The prisoner's grimacing face, a face caught in the moment between life and death, became one of the most vivid images of the Vietnam War. Like the recurrence of a particularly unpleasant nightmare, that face reappeared this month with the death of South Vietnamese Gen. Nguyen Loan, the man's executioner.

Photographer Eddie Adams' extraordinary picture of that impromptu execution on a Saigon street in February 1968 captured perfectly the brutality of the war in Vietnam: Loan's arm outstretched, the man's hands secured behind his back, his twisted mouth, even the bullet leaving his skull, some say.

Loan died July 14 of cancer in Northern Virginia, three decades after Adams' photograph imparted an odd immortality to both prisoner and executioner. But unlike Loan, who became instantly famous, or infamous, worldwide, the man he gunned down in a Saigon street during the 1968 Tet Offensive remains all but anonymous.

Anonymous Vietnamese bodies were plentiful in those days. Except in the terrible intimacy of the firefight, we never got to know either our enemies or our friends very well in Vietnam.

Adams, who won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for his photo, came to feel apologetic about the picture.

"Photographs, you know, they're half-truths," he said the day after Loan died. He felt compassion and sympathy for Loan.

After the photo generated revulsion worldwide, Adams said in an interview on National Public Radio, he actually spent a few weeks traveling with Loan through South Vietnam. He got to know him pretty well.

"The guy was very well loved by the Vietnamese," he said. "He was a hero to them, you know. So he wasn't the idiot he was taken to be, like a lot of people, and it just saddens me that none of this has really come out.

"He was fighting our war, not their war, our war ... [but] all the blame is on him."

Which perhaps was the problem. Loan was our guy. Not some Nazi SS thug shooting prisoners. Not a grinning World War II Japanese caricature. Not a Soviet commissar. Not a Chinese interrogator from "The Manchurian Candidate." Not even a ruthless North Vietnamese political officer.

Our guy.

Years later, we would find out that a month and a half after Loan pulled the trigger on his prisoner, our American "boys" would be shooting women and children at My Lai. Ruthless violence became infectious in Vietnam.

Saigon -- Ho Chi Minh City now -- had a phantasmagoric quality during the Communists' Tet Offensive. A correspondent could eat breakfast in the courtyard of the Continental Palace Hotel, where shabby peacocks strolled, then taxi out to the war in one of the little blue Renaults that scooted around Saigon like water bugs on a fetid swamp. Adams was himself just cruising with an NBC television crew when they ran into Loan and the photo op of a lifetime.

A reporter could spend a few hours watching the action in Cholon, the Chinese quarter, at the Y Bridge, or near Tan Son Nhut air field, then return in time for a sundowner on the veranda of the Continental, where pornographers peddled their seedy and often ancient pictures.

Which may be why I got to the scene late on the day Loan himself was shot about three months after the notorious execution, during a second round of Viet Cong assaults after Tet.

A dozen or so Viet Cong soldiers had fired a mortar at the Phan Thanh Gian Bridge, the main route from Saigon to major U.S. bases at Bien Hoa and Long Binh. They succeeded only in crumbling a chunk of the sidewalk. They caused no more delay than a clogged toll booth at the Harbor Tunnel.

But the mortar squad apparently got lost and trapped in a warren of shanties and small houses along a branch of the Saigon River. Not far from where the "The Quiet American," of Graham Green's great novel of the Vietnamese malaise, was found dead in the mud. The VC held out tenaciously against South Vietnamese Rangers sent to rout them out.

The curious sightseers of war assembled at the head of the street leading into the enclave of shacks where the VC were hiding. Saigon harbored an amazing assortment of civilians during Tet, from CIA agents to construction workers to a kind of macabre tourist of war.

"I like to ride around Saigon and look at things," said a blond German girl on a bicycle.

"It's dangerous," I said.

"I'm not very afraid of anything very much."

"That's good," I said.

By that time the sniping near the Phan Thanh Gian Bridge was not very interesting anymore and she pedaled away.

Loan arrived early in the day, and as a Newsweek story put it: "The little bastard just went in with his AR-15 blazing."

No one ever said Loan lacked guts. Sniper fire ripped into his right leg, cutting the femoral artery. Grenade fragments tore into his shoulder.

An American Marine and an Australian correspondent named Pat Burgess carried him out.

I got there an hour or so after Loan was hit. The Viet Cong snipers still held everyone at bay. Two American MPs joined the fight. They slipped across an alley into a house along the edge of the river: "a weird, dangerous place of nooks and crannies, wooden catwalks, sudden turns, dead ends and cul de sacs," I wrote.

Both MPs got hit, one in the hand and the other in the wrist, a neat wound through and through. A grinning Vietnamese ranger and an American civilian with a pearl-handled automatic pulled them out.

"I saw him," said the MP named John Petrichella, a Spec-4 from Williamsport, Pa. "I was going to fire. But he was already aiming and I jumped back. He got me in the hand."

Petrichella may have been the last person to see a VC soldier that day. After nightfall they slipped away and the action at Phan Thanh Gian Bridge was over.

The suspect

Loan's wound cost him his leg. His military career was over; an afterlife of vilification began.

Along with the ruthlessness of the moment, Adams' photograph caught the frustration felt by the men who fought the Viet Cong and later the North Vietnamese Army.

Obituaries of the general called the man he shot "a Viet Cong suspect." But, of course, the dead are all suspect, and mostly guilty. Loan said the man was the head of a VC sapper squad. Loan's patron, Nguyen Cao Ky, the dashing air marshal who became one of South Vietnam's numerous premiers, identified him as a very, very high VC political cadre. A former CIA station chief claimed the man had just slaughtered South Vietnamese soldiers and policemen.

"The only reality about death in Vietnam was its regularity, not its cause," Stanley Karnow wrote in his definitive "Vietnam, A History."

Our leaders had told us the war was being won. Then at Tet, the Buddhist New Year, the Viet Cong exploded in cities and towns across the whole of South Vietnam like a string of deadly Claymore mines. They penetrated the American Embassy in Saigon and their dead still lay in the compound when Loan pulled the trigger on his VC "suspect."

A week of so after Adams' got his picture, Walter Cronkite came to Saigon, sat on the roof of the Caravelle hotel, listened to artillery and gunfire and watched gunships hose down the perimeters of the city with tracer fire. He went home and told his television audience we weren't winning the war.

The bullet Loan fired in his impromptu execution was no coup de grace. The war went on and on. Before it ended seven years later, another 37,000 Americans died. But we never again really thought we were fighting to win.

"I think Buddha will forgive me," Loan said. Maybe he did. Loan died a natural death in Virginia, the patriarch of a family that included his wife, four children, brothers and sisters, and nine grandchildren.

At the Embassy of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in Washington they didn't know the name of the man he shot either. They say the people of Ho Chi Minh City would remember. He was an officer of the South Vietnam Liberation Front, they say. But there's no special monument.

"There were thousands like him," a press spokesman said.

Carl Schoettler reported from Vietnam for The Evening Sun from February to May 1968.

Pub Date: 7/29/98