베트남전쟁 사진 ‘사이공식처형’ 한남자 인생 망쳤다(서프라이즈) 2015-01-18 11:12:48
한 장의 베트남전쟁 사진이 한 사람의 인생을 망쳤다.
1월 18일 방송된 MBC '신비한TV 서프라이즈'에서는 전 세계적으로 큰 파장을 일으킨 AP통신의 베트남 전쟁 사진 한 장에 대한 비밀이 전해졌다.
1960년 베트남 공산주의자들이 베트남의 통일과 미국으로부터의 완전한 독립을 요구하며 벌인 베트남 전쟁이 한창이던 당시, 에디 애덤스는 AP통신 종군기자로 베트남전쟁에 파견됐다.
이 과정에서 에디 애덤스는 무장한 베트남 군인이 민간인에게 총을 겨누는 모습을 목격하고 그 장면을 찍어 보도했다. 해당 사진은 '사이공식 처형'이라는 이름으로 전 세계에 보도됐고 전쟁의 참혹상을 생생하게 담아낸 사진에 사람들은 큰 충격에 휩싸였다.
살해된 민간인은 전쟁이 낳은 희생양으로 인식되며 강한 동정여론이 들끓었다. 에디 애덤스는 그 해 퓰리처상을 수상하며 최고의 종군기자가 됐다.
하지만 이 사진 속에는 놀라운 비밀이 담겨 있었다. 총을 든 남자는 구엔 곡 로안으로 베트남에서 존경받는 경찰청장이었고, 그의 앞에 서 있던 남자는 구엔 반 렘이라는 악명높은 암살부대 멤버였다. 그는 여자 34명을 강간한 뒤 붙잡혔던 것이었다.
에디 애덤스는 자신의 사진 '사이공식 처형' 때문에 진실이 왜곡되자 당황했고, 미국으로 돌아간 후 회사 측에 정정기사를 요청했다. 문제는 이미 사진에 대한 후폭풍이 거세하게 일어났던 후라 AP통신 측은 진실을 묻어두기로 결정했다.
1975년베트남 전쟁이 종결되자 사진 주인공 구엔 곡 로안은 남 베트남 패망과 동시에 미국으로 이주했다. 구엔 곡 로안은 버지니아 주에 정착해 작은 음식점을 운영하려 했다. 하지만 악인으로 낙인찍힌 구엔 곡 로안에 사람들은 전범재판도 받지 않은 그를 추방해야 한다고 비난했다.
결국 미국 측 역시 구엔 곡 로안에 거주허가 취소 통보를 내렸다. 이러한 상황을 알게 된 에디 애덤스는 다시 한 번 용기를 내 진실을 밝힐까도 고민했고, 구엔 곡 로안을 직접 찾아가기도 했지만 번번이 발걸음을 돌려야 했다.
이후 구엔 곡 로안은 1998년 버지니아 중에서 은둔 생활을 하던 중 암으로 사망했다. 또 2001년 에디 애덤스 역시 루게릭 병으로 시한부 판정을 받았다. 이에 에디 애덤스는 직접 방송국에 연락해 다큐멘터리 방송을 제안, 진실을 공개했다.(사진= MBC '서프라이즈' 캡처)
[뉴스엔 조연경 기자]
조연경 j_rose1123@
기사제보 및 보도자료 newsen@newsen.com copyrightⓒ 뉴스엔. 무단전재 & 재배포 금지
Nguyen Ngoc Loan, the quick-tempered South Vietnamese national police commander whose impromptu execution of a Viet Cong prisoner on a Saigon street in the Tet offensive of 1968 helped galvanize American public opinion against the war, died on Tuesday at his home in Burke, Va. He was 67 and had operated a pizza parlor in nearby Dale City.
A son, Larry Nguyen, said the cause was cancer.
