Vietnam One Week's Dead Analysis

In 1969, Life magazine, an extremely popular and influential magazine of the time, hires a new editor, and there is an obvious change in the type of stories they were printing. The stories become more anti-war, and they showcase the ways in which the war was affecting both the Vietnamese and the people at home in America. One extremely powerful and shocking piece they published titled "Vietnam: One Week 's Dead", showed over 200 young men who had been lost in the span of one full week in the conflict of Vietnam. There was no story, simply their picture, their name, their age, their hometown, and their ranking in the military. These photos were sent in by the families, and oftentimes showed the youth and joy of these passed men, with several

Eddie Adams was a photojournalist who in 1968 captured one of the most infamous photographs of the Vietnam War. In his photo, "Police Commander Nguyen Ngoc killing Vietcong Operative Nguyen Van Lem", we see the exact moment of death for a Vietcong captain. The police chief of South Vietnam had decided to execute this man for capturing and killing dozens of unarmed innocent civilians. This photo was absolutely shocking to the American public, and even won the Pulitzer Prize for breaking new photography in 1969. Even though this was a staged photo, the complete brutality and pure atrociousness of the moment showed the American public just how deep the corruption of this war ran. To shoot a man in the head point blank in the middle of the street is not something that sat well with the American public. As said by Marien, "Some lasting images of the war experience were created only in photography" (368). This photo remains to this day one of the most recognizable photos of the war, and among the most tough to look at. This display of pure savagery showed how demoralizing and dehumanizing this conflict had become, and added to the ever growing anti-war sentiment. This photo was another example of how the war was consistently going against traditional American ideologies, and convinced the American people even more that this violence needed to