http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIbQHwws3vc

“There was so much blood.”

This is a phrase Elon University sophomore Emma Vo heard her grandfather utter repeatedly into the phone as he told her, for the first time, the story of standing witness to one of the most iconic events of the Vietnam War.

“He’d never talked to me about this,” Emma said. “I asked him about it when I was writing a paper last year, but he never thought it was something to share with a teenage girl.”

Emma’s grandfather, her ong noi, Suu Vo, was born and raised in Vietnam. By the time war broke out, the event he witnessed on Jan. 30, 1968, was his reality. What he didn’t know was the extent to which his story would shape history.

Moment in history

It was early on in the Tet Offensive. The war had been on for 12 years, and Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan, the South Vietnamese chief of national police, had had it. He picked up a pistol and impulsively sent a bullet through the skull of his enemy, a Viet Cong prisoner, in the middle of a Saigon street. The moment Loan pulled the trigger was not the moment history was made. It was made when Emma’s grandfather hit “record” on an NBC Studios video camera, capturing the execution on film.

Emma said Suu and his partner Eddie Adams, the photographer, had just left NBC Studios.

“They were just walking, and they heard all of this ruckus down the street, only a block away from where they were stationed,” she said. “When they turned the corner, they saw General Ngoc Loan holding a Viet Cong prisoner hostage. He took him to the corner, and that’s when Eddie Adams took the pictures and my grandfather caught the footage. They didn’t know he was going to execute him right there on the spot.”

In the shocking turn of events, the trained journalists knew what to do.

“[NBC Correspondent Howard] Tuckner kept whispering into Suu’s ear, ‘Keep rolling, keep rolling,’” George A. Bailey and Lawrence W. Lichty wrote in a 1972 edition of Journalism Quarterly. “Eddie Adams was snapping many photographs. Later Adams wrote that as Loan’s hand came up so did his camera and he just snapped by instinct … Tuckner and Adams were the only Westerners in sight. Tuckner feared their film would be confiscated or worse. He signaled to Suu to quickly change film magazines and hide the exposed footage.”

Emma vividly remembered hearing her grandfather speak about what happened next.

“Many Americans have been killed these last few days, and many of my best Vietnamese friends,” Loan told Suu after he fired the pistol. “Now do you understand? Buddha will understand.”

Video’s impact

In America, a countercultural movement was gaining attention, and the Vietnam War had fallen out of focus — the U.S. population thought the situation in Vietnam was under control. Then Suu’s video footage was aired.

“These images were among the first indications for my parents and many others that all was not going as well as the military would have had us believe,” said L.D. Russell, religious studies professor at Elon. “I did not understand what was happening or why, yet I could sense my parents’ revulsion, especially my mother’s, and somehow we sensed that something was terribly wrong.”

The nation saw, in black and white, that the violence had reached a different level. A man was assassinated at point-blank range without any form of trial, and it was so public American cameras could capture it at the same range.

Adams, in an interview with the Associated Press, recalled dropping off the film of the execution and going to lunch.

“I thought nothing of it,” Adams said. “It was a war. I had seen so many people die at that point in my life … It’s not nice, but he was a prisoner and [Gen. Loan] shot him. I might have done the same thing.”

Once the footage aired, it swept the nation. In the same interview, Adams said he received reports of the photo’s impact while in Saigon and never understood it. Like Emma’s grandfather, it was his reality — it was nothing special.

In the U.S., the footage was thought to be so violent the question became one of media ethics: Is this footage too graphic to be shown on television?

“Suu was very calm. His hands did not shake as he kept the camera rolling and zoomed into the side of the dead man’s head where blood spurted out like a fountain,” Howard Polskin wrote in a 1983 article about the footage.

The amount of blood Emma ’s ong noi described over the phone cannot be exaggerated when captured in real-time. And according to an academic journal by Mark D. Harmon, on TV Networks during Vietnam 20 million viewers saw the blood.

“NBC got a lot of letters in the mail complaining about it, saying, ‘You shouldn’t put that on air, it’s too graphic,’” Emma said, recalling details from her grandfather’s story. “I’m in Media Law and Ethics right now, and we’ve been talking a lot about what you can show on TV and movies … But, to me, it’s the truth. It shouldn’t matter. It’s news. It happened. You’ve got to show it.”

Although news stations were faced with hard decisions in regards to ethics during the war, both U.S. officials and the media were forced to ask themselves, what is our true aim?

“Being confronted up close with such brutality led people to see major problems with the war,” said Safia Swimelar, Political Science and Policy Professor at Elon.  “Many have said that photo and video also just illustrated the moral ambiguity of the war, since it showed that both sides were engaged in violence and possible war crimes.”

Regardless, the video and photo’s impact from that day is indisputable.

“Eddie Adams said that he felt he ‘killed’ the General Loan with his camera,” Swimelar said. “The photo and footage ruined his life and reputation, and he always felt bad about it. [Adams] saw [Gen. Loan] actually as a hero and not a murderer.”

A second generation of cinema

At Elon, the girl on the other end of the phone-line was changed.

“My grandfather saw history before his eyes, through his camera, and that’s what I want to do in filmmaking,” Emma, a cinema major, said. “I don’t want to do really out-there stories, I want to do stories that mean something in today’s world — showing people the truth, even if it’s gruesome or graphic, so they form a connection and do something about it. The same way America felt they needed to do something in Vietnam after seeing my grandfather’s footage.”

Suu spent 10 years in Vietnam covering the war for NBC Studios (1965-1975). He and his family left the country April 22, 1975, eight days before the Fall of Saigon.

Emma thanked NBC Studios and, by extension, a video camera, for her and her family’s lives. She plans to spend the rest of hers seeking the truth latent in bloodshed, the same way her ong noi did nearly 50 years ago.

“I don’t know if my dad’s family would’ve left Vietnam if my grandfather didn’t work for NBC news,” Emma said. “That was their way out, that was how they escaped from the war, being in a family that was connected with an American employer.”

Now Emma said she cherishes the opportunity to bring up her ong noi, her inspiration.

“When I tell people about why I want to go into media, I always talk about [the execution footage] and ask them if they know of it, and most people say yes,” she said. “That’s pretty cool. My grandfather still doesn’t realize how commonly known it is he is.”