Gấu đang gửi Radiophoto cho UPI.
Bên cạnh là ông Hưng, AP Radiophoto operator.
Đài Liên Lạc VTĐ thoại quốc tế, số 5 Phan Đình Phùng, kế bên Đài Phát Thanh Sài Gòn.

Bức hình trên sau 1975 đã được gửi tới văn phòng ODP tại Bangkok, để xin đi Huê Kỳ, theo diện nhân viên Mẽo.

Cái mail của Dirck, lần gặp lại trên net.

From:
Date: Thursday, July 21, 2005 11:36:18 PM
To: Nguyen_Quoc_Tru
Subject: Re:
It's wonderful to hear from you Tru. How are you?
We missed you at the reunion in Saigon in May.

Eddie had come back to Vietnam a few weeks before the Tet Offensive to take a third crack at this story. He had initially arrived in 1965, when the first U.S. Marines had landed. We knew Eddie as a former Marine photographer of some repute gained in the Korean War. He was a personal friend of General Lewis Walt, the erstwhile commander of the Marines in Danang.
Eddie was after more than just good day-to-day newsphoto coverage of the war. He was after the perfect, meaningful photograph expressing the frustrations, the bravery, the suffering of the war - all expressed in one image. He had tried for three years, on countless military operations - and would become very moody and depressed when it did not work out perfectly. New York headquarters was happy with his work - but Eddie wasn't. Until Feb. 1, 1968. "I got what I came to Vietnam for," he told somebody in the office.
I found myself in the role of editor and coordinator during the Tet Offensive. Six weeks earlier, shrapnel from a rocket- propelled grenade had ripped into my legs and I could not walk unaided beyond the fourth-floor office of The AP in Saigon. I had dodged evacuation to a hospital in Hong Kong or Honolulu - and I was delighted with my good luck in being able to edit the AP photo report of the Tet Offensive, which brought the Vietnam story back onto the front pages of the world press for many weeks.
The first 24 hours of the Tet Offensive were confusing. Vietcong had penetrated the city and were fighting inside the grounds of the U.S. embassy a few blocks away from the AP office. Eddie concentrated on that action on day one. Vietnamese photographers living across the city reported that Vietcong were fighting in their districts. It was not a time to venture out to find them. Most photos of this first day came from Vietnamese cruising the city on their motorbikes - including a 14-year-old boy photographer, Lo Hung, moving about on a bicycle and bringing back his films every few hours. Another youngster was Huynh Cong Ut, then 18, who was endearingly called Nick Ut by Eddie Adams.
But at the time, Eddie did not like the "kids'" competition.
On day two, news reports came in of fighting around a Buddhist pagoda (known for the monks' opposition to the government) in an area where Saigon becomes Cholon, the Chinese section of the capital. Eddie teamed up with one of NBC's most experienced cameramen - NBC was an office neighbor of AP and tips and transport were often shared. Eddie and Vo Su were driven slowly towards the area where fighting was reported, then walked when they found the streets had become abandoned and litter from a fight was visible.
The pagoda occupied by Viet Cong had been recaptured by Vietnamese marines. Hearing shots, they moved towards the action.
From a later interview Hal Buell, then Eddie's boss in New York, reconstructed what happened next.
He wrote: "Adams watched as two Vietnamese soldiers pulled a prisoner out of a doorway at the end of the street. The soldiers then pushed and pulled what appeared to be a Viet Cong in a plaid shirt, his arms tied behind his back. They escorted the man toward the spot where Adams and Vo Su were located.
Eddie Adams said, 'I just followed the three of them as they walked towards us, making an occasional picture. When they were close - maybe five feet away - the soldiers stopped and backed away. I saw a man walk into my camera viewfinder from the left. He took a pistol out of his holster and raised it. I had no idea he would shoot. It was common to hold a pistol to the head of prisoners during questioning. So I prepared to make that picture - the threat, the interrogation. But it didn't happen. The man just pulled a pistol out of his holster, raised it to the VC's head and shot him in the temple. I made a picture at the same time.'
"The prisoner fell to the pavement, blood gushing," Buell wrote, quoting Eddie. "After a few more pictures of the dead man, Adams left."
The shooter was later identified as Lt. Colonel Nguyen Ngoc Loan, police chief of South Vietnam. Adams said he walked up to him and said, "They killed many of my people, and yours, too" and then just walked away.
