Photographer who took famous Saigon photo dies

Source: Associated Press

HONG KONG (AP) — Hugh Van Es, a Dutch photojournalist who covered the Vietnam War and recorded the most famous image of the fall of Saigon in 1975 — a group of people scaling a ladder to a CIA helicopter on a rooftop — died Friday morning in Hong Kong, his wife said. He was 67 years old.

Van Es died in Queen Mary Hospital in Hong Kong, where he had lived for more than 35 years. He suffered a brain hemorrhage last week and never regained consciousness, his wife Annie said. Hospital officials declined to comment.

Slender, tough-talking and always ready with a quip, Van Es was considered by colleagues to be fearless and resourceful. He remained a towering figure after the war in journalism circles in Asia, including his adopted home in Hong Kong.

"Obviously he will be always remembered as one of the great witnesses of one of the great dramas in the second half of the 20th century," said Ernst Herb, president of Hong Kong's Foreign Correspondent Club.



Read more: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jZU7-_px__q2eW1nDu7m6ZDvY_kgD986EOU80

that has haunted me for years is the one where the children, including the naked girl running away from the fire.

.
.
.



I imagine Fallujah didn't look much different

USA's War-Machine ain't changed much . . .

(sigh)

Air Strike on Trang Bang

More: http://www.famouspictures.org/mag/index.php?title=Vietnam_Napalm_Girl

AP reporter Nick Út was sent to the small village of Trang Bang along Route 1, the highway that leads from Saigon towards the Cambodian border. North Vietnamese troops had taken control of the Highway there and Nick was sent to cover the South Vietnamese soldiers from the 25th Army Division who were ordered to retake Trang Bang and open the Highway. When Nick arrived he and other reporters also on assignment stood with South Vietnamese soldiers just outside the village watching the action.

The South Vietnamese commander of the unit requested an air strike and propeller driven Skyraiders, Korean-war vintage planes from the 518th Vietnamese Airforce Squadron, dropped Napalm on the village. When the smoke cleared villagers from the Trang Bang ran screaming from the village to the soldiers and reporters up the road. Taking pictures with two cameras, his Leica and a Nikon with a long lens, Nick Út remembers seeing Kim Phuc running naked down the street:

I won't criticize Nick's work of late because, as bizarre as it may sound, he's still capturing the essence of the story, as sordid as it may be.

And other places as well, like Seoul.

That's an Air America (CIA) helicopter

The World; Getting It Wrong in a Photo

whole article---http://www.nytimes.com/2000/04/23/weekinreview/the-world-getting-it-wrong-in-a-photo.html


The picture was of an apartment building for the employees of the United States Agency for International Development, its top floor reserved for the Central Intelligence Agency's deputy chief of station. The address was 22 Gia Long Street, about a half mile from the embassy. I lived around the corner as one of the last two correspondents of The New York Times remaining in Vietnam and left later that afternoon.

In the last days, as the embassy hastily prepared for the last stage of evacuation, 22 Gia Long was chosen as one of about a dozen possible gathering places for Americans. The secret signal for the start of the evacuation was a radio broadcast saying the temperature in Saigon was ''105 degrees and rising,'' followed by the first 30 seconds of ''White Christmas.''

Dead, boat people, reeducation camp, serving pho on Argyle Street?

get the photo credit for the pic of the last choppers off the roof at the Kabul embassy?

Van Es' photo is one of the iconic shots of the Viet clusterfuck.

US Marines finished evacuating all foreign nationals, not just Americans, wishing to get out of the war zone hours before Van Es' photo. Just like they have in a hundred other locations throughout history.

has stayed with me.



The video: Warning, not for the faint of hear.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6691386969411115472&ei=PboNSvymN4u6rQLX1YHICw&q=vietcong+executed&hl=en

The Saigon Execution
October 2004

by Horst Faas http://www.digitaljournalist.org/issue0410/faas.html


Horst Faas, photographer and photo editor now retired from The Associated Press, remembers the day he saw Eddie Adams' Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of the execution of a Vietcong in 1968.



Running my Nikon eyeball quickly over a roll of black-and-white film from Eddie Adams, I saw what I had never seen before on the lightbox of my Saigon editing desk: The perfect newspicture - the perfectly framed and exposed "frozen moment" of an event which I felt instantly would become representative of the brutality of the Vietnam War.

The 12 or 14 negatives on that single roll of film, culminating in the moment of death for a Viet Cong, propelled Eddie Adams into lifelong fame. The photo of the execution at the hands of Vietnam's police chief, Lt. Colonel Nguyen Ngoc Loan, at noon on Feb. 1, 1968 has reached beyond the history of the Indochina War - it stands today for the brutality of our last century.

just dont wake up.