It’s ironic that the two most iconic images of the Vietnam war, Eddie Adams’ Saigon Execution and Nick Ut’s napalm burned Vietnamese girl at Trang Bang, ended up distorting the truth.
Adams’ long insisted that the South Vietnamese general was right to summarily execute the VC who had just killed a bunch of people during a VC operation in Saigon. Adams said, regretfully, that the general killed the VC and his photo figuratively killed the general. Adams regarded the general as a hero.
Nick Ut’s photo was used by antiwar activists and to this day it is seen as symbolic of US military action in Vietnam but no Americans were in the photo. The napalm was dropped by South Vietnamese planes, not US planes, at the order of ARVN commanders, not US. The soldiers in the picture are Vietnamese, not US.
When I point this out to lefties, they like to go on about how the napalm girl photo teaches “larger truths” than the facts of the photo.