Typewriters stopped clattering for a few moments when the first transmission prints emerged from the darkroom. Peter Arnett, who had just come back from "the town that had to be destroyed to save it," got ready to interview Eddie.
Eddie had made a stop at his hotel, then meandered slowly into the office, as was his habit. He hid his excitement under a cloak of slight, feigned boredom - but headed straight to the editing lightdesk. Yes, I had selected the right first four pictures - but Eddie wasn't happy. Of course, like all of us, he wanted the whole sequence radioed out to the world to tell the full story. He had to wait for another day - in those days it took 20 minutes to transmit a single photo, which often had to be repeated - and the single radiotelephone circuit to Paris, shared with UPI, was closing down after three hours. AP's radiophoto operator, Tran von Hung, already had gone to sleep beneath his transmitter because of the curfew and continued fighting.
But all of Eddie's pictures, the full sequence of the incident, were finally sent to the world by radiophoto. "They made it for the PMs," we said in those days.
The days after Adams' execution photo, Vietnamese photographers competed with a whole horror scenario of similar events. AP's Le Ngoc Cung came up with a heartbreaking sequence showing a South Vietnamese soldier sharing a sandwich and water from a canteen with a Vietcong prisoner. The last pictures show how he shot him.
Dang Van Phuoc, also roaming the city for AP, had photos of diehard Vietcong dragged from the ruins and then summarily shot.
No pardons were given, and the photos showed that for days.
The stories surrounding the victim in Eddie Adams' execution photo differed. Lt. Colonel Loan had said that the man had killed many South Vietnamese and even Americans. Vietnamese photographers said that he was a traitor, working for both sides - the Vietcong and the South Vietnamese police. Others said he was a small-time Vietcong who had put on a fresh shirt hoping to slip away.
Thirty-two years later, I met his widow, who still lived in their home in a southern Saigon suburb and mourned him. In a corner of the living room, behind plastic flowers, was a heavily retouched photograph of Nguyen Van Lam, who, as a Viet Cong, had the "secret name" (alias) Bay Lap. Yes, he had been a member of the National Liberation Front, the Vietcong. He just disappeared shortly before the Tet Offensive, and never came back.
Eddie Adams' photograph made him a martyr, but, no, she does not have and does not want to see the photograph of her husband's death. She will mourn Nguyen Van Lam until his body is found, she said in 2000, when the Vietnam government celebrated the 25th anniversary of the end of the war.
General Nguyen Ngoc Loan continued to take the fight to the Vietcong and, despite his notoriety after the execution, U.S. commanders and newsmen who knew him respected him for his bravery and determination. Eddie Adams felt that his famous photo unfairly maligned Loan, who lived in Virginia after the war and died in 1998.
The next time I saw a photograph of Nguyen Ngoc Loan, then promoted to Brigadier General, was during the "Mini-Tet" Offensive in May 1968. Vietcong had again reached the inner ring of the city and were fighting at the bridge that connects the district of Gia Dinh with Saigon. Brig. Gen. Loan had led a charge of South Vietnamese troops across the bridge when a machine gun ripped his leg off. The photograph showed the burly, rugby-sized Australian war correspondent, Pat Burgess, carrying the bleeding general back to his lines. Pat Burgess died a few years after the war of a painful sclerosis of the nervous system, similar to the type which ended Eddie Adams' life.
I am certain that even back in Vietnam, Eddie was already dreaming of his workshops for young photographers, which have now become his legacy.
He loved young Nick Ut, whose brother, Huynh Cong La (Thanh My), had died photographing for the AP in 1965. And he admired the art and sensitivity of Henri Huet, whom he helped to bring over to The AP from UPI in 1965.
It was these two great photographers and close friends who made me feel like a lottery winner twice over again when I edited their film: Henri Huet with his moving sequence of a wounded medic aiding others wounded in battle (1967) and, of course, Nick Ut and his "napalm girl," Kim Phuc, in 1972.
Henri died in 1971 in the flames of a helicopter. Nick Ut mourns Eddie in Los Angeles.
Eddie Adams, Henri Huet and Nick Ut wrote our history with perfect, singular newsphotos.

