Lessons the Pentagon learned well: Nguyen Ngoc Loan
Loan later insisted that this was justified because the prisoner had been the captain of a terrorist squad that had killed the family of one of his deputy commanders.
Concerning General Loan and his famous photograph, Eddie Adams wrote in Time Magazine: "The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths."
During the U.S. withdrawal, Loan left Vietnam in 1975. He moved to Virginia and opened a pizza restaurant, which he gave up after his past had been disclosed to the public in 1991. He died of cancer in 1998 in Burke, Virginia, a Washington, D.C. suburb....
The photographer Eddie Adams later apologised in person to General Loan and his family for the irretrievable damage it did to his honor when he was alive. When General Loan died, he praised him as a hero of a just cause.