Posted on 03/06/2023 8:00:50 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Remember all that political hay the far left and its media allies made during the Vietnam War about the wickedness of America's South Vietnamese ally and the importance of abandoning that country to the communists?
Here's the Pulitzer Prize-winning AP photo that was supposed to prick our consciences and make us turn against that "immoral" war against a communist takeover:
There's no doubt about it, the photo is hard to look at. It's crude, rough, wartime justice, a picture of South Vietnamese Police Captain Nguyễn Ngọc Loan coldly executing Viet Cong Captain Nguyễn Văn Lém. The film is even harder to look at.
It ran on the front page of the New York Times, cropped from the original to fill the space and make its impact even more immediate.
And it got the results the anti-war left wanted: Public sentiment abruptly turned against the war as a result of this photo. The Vietnamese people abandoned by the Americans whose cut-and-run evacuation from the Saigon embassy rooftop was only recently bested by Joe Biden's Afghanistan pullout. After that, the reeducation camps rolled in, the boat people launched into the high seas, and the killing fields of Cambodia began.
Jane Fonda must have been so proud of herself.
Just one problem, though: The context was missing and that context mattered.
The guy who got shot, who went by the nom de guerre of Bay Lop, was a death squad psychopath in the Viet Cong who just got done massacring 34 innocent people.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
The shrouded hammer “Bodyguard “ model is quite old, first production in 1952
http://smith-wessonforum.com/s-w-revolvers-1961-1980/447333-history-s-w-bodyguard-revolvers.html
The hammer is only “shrouded” and can be manually cocked.
Yep, I know the back story but went most of my life without knowing it. It’s remarkable how lies and misinformation can persist once they’ve been released into the wild and gained some traction. I wonder if Showalter is just now learning of the context of the pic?
RE: As far as I’m concerned, Ukraine is another eg; of that whole mess in Vietnam.
One major difference — We are not sending any American soldiers to fight in Ukraine.
Try this on for size. Early “photoshop”, from photo shops under Stalin starting in 1922.
As soon as we had photographs, people were editing them.
https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/stalin-photo-manipulation-1922-1953/
BTW, the photo in question was not altered it seems. The execution was (evidently) completely legal under the laws of war. Apprehended enemy combatants in civilian clothes can be executed at point of capture. Still can, but few politicians have the juevos to allow it.
Not exactly. There's a little hammer stub at the back of the shroud so that you can cock it and fire it single-action if you want to.
this photo came out 50 years ago
He sounds like he would fit right in with Today’s liberals.
Enemy combatants out of uniform can be summarily executed, according to the Geneva convention.
Introduced as the model 49 in 1955. 1955 was a good year for guns, the .44 Mag came out, as did the Colt Python. Also the Combat Magnum later called the model 19.
I recall watching this on the news. Was evening news sitting in living room with mom and dad, was during Tet (1968) There was no warning on the graphic nature of the segment. Hard to forget blood pulsing out of his head as he fell to ground, as it continued to pour onto the street. At that point the war was lost in my opinion, regardless of the victories our troops had.
He needed killing!
The story of this picture makes the rounds every few years. The events of why this happened and how the press manipulated it were all known years ago.
This reads like American Thinker just rewrote Wikipedia entries and spun them together as if this is a new story, which it is not.
***Bay Lop, was a death squad psychopath in the Viet Cong who just got done massacring 34 innocent people.***
I believe some of those massacred were kin to the South Vietnamese Police Captain Nguyễn Ngọc Loan who is pulling the trigger.
I am reminded of a photo from the 1970s of cops holding down and pummeling a black man. The photo was cropped to remove the dead cop a few feet away the perp had just killed.
***Walter Cronkite, the “Most Trusted Man in Media”***
The VC were destroyed in the Tet Offensive. Cronkite made it sound like we lost. He was a lying son of a b-tch.
S&W model 49 in .38 special. And it’s not hammerless, the hammer is shrouded. I used to own one.
CC
It’s not photoshopped. Film show same gun.
i had always thought this showed the evils of communism...
right answer through the wrong meaning of the picture.
i am better off knowing the story behind it.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