Note: Bức hình, trên 1 số NYRB đã cũ, May 1, 2003, tình cờ GNV vớ lại được, trong bài viết của Charles Simic, điểm cuốn của Susan Sontag: Nhìn nỗi đau của kẻ khác, Regarding the Pain of Others. Trong bài viết, Simic cũng nhắc đến cái thú của quản giáo Khờ Me Ðỏ, trước khi làm thịt ai, thì cho nguời đó được chụp 1 tấm hình làm kỷ niệm. Bài viết của Simic, quả đúng là thi sĩ, thật tuyệt. Ông viết về kinh nghiệm ấu thời của ông, ở vùng Balkans. Có thể nói, qua bài viết của ông, thì cả lịch sử nhân loại được chia ra làm hai, một thời kỳ không có hình, và một, có hình. Chỉ khi có hình, thì chúng ta mới được thưởng thức nỗi đau của kẻ khác, dù không là chứng nhân tận mắt.
Archives of Horror, là theo nghĩa đó.

Regarding the Pain of Others

by Susan Sontag.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 131 pp., $20.00

"the clarity of everything is tragic"

- Witold Gombrowicz

I still have a memory of a stack of old magazines I used to thumb through at my grandmother's house almost sixty years ago. They must have dated from the early years of the century. There were no photographs in them, just engravings and drawings. I was especially enthralled by scenes of battles that were most likely depictions of past Balkan wars and rebellions. They were done in the heroic manner. The soldiers charged with grim determination through smoke and carnage; the wounded hero lay with his chest bared in the arms of his comrades seemingly happy as to how things turned out. It was the kind of stuff that made me want to play war immediately. I'd run around the house shooting an imaginary rifle, crashing down on the floor mortally wounded, then immediately jumping up again to fire at the enemy until my grandmother ordered me to stop. Her nerves were frayed enough already since there was plenty of real shooting to be heard all around us.

The year was 1944, the Russian army was closing in on Belgrade, the Germans were digging in to fight, while the Americans and the English took turns bombing us. If one escaped the city, one was in even greater danger, since a civil war raged in the countryside between Communists, royalists, and several other factions, with civilians being killed indiscriminately. Like many others, my parents went back and forth. Even a six-year-old had numerous opportunities to see dead people and be frightened. Still, I made no connection then that I recall, between what I saw in those magazines and the things I witnessed in the streets. That was not the kind of war I and my friends were playing. This may sound unbelievable, but it took war photographs and documentaries that I saw a few years later to impress upon me what I had actually lived through.

One day when I was in third or fourth grade our whole class was taken to a museum to see an exhibition of photographs of atrocities. The intention, I suppose, was to show the youth of a country whose official slogan now was "brotherhood and unity" what the fascists and their local collaborators had brought about. We, of course, had no idea what we were about to see, suspecting that it would be something boring, like paintings of our revolutionary heroes. What we saw instead were photographs of executions. Not just people hanged or being shot by a firing squad, but others whose throats were being cut. Ordinarily, we took the opportunity of these class trips to tease the girls and generally make a complete nuisance of ourselves, but that day we were mostly quiet. I recall a photograph of a man sitting on another man's chest with a knife in his hand, looking pleased to be photographed.

As terrifying as the scenes were, they tend to blur in my mind except for a few vivid details. A huge safety pin instead of a button on the overcoat of one of the victims; a shoe with a hole in its sole that had fallen off the foot of a man who lay in a pool of blood; a small white dog with black spots who stood in the distance, wary but watching. It was like seeing hard-core pornographic images for the first time and being astonished to learn that people did such things to one another. I could not talk about this to anybody afterward; neither did my schoolmates say anything to me. Our teachers probably lectured us afterward about what we saw, but I have no memory of what they said. All I know is that I never forgot that day.

