The South Vietnamese officer whose point-blank, summary execution of a grimacing guerilla suspect became one of the more memorable and shocking images of the Vietnam War succumbed to cancer at his home in a Washington, DC, suburb on Tuesday. On 1 February 1968, a month after North Vietnam launched its Tet offensive, Loan yanked a prisoner into a Saigon street, put his gun to the man's head, and pulled the trigger. He told the newsmen standing by that the prisoner was a Viet Cong captain. Loan fled to the United States when the communists took Saigon in 1975, and opened a restaurant in Virginia.
Passage: Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan, 67
The South Vietnamese officer whose point-blank, summary execution of a grimacing guerilla suspect became one of the more memorable and shocking images of the Vietnam War succumbed to cancer at his home in a Washington, DC, suburb on Tuesday. On 1 February 1968, a month after North Vietnam launched its Tet offensive, Loan yanked a prisoner into a Saigon street, put his gun to the man's head, and pulled the trigger. He told the newsmen standing by that the prisoner was a Viet Cong captain. Loan fled to the United States when the communists took Saigon in 1975, and opened a restaurant in Virginia.
