The Turning of the Tide

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In hindsight it is neat and orderly to say that the Tet offensive, which began in late January 1968, was the turning point in Vietnam.

And, strategically, perhaps it was.

But public opinion had been turning against the war for quite awhile. The escalation of the conflict in the mid–1960s had spawned Eugene McCarthy's insurgent presidential campaign that would force President Lyndon Johnson to abandon any plans he had to seek another term, and it would lead to Bobby Kennedy's campaign as well. There were protests — and chaos — in American cities. It was a turbulent and terrifying time in American history.

Through it all, I suppose, a majority of Americans continued to believe that victory was still possible in Vietnam — until the Tet offensive revealed the weaknesses of America's war effort. While the Tet offensive failed to meet its military objectives, historian Theodore H. White called it "the shadow on the walls."

Again, in hindsight, it was. But no one really recognized the shadow for what it was — at least at first.

Two days into the offensive — 50 years ago today — one of the most famous photographs of the Vietnam era was taken. It would lead to a Pulitzer Prize for the photographer, Eddie Adams of the Associated Press, who snapped a picture of the execution in Saigon of Nguyễn Văn Lém, a Viet Cong operative who had been involved in the slayings of a South Vietnamese officer's wife and children.

It was a powerful picture, powerful enough to mobilize opposition to the war even — or, perhaps, especially — if the person looking at the picture did not know the details behind it. To the uninformed, it could well appear as if Vietnam was like the lawless old west with people being randomly murdered in the streets. The picture did not say why the man was being executed.

The executioner was Nguyễn Ngọc Loan, chief of South Vietnam's national police. He shot Nguyễn Văn Lém in front of Adams and a TV cameraman for NBC News. According to Adams, the shooter walked up to him and said, "They killed many of my people and yours, too," and walked off.

Film footage of the shooting was subsequently broadcast worldwide, invigorating the antiwar movement and providing the first of many shocking, unexpected and critical moments in what would be a thoroughly unpredictable year, filled with riots in the streets and assassinations.

But it could really be said to have begun on this day with the shooting of one man in the streets of Saigon.

Burst of Joy

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In my career as a journalist, I have known several people who truly were gifted at photography.

Personally, I have never been much more than an aim–and–shoot photographer. When I was a reporter, I occasionally took a camera with me and returned with acceptable photographs that ran with my stories. But I never mastered the intricacies of photography. Never came close to snapping a photograph that was worth the proverbial 1,000 words or a Pulitzer Prize.

I've always been a little envious of those folks who had a photographer's eye. I've been told that I am a good writer, and one person even told me that my writing was like music, which appealed to me because I love music even though I'm not terribly musical.

Music is an art form, and I love the arts. I get that from my mother, I suppose. She was a first–grade teacher, and she used her classroom to spread her creative wings. In fact, after she died, we received a letter from an old friend of my parents. He said that he had long suspected that, if Mom had not gone into teaching, her artistic gifts would have drawn her to the stage.

Anyway, Mom always encouraged a love of the arts — and writing was one of them. Her encouragement sure worked on me. I have always loved to read, and writing has always been more pleasure than work for me.

But writing has never seemed that artistic to me. Maybe that is because it has always come easily to me, maybe too easily at times, and I've always felt that great art requires great effort — like giving birth.

But, for some people, maybe it doesn't require a great effort. Maybe it really is as effortless as it seems.

Maybe that is how it is with great photographers.

Great photography, like the theater, excels at capturing dramatic moments in life, and there have been few moments in my lifetime that were more dramatic than when American prisoners of war started coming home from Vietnam in 1973.

I saw many dramatic photographs in those days. In fact — in hindsight — 1973 was filled with dramatic moments. It was the year that Richard Nixon famously declared that he was not a crook — an astonishing assertion for a president to make — a few months after it was revealed that Nixon had been recording Oval Office and telephone conversations for a couple of years. It was the year that Rose Mary Woods tried to take the heat for her boss — and failed. Her re–creation of her alleged error was preserved by many photographers.

But the most dramatic photographs of that year came when the POWs began coming home from Vietnam.

For the most part, America's veterans were treated shabbily by their fellow Americans. To an extent, it was understandable that Americans behaved as they did. They were frustrated by the waste of the war, and they felt deceived by their government. Being unable to take out their frustrations on the people who were really responsible, they lashed out at the most visible and most accessible symbols of the war — the young men who fought in it.

That wasn't fair. Soldiers carry out orders. They don't make policy. Even so, many Americans — to their everlasting shame — greeted returning Vietnam vets in the vilest ways.

Not so at Travis Air Force Base in northern California on this day in 1973.

Associated Press photographer Sal Veder happened to be in the right spot at the right time to snap a photo (above) that came to be known as "Burst of Joy." Lt. Col. Robert L. Stirm was greeted by his family after spending more than five years as a prisoner of war. His 15–year–old daughter led the way, her arms outstretched. Her brothers, sister and mother followed, each face glowing in a radiant smile.

When I first saw that photo, it seemed to be the perfect bookend for a painful chapter in American history. It took many photos to tell the story of the Vietnam war — the photo of Vietnamese children running from their burning schoolhouse showed a side of war that non–combatants seldom see, and the photo of a young girl kneeling over the body of a victim at Kent State illustrated the divisions at home.

"Burst of Joy" allowed Americans to feel good again after years of feeling bad.

