"Eddie Adams," writes his widow Alyssa Adams in her Author's Note to Vietnam, "would never had let this book be published if he were alive." It is a strange way to open a monograph on one of the most honored photojournalists of the Vietnam era. Adams himself had been working for years on a retrospective monograph covering his entire 45-year career, but the project never came together. He wanted to show a broader view of his work that he felt would both free him from the limiting label of 'photojournalist' and present himself as more than a war photographer. This was a challenge considering he spent most of his career working for the Associated Press and had put himself in harm's way in thirteen world conflicts.



For Adams, there was also the vexing problem of being identified to the wider public with a single photograph, taken on a street in Saigon on February 1, 1968. Assuming he was photographing a typical instance of prisoner intimidation, Adams instead caught the moment at which South Vietnamese General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executed a captured Viet Cong infiltrator with a point blank pistol shot to the head. Today we would say that image "went viral," appearing worldwide in newspapers, broadcasts, and placards at anti-war demonstrations. But Adams, who knew the execution was a much more complex situation that the single image could ever convey, was never comfortable with its fame.




"I was never out to change the world," Adams told interviewers, "I was out to get a story." Whatever Adams might have thought of this present book, his accomplishments during his three tours in Vietnam have been given thoughtful and in depth assessment. Following brief tributes by such fellow journalists as David Halberstam and Peter Arnett, Hal Buell makes extensive use of Adam's journals and interviews to develop a narrative that accompanies over 200 of Adams' photographs. —Charles Dee Mitchell