It was “just some guy shooting somebody” Associated Press photographer Eddie Adams said at the time. But of course it wasn’t. When Saigon Police Chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan casually put a bullet into the head of the trussed Viet Cong Capt. Nguyen Van Lem, the shot reverberated around the world. Adams’ photograph became the iconic image of everything that was wrong with America’s war in Vietnam. In “No Wider War,” the second volume of a new two-part history of the Vietnam War, author Sergio Miller weighs the moment when American moral revulsion sentenced the vicious conflict in Indochina.
‘By 1968, Saigon had become the greatest jungle in Vietnam where everything was for sale. The city was more a restless, broiling energy than a defined urban space. More than two million people were squeezed into central Saigon making it the most crowded city in the world. Greater Saigon, which more than doubled the population, was a labyrinth of shanty towns which now extended 28 miles to the west, 20 miles to the south and 35 miles to the north. Its inhabitants lived with the sound of artillery fire and the rumble of B-52 strikes. At night, a midnight curfew restored some semblance of peace. The traffic was insufferable, with over half a million motorcycles creating a permanent smell of acrid, two-stroke fumes. There was a lack of reliable electricity and water. The drug trade and a black market in military ware, including weapons and ammunition, thrived. Street hawkers, conmen, and prostitutes all engaged in a frantic scramble for the American dollar. With as many as 25,000 American troops annually spending $200 million, mostly in the city, this dollar was not hard to find. It was estimated that the average bar girl was making twice the prime minister’s salary. Saigon was a city being raped and now it was the communists’ turn.