But there is a truth behind pictures that can't be seen — and the truth behind "Burst of Joy" was the fact that Stirm, who had been released by North Vietnam only three days earlier, had received a letter from his wife on the day of his release telling him that their marriage was over.

I don't know if the children knew about this so their smiles may well have been genuine. But the smile on Loretta Stirm's face, at least, hid a darker truth about the price of war.

Veder won a Pulitzer Prize for the photo he shot of the homecoming, and copies of it are on display in each of the children's homes.

But the focal point of the photo, Lt. Col. Stirm, does not. For him, it is a painful reminder.

Nevertheless, "Burst of Joy" continues to be "part of the nation's collective consciousness, often serving as an uplifting postscript to Vietnam," wrote Carolyn Kleiner Butler for the Smithsonian magazine eight years ago. "That the moment was considerably more fraught than we first assumed makes it all the more poignant and reminds us that not all war casualties occur on the battlefield."

The Horror of War

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There is no time in my memory of my childhood when the war in Vietnam was not an ever–present fact of life.

When you thumbed through a newspaper or a magazine, you were bound to see articles about it. If you switched on your TV or your radio, you were almost sure to see or hear something about the war. All the prominent people of the time were talking about it.

It was everywhere.

As young as I was, I got the sense that most people still thought of war casualties in military terms. I know I did. When the nightly or weekly casualty counts were given on the network news, I thought of soldiers.

I guess the folks who had served in World War II and Korea should have known better than that. They had seen first hand the pain that had been inflicted upon civilians in those conflicts.

For that matter, I guess, the people of my parents' generation — who were too young to serve in WWII, too young even to get away with lying about their ages — should have known better, too. They had seen the footage of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They knew that soldiers weren't the only ones who got hurt or killed in war.

Nevertheless, non–veterans seemed to know nothing about the human face of war during the Vietnam era.

I was as naive as any, I suppose — until June of 1972, when the attached photograph was taken by a young Associated Press photojournalist named Nick Ut.

The photo showed a group of South Vietnamese children running from their village after a napalm attack on June 8, 1972. A young girl could be seen running naked along the road, her face twisted in pain.

Just from looking at the photo, it wasn't really possible to determine how extensive the girl's injuries were. Only if one read the caption that accompanied the photo — and usually made a vague reference to a napalm attack on the children's village — could one begin to get an idea of just how badly she had been hurt.

The girl in the photo had torn off her burning clothes, which allowed her to survive, but the damage had been done to her tiny body.

For many, this photo truly was worth a thousand words — at least. It was a haunting image that came to symbolize everything that had gone wrong in Vietnam — in large part because a South Vietnamese village had been napalmed by South Vietnamese forces. That was no accident. North Vietnam had captured the village earlier, and the South Vietnamese were trying to drive the North Vietnamese out of it.

The villagers were simply, as Timothy McVeigh put it a couple of decades later, collateral damage.

I remember vividly seeing that picture on the pages of my hometown newspaper a few days after it was taken. I had never heard of the village — Trang Bang. But the little girl in the photo was about my age, give or take a year or two, and that put a human face on the war for me.

I could look at her and see just about everyone I knew, everyone with whom I went to school, everyone with whom I played on a daily basis. That picture gave me nightmares for weeks.

There was no question it was a powerful photograph. It won a Pulitzer Prize and has become an iconic image of that time.

President Nixon, who was running for re–election, doubted the authenticity of the photo, as a tape of a conversation with his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, revealed.

Nixon had been elected president four years earlier in large part because of criticism over the way the Democrats had handled the war. His suggestion to Haldeman that he suspected the photo had been "fixed" may have stemmed from a fear that the photo could damage his political prospects.

(As it turned out, Nixon was more gravely wounded by something that happened a week later and much closer to home — the Watergate break–in.)

It wasn't until after the children had been examined at a Saigon hospital that it was concluded that the girl, whose name was Kim Phúc, had been burned so badly that she was not expected to survive. But she did.

I can only imagine the nightmares she must have lived with — that she may still be living with.

Today she lives with her husband and children in Canada. In 2008, she told NPR that she had forgiven those who hurt her.

"Forgiveness made me free from hatred," she said. "I still have many scars on my body and severe pain most days. But my heart is cleansed. Napalm is very powerful, but faith, forgiveness and love are much more powerful."

Her words are as powerful as the image from decades ago.

My Street Becomes an Ice Rink

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Well, they say a picture is worth a thousand words.

This was the scene in front of my apartment a few minutes ago.

Just to set the stage for you, we got rain, freezing rain, sleet and snow here in Dallas starting early this morning and continuing until a little while ago. Even now, we're getting some blowing snow, but the snow isn't as heavy as it was.

Snow isn't the problem, though. It never really is. There are times when snow is a little slippery, and that keeps it from being a very pleasant experience, but ice is never a pleasant experience, whether you're walking on it or trying to drive on it.

It's deceptive, too. The pavement may look all right until you're on top of it — then, you quickly discover that it isn't all right, after all.

And neither are you. If you're on foot, you are apt to find yourself going from vertical to horizontal with no warning. And if you're behind the wheel, you may find yourself spinning out of control.

Apparently, some seemingly clear spots deceived some drivers on my street. None of the vehicles in the above picture were in motion.

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It doesn't look like we're going to get above freezing around here for a few days, which means anything that is slush when the sun goes down will turn to ice overnight. Driving could be pretty hazardous.

Stay tuned for future developments.