I suspect Susan Sontag has written a book others thought of writing but chickened out of. The images of war atrocities may seem like a subject about which there'd be plenty to say, but somehow it turns out not to be the case. As with other all-powerful visual experiences, there's a chasm between what one sees and what one can articulate. For instance, I can recall down to its minutest details Ron Haviv's close-up photograph taken in 1992 of a Muslim man begging for his life on the streets of the town of Beljina in Bosnia. I feel the horror at what is about to take place, can even imagine what is being said, know well enough that these men with guns are without pity. And yet nothing that I can imagine or say equals the palpable reality of this terrified, pleading face on the verge of tears. Who is this witness, I ask myself, this photographer who gives himself the godlike right to be there? Did he just happen to come along? What took place after the camera's click? How come the killers let him go with the evidence of their crime? Did they exchange any words before he went his way? Is it true then, as Sontag wrote in On Photography (1977), that the camera is a passport that annihilates moral boundaries, freeing the photographer from any responsibility toward the people photographed? If there's anyone capable of answering these thorny questions, it is she. As that early book demonstrated, she is a most probing critic, one of the very best writers on photography in its history.

Regarding the Pain of Others is a book about photographs without a single illustration. It begins with a discussion of Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas, a book of reflections on the roots of war. In order to test our "difficulty of communication," Woolf proposes that we look together at images of Spanish Civil War atrocities. She wants to know whether when we look at the same photographs, we feel the same thing. Sonntag tells us that Woolf professes to believe that the shock of such pictures cannot fail to unite people of good will:

Not to be pained by these pictures, not to recoil from them, not to strive to abolish what causes this havoc, this carnage-these, for Woolf, would be the reactions of a moral monster. And, she is saying, we are not monsters, we members of the educated class. Our failure is one of imagination, of empathy: we have failed to hold this reality in mind.

Who are the "we" at whom shock pictures such as these are aimed, Sonntag wonders. In 1924, Ernst Friedrich published in Germany his Krieg dem Kriege! (War Against War!), an album of more than 180 photographs drawn from German military and medical archives, almost all of which were deemed unpalatable by government censors while the war was going on, thinking that circulating them widely would make a lasting impact. As Sonntag describes it, the reader gets a photo tour of four years of slaughter and ruin: pages of wrecked and plundered churches, obliterated villages, torpedoed ships, hanged conscientious objectors, half-naked prostitutes in brothels, soldiers in death agonies, corpses putrefying in heaps, close-ups of soldiers with huge facial wounds, all of them meant to shock, horrify, and instruct. Look, the photographs say, this is what it is like. This is what war does. By 1930, War against War! had gone through ten editions in Germany and had been translated into many languages. Judging by the refinements in cruelty in the next war, its effect was zero. Here's what Sontag has to say:

The familiarity of certain photographs builds our sense of the present and immediate past. Photographs lay down routes of reference, and serve as totems of causes: sentiment is more likely to crystallize around a photograph than around a verbal slogan. And photographs help construct-and revise-our sense of a more distant past, with the posthumous shocks engineered by the circulation of hitherto unknown photographs. Photographs that everyone recognizes are now a constituent part of what a society chooses to think about, or declares that it has chosen to think about. It calls these ideas "memories," and that is, over the long run, a fiction. Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as collective memory-part of the same family of spurious notions as collective guilt. But there is collective instruction.

All memory is individual; un-reproducible-it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds. Ideologies create substantiating archives of images, representative images, which encapsulate common ideas of significance and trigger predictable thoughts, feelings.

I imagine most of the people carrying out the butchery in Croatia and Bosnia in the 1990s had already seen 1 previous photographs of war everything they were now doing. In the days of nationalist euphoria that preceded these crimes, television audiences all over Yugoslavia were being shown pictures of what one ethnic group did to the others in the past. Sontag is right when she points out that images of dead civilians serve mostly to quicken the hatred of your enemy. She writes:

To an Israeli Jew, a photograph of a child torn apart in the attack on the Sbarro pizzeria in downtown Jerusalem is first of all a photograph of a Jewish child killed by a Palestinian suicide-bomber. To a Palestinian, a photograph of a child torn apart by a tank round in Gaza is first of all a photograph of a Palestinian child killed by Israeli ordnance.