In a long war that claimed two million lives, the death of a single Viet Cong official would hardly have seemed noteworthy, especially in a week when thousands of insurgents were killed mounting an offensive that included the beheading of women and children in Saigon.
But when Brig. Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan raised his pistol on Feb. 1, 1968, extended his arm and fired a bullet through the head of the prisoner, who stood with his hands tied behind his back, the general did so in full view of an NBC cameraman and an Associated Press photographer.
And when the film was shown on television and the picture appeared on the front pages of newspapers around the world, the images created an immediate revulsion at a seemingly gratuitous act of savagery that was widely seen as emblematic of a seemingly gratuitous war.
The photograph, by Eddie Adams, was especially vivid, a frozen moment that put a wincing face of horror on the war. Taken almost at once with the squeeze of the trigger, the photo showed the prisoner, unidentified and wearing black shorts and a plaid shirt, in a final grimace as the bullet passed through his brain. Close examination of the photo, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1969, showed the slug leaving his head. Continue reading the main story
For all the emotional impact, the episode had little immediate influence on on the tide of American involvement in the war, which continued seven years longer, until the evacuation of Saigon in 1975. Indeed, it was four years after the execution that another indelible image of the war created a new round of revulsion, the sight of a screaming 9-year-old as she ran naked along a road after having been burned in a South Vietnamese napalm attack.
The execution changed General Loan's life.
One of the 11 children of a prosperous mechanical engineer, Mr. Loan was born in Hue. He graduated near the top of his class at the University of Hue and begun a career as a jet pilot in the South Vietnamese Air Force. As a close friend of Nguyen Cao Ky, the swashbuckling pilot who became Premier in 1965, Mr. Loan, then a colonel, was put in charge of the national police and gained an immediate reputation among Western reporters for his temper and rages at the scenes of Viet Cong attacks on civilian targets.
Some of those who knew him said General Loan would not have carried out the prisoner execution if reporters and photographers had not been at the scene.
Mr. Loan insisted that his action was justified because the prisoner had been the captain of a terrorist squad that had killed the family of one of his deputy commanders.
Even so the killing and other summary executions by the South's military in the Tet offensive drew immediate rebukes from American officials. A few days after the incident, Mr. Ky, who had become Vice President, said the prisoner had not been in the Viet Cong military but was ''a very high ranking'' political official.
Mr. Loan later suggested that the execution had not been the rash act it might have appeared to be but had been carried out because a deputy commander he had ordered to shoot had hesitated. ''I think, 'Then I must do it,' '' he recounted. ''If you hesitate, if you didn't do your duty, the men won't follow you.''
Vo Suu, a cameraman at the scene for NBC News, recalled that immediately after the shooting the general had walked over to a reporter and said, ''These guys kill a lot of our people, and I think Buddha will forgive me.''
When General Loan was severely wounded while charging a Viet Cong hideout three months later and taken to Australia for treatment, there was such an outcry there against him that he was moved to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, where he was repeatedly denounced in Congress.
Back in Saigon, Mr. Loan, who had been relieved of his command after having been wounded, seemed a changed man, devoting time to showering presents on orphans. At the fall of Saigon his pleas for American help in fleeing were ignored. But he and his family escaped in a South Vietnamese plane.
After his presence in the United States became known there was a move to deport him as a war criminal. But the efforts fizzled, and Mr. Loan, whose right leg had been amputated, settled in northern Virginia, where he eventually opened his pizzeria, which he operated until 1991 when publicity about his past led to a sharp decline in business. As a message scrawled on a restroom wall put it, ''We know who you are.''
In addition to his son, who also lives in Burke, Mr. Loan is survived by his wife, Chinh Mai; a daughter, Nguyen Anh of Fairfield, Va.; three other children, a brothers and sisters and nine grandchildren.
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A version of this obituary; biography appears in print on July 16, 1998, on Page A00027 of the National edition with the headline: Nguyen Ngoc Loan, 67, Dies; Executed Viet Cong Prisoner. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
