a final grimace as the bullet passed through his brain. Close examination of the photo, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1969, showed the slug leaving his head.

For all the emotional impact, the episode had little immediate influence on on the tide of American involvement in the war, which continued seven years longer, until the evacuation of Saigon in 1975. Indeed, it was four years after the execution that another indelible image of the war created a new round of revulsion, the sight of a screaming 9-year-old as she ran naked along a road after having been burned in a South Vietnamese napalm attack.

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