Looking at pictures of Serbian atrocities in Croatia, it occurred to me that Serbs who saw them may have been envious. They yearned to do the same to Croats. Today, of course, Serbs find it difficult to look at photographs of what was done in their name. The usual response, as Sontag notes, is that these pictures must be fabrications since our brave fighting men are incapable of such barbarities. It seems that, for nationalists everywhere, feeling remorseful for the wrong one has done to others is a sign of weakness and nothing more.

Do photographs that permit one to linger over a single image make a· greater impact on viewers than violence on television and in the movies? Sontag believes they do, and I agree. The collapse of the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001, was almost universally described as "unreal," "surreal," or "like a movie," and it was. The still images made by both professional and amateur photographers are at times more direct and thus more powerful, as anyone who has seen them will testify. Even the death and destruction in the Vietnam War, ·which was documented day after day by television cameras and brought to our homes, did not seem to make as much of an impression as a few famous photographs of that war did. "Memory freeze-frames; its basic unit is the single image," Sontag writes in Regarding the Pain of Others. Photographs, her argument runs, seem to have a more innocent and more accurate relation to reality, or so we tend to believe. They furnish concrete evidence, a way of certifying that such and such did actually happen.

We are more suspicious of movies and documentaries since we know that they can be edited to make a particular aesthetic or political point. Even though the same can be done to a photograph, we rarely question what we are seeing. The most famous photograph of the Spanish Civil War is a blurred, blackened-white image of a Republican soldier shot by Robert Capa's camera at the same moment as he is struck by an enemy bullet. The photographer, we think, had the presence of mind to point his camera and bear witness and we admire him for it. "Everyone is a literalist when it comes to photographs," Sontag writes. It's disconcerting to learn from her book that this photo may have been staged, as were many other long-familiar war photographs of the past, for reasons of expediency and propaganda.

Is there a shame in finding oneself peering at a close-up of some unspeakable act of violence? Yes, there is. Can you bear to look at this without flinching, a photograph asks, and often we can barely find the strength to do so, as in the well-known Vietnam War photograph taken by Huynh Cong Ut, of children shrieking with pain and fear as they run away from a village that has just been doused with American napalm. What makes it shameful is that the photograph is not only shocking, it is also beautiful, the way a depiction of excruciating torments of some martyr can be in a painting. "The aesthetic is in reality itself," the photographer Helen Levitt once said. One ends up by complimenting the man with the camera who not only documents the horror but manages to take a good picture. Sontag writes:

That a gory battlescape could be beautiful-in the sublime or awesome or tragic register of the beautiful-is a commonplace about images of war made by artists. The idea does not sit well when applied to images taken by cameras: to find beauty in war photographs seems heartless. But the landscape of devastation is still a landscape. There is beauty in ruins.... Photographs tend to transform, whatever their subject; and as an image something may be beautiful -or terrifying, or unbearable, or quite bearable-as it is not in real life.

"The photograph gives mixed signals," Sontag says. "Stop this, it urges. But it also exclaims, What a spectacle!" The Khmer Rouge took thousands of photographs between 1975 and 1979 of men and women just before they were to be executed. They stare straight at the camera, the number tags pinned to the top of their shirts. Their expressions are in turn serious, disbelieving, worn-out, and somehow still curious about what comes next. It's hard to meet their eyes, while at the same time one can't stop looking at them. We are all voyeurs, whether we like or not, Sontag writes, and who could pretend otherwise? "All suffering people look the same," a friend of mine likes to say. This is true up to a point, that is, before the camera makes them distinct. A little private light bulb that illuminates the life of each of us comes to be lit by the photograph. Our memories are dark, labyrinthine museums with an occasional properly illuminated image here and there.

"Is it correct to say that people get used to these?" Sontag asks. Are we better off for seeing images of atrocities? Do they makes us better people by eliciting our compassion and indignation so we want to do something about injustice and suffering in the world? Finally, are we truly capable of assimilating what we see? She notes the mounting level of acceptable violence and sadism in mass culture, films, television, and video games. Scenes that would have had the audiences cover their eyes and shrink back in disgust forty years ago are now watched without a blink by every teenager. The same is true of the world out there. People can get used to bombs, mass killings, and other horrors of warfare. Today I find it hard to believe that I once swiped a helmet off a dead German soldier, but I did. Despite what believers in long-repressed and buried memories may think, fear and shock unfortunately have expiration dates. For every dreadful image I recall, I have forgotten thousands of others. In On Photography, Sontag argued that an event known through photographs after repeated exposure becomes less real. As much as they create sympathy, she wrote then, photographs shrivel sympathy.

