"The moment when the American public turned against the war"

The type of research I had to do for this play was different than I expected. I had to ask my family on their experiences during the Vietnam War. It’s hard not to cry when you hear of the hardships your family had to endure, particularly my mother.

After the war had ended and my father set out on his boat ride, my mom was left alone for a year with her three kids in Vietnam. When he first left, she hid in a shack hoping that the communist soldiers wouldn’t come find her. However, they did. From what I know, we were fairly well-off because we owned a gas station. They took that. After the communists assessed her wealth, they gave her back a percentage they thought was fair. Translation: they were dirt poor. She ran around doing any job she could to feed her children. One particular job she did a lot was painting bicycles. She didn’t know if my father was dead or alive until her sent his first letter a year later.

Sometimes I wish I could go back and help her somehow but it’s not possible. I know the fear still stays with her because when she was explaining this to me, her voice often broke.

I asked her what she thought about us (the non-commie South Vietnamese) losing the war and she doesn’t blame it on anyone. She knows that it only kept going because of the US soldiers helping us out but as soon as they left (because of the family protests back in America); the war was pretty much over for them.

I believe the family protests worsened after the picture shown here was published. It was taken on January 31, 1968 by Eddie Adams. He wandered the streets that morning looking for a story and that’s exactly what he got. The man holding a gun is South Vietnamese, Nguyen Ngoc. The man that had the gun pointed to him is part of the Viet Cong – a political organization and army that fought against the South and US during the Vietnam War. Adams snapped a picture just as Ngoc fired a bullet into this man’s head. This image became iconic, brought opprobrium down upon Ngoc, and it even won Adams a Pulitzer Prize. This photograph, in the words of Harper’s magazine, "the moment when the American public turned against the war." The American public didn’t bother to research anything; they saw the photo and passed immediate judgment. If they even looked below the surface, they would realize that the man being shot was a killer. He assassinated Ngoc’s entire family. They weren’t soldiers. They weren’t on a battlefield and yet they died anyway all because they were Ngoc’s family and he was the chief of South Vietnam’s National Police. Adams always regretted this, but it was too late.

Sylvia Vuong