In her new book, she's no longer sure. "What is the evidence that photographs have a diminishing impact, that our culture of spectatorship neutralizes the moral force of photographs of atrocities?" she asks. Our military shares her uncertainty and has no intention of testing its truth by letting photographers roam freely on the battlefield. There are hardly any images of the dead in the first Gulf War, mainly stories of wild dogs tearing at the corpses of the Iraqi dead. A few pictures slipped past censorship of the war in Afghanistan, but the overall policy is to conceal the effects of warfare, especially on civilians. The military learned its lesson in Vietnam. "The war itself is waged," Sontag writes, "as much as possible at a distance, through bombing, whose targets can be chosen, on the basis of instantly relayed information and visualizing technology, from continents away." When local television stations begin showing images of civilian casualties we do not hesitate to bomb them into silence, as happened in the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia and with al-Jazeera in Kabul. "When there are photographs," Sontag-writes, a war becomes "real." The revulsion at what the Serbs had done in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo and the almost universal demand that something be done about it were mobilized by images. Unfortunately, as we've seen with Cambodia and Rwanda, photographs do not always guarantee accountability. Still, a war without pictures, or rather a war sanitized to a few propaganda images, is a frightening prospect.

Sontag is rightfully angry with certain French intellectuals fashionable in academic circles who speak of "the death of reality" and who assure us that "reality" is now a mere spectacle. "It suggests, perversely, usuriously," she writes, "that there is no real suffering in the world." And yet, there was a time when she was somewhat inclined toward that view, when she was tempted to say that it is images and not reality that photography makes accessible. She charged photography of doing as much to deaden conscience as to arouse it, and she was not wrong. "Photography implies," she wrote, "that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks." Some reviews of the new book I have seen claim that she has now repudiated this view. This simplifies her ideas in the earlier book about the relationship of the image world to the real one which are not only more nuanced, but are also mindful of the long history of that question going back to Plato. By insisting that there is indeed such a thing as reality, it does not mean that she now embraces a reductive, either / or approach with truth and beauty as irreconcilable opposites. Lastly, it's not photographs of bell peppers, nudes, or the Grand Canyon that are her subject here, but rather what she once called "the slaughter-bench of history."

Timely as it is, Sontag's extended meditation on the imagery of war in Regarding the Pain of Others is guaranteed to make some readers uneasy. These are things they'd rather not dwell on. Consumers of daily violence, she knows, are schooled to be cynical about the temptation of strong feelings. Her book on the other hand bristles with indignation. She has no patience for those who are perennially surprised that depravity exists, who change the subject when confronted with evidence of cruelties humans inflict upon other humans. "No one after a certain age," she goes on to say, "has the right to this kind of innocence, of superficiality, to this degree of ignorance, and amnesia."

Sontag is a moralist, as anyone who thinks about violence against the innocent is liable to become. The time she spent in Sarajevo under fire gives her the authority. Most of us don't understand what people go through, she writes. True, we only have photographs. Even if they are only tokens, they still perform a vital function, Sonntag insists. They certainly do for me. Like the one by Gilles Peress I saw some years ago of a child with eyes bandaged being led by his mother down a busy street in Sarajevo. Or another, by the same photographer, where we see a man in a morgue approach three stretchers with bodies lying on them and cover his face as he recognizes a friend or a relative. The morgue attendant is expressionless as he stands watching.

Men and women who find themselves in such circumstances, one says to oneself, do not have the luxury of patronizing reality. Such photographspreserve, however tenuously, the mark of some person's suffering in the great mass of faceless and anonymous victims. We ought to be grateful to Susan Sontag for reminding us of this. If photography is a form of knowledge, writing about it with critical discernment and passion, as she does, is bound to make trouble for every variety of intellectual and moral smugness. +