Split Screen

This past week gave us a tragedy which shows how divided, by way of the country's reaction to it, the United States really is.  Oddly, it gives me a little hope that we're now at the point where we're going to start the process of overcoming it as well.

I'm writing, of course, about ICE agent Jonathan Ross's killing of immigration protester Renee Nicole Good.

Body cam footage of Renee Nicole Good seconds before she was shot by ICE Officer Jonathan Ross, a ten year veteran of ICE.  Prior to ICE, he served with the U.S. Border Patrol from 2007 until 2015, and before that he served in Iraq in the Indiana National Guard.  Contrary, therefore, to my suspicions, he wasn't a new or green officer.

Or, at least, I'm writing about it, somewhat.  What I'm more particularly writing about is the reaction to the killing and the instant polarization surrounding it.

Let's start with the killing itself and what we actually know if it.  

Good was killed by Ross on January 7, 2026, a few days ago.  ICE was operating in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a quite liberal Minnesota city in which ICE was undoubtedly wholly unwelcome.  Donald Trump has used ice in various municipalities, but he's sent it into liberal bastions as what may be regarded as a sort of taunt.  ICE, moreover, has acted like a pack of Brownshirts everywhere it's gone.  Not only as militarized police, but as Sturmabteilung, stormtroopers really, for Trump.

Good was there as a protestor, and she was blocking their way with her car.  To the extent we know much about her, she was a classic Minneapolis lefty.  Apparently originally from Colorado, she was graduate from Old Dominion with an English degree, she was a poet.  She had a daughter who was 15 years of age and sons who were 12 and 6. While not alway so identified, she presently identified as a lesbian and was "married" to another woman.   

On January 7, what was known to Ross was none of this at all, other than that she was blocking the road.  Another ICE officer went to confront her in the typical heavy handed ICE fashion, a fashion that no trained municipal force, and I've worked a lot with municipal police forces, would have used.  A trained municipal force would have, rather, simply walked up and said, "ma'am would you move your car?"  Based on her last words, she would have.

ICE, however, does't operate that way.  Like SA in German streets in the early 30s, or, if you prefer, like strikebreakers at Ludlow in 1914, they hit or strike first and ask questions later, having been given license to do just that. 

Colorado National Guard, many just newly recruited, breaking up a crowd with the flats of their sabers, Ludlow, Colorado, 1914.

This always leads to the loss of innocent life sooner or later.  Good had no legal right to block ICE, but what she was doing is a time honored, and mild, form of protest.  

Good appears to have turned her car wheel to the right, in compliance with ICE's wishes, but not in compliance with being drug out of her car, which an ICE agent was stupidly, but typically, trying to do.  I wouldn't have done that either, and frankly I have actually been in a vehicle, by accident, at the wheel, in the midst of a huge urban protest.  I wouldn't have gotten out my truck in that for anyone, including the police.¹  Ross, inexplicably, got in front of her car.  He drew his sidearm, and as she moved forward, armed as he was with a 9mm, a fine police weapon, he shot her three times, exhibiting the training that's carried over from the Armed Forces where the anemic 9mm is a known complete dud, necessitating multiple shots to kill.²   As a police weapons, supplaning the old .38 revolver round, which doesn't kill either, it was perfectly adequate.

Shot three times, she died, probably instantly.

There's a lot to break down here. ³ 

The thing, however, it reminds me of, is Kent State, in 1970.

Student Alan Canfora waves a black flag before the Ohio National Guard shortly before they opened fire at Kent State, May 15, 1970.

Which might give us a slight bit of hope.

For most Americans today Kent State doesn't mean anything at all, or if it does, that's because they're a student of history.  For some of us yet, however, Kent State is both a prescient moment in history, and a personal memory.

I was only seven years old or so when Kent State happened.  I feel like I can remember it, but that may be a false memory.  In 1970 we had a television and my father and mother watched the news every night.  The television, which we had only had for two years, was by that time located in the kitchen, moved from the living room in our 1958 vintage house which was not designed to house a TV.  It seems to me that I can recall this event from them, but I might not be able to.   Having said that, I can remember seeing some of the rioting of the 1960s on television, and seeing Jimi Hendrix on the news on the last morning of Woodstock, so my memory goes back to my early years.

Kent State was a pivotal moment in the Vietnam War and in the ushering in of the liberal 1970s.

The real lynchpin in the decline of American support of the Vietnam War was the Tet Offensive of 1968.  The American military reacted to the Tet Offensive brilliantly and completely crushed the North Vietnamese effort.  NVA and VC gains were temporary and despoiled by atrocity.   Only in Hue did the NVA hang on, and to their everlasting discredit by their horrific actions against the civilian population there, which should disqualify the current regime in Vietnam from evcen existing.  But in spite of that, the American public was shocked and horrified, feeling, really, betrayed by promises and assurances broken.

Much like some are now about the end of "forever wars" when the regime that promised the end to them kills Venezuelans for some reason, and then entertains oil executives in the White House shortly thereafter, while also acting as Putin's agent, for one reason or another, in making claims against a NATO Ally.

1968 saw the American public abandon support for the war in Vietnam, but not for the American soldier. A new Republican President came in promising to end the war with a secret plan.  Richard Nixon was going to make things better in some vague, undescribed, way.

The war hung on and 1970 arrived.  By that point college campuses were solidly opposed to the war.  The working class, in contrast, remained behind it, sort of, with it supplying the troops.  University students who didn't want to serve in Vietnam found ways towards deferrements, with people like Dick Cheney, and Donald Trump, finding ways not to serve. Working class people, on the other hand, largely served, and in many instances joined the National Guard and ARmy Reserve, something that rich people like Donald Trump would not condescend to do.

This was the situation in Kent, Ohio, in 1970.  Often missed in the analysis of the terrible events that happened there, the students at the university were neither serving in Vietnam, or serving in the National Guard.  Those in the Ohio National Guard were from the town.  Blue collar men who didn't go to college, and because they were in the Guard, were not in Vietnam.  They were likely in the Guard as they didn't want to go to Vietnam, although that wouldn't univerally work for everyone who joined the Guard, contrary to what's commonly imagined.⁴

The Cold War National Guard was trained for the Cold War, not riot patrol, and in 1970 it would have had a lot of older soldiers in it who had served in World War Two and Korea.  Even when I joined the Guard a little over decade later we still had one soldier who had served in World War Two, and a lot who had served in Korea.  Soldiers do not make very good policemen as they aren't trained to be police and are trained to react to a threat with aggression.

Perhaps for that reason, it's always surprised anyone familiar with this role of the Guard that the Guardsmen at Kent State had been issued ammunition  That alone would have predisposed them to believing that they were going to need it.  What occurred such that they used it has never been clear, and there are of course conspiracy theories associated with it.  What's clear is that rocks were thrown and shooting started.  Allison Krause, age 19, an honors college student and anti-war activist,  Jeffrey Miller, age 20, a psychology student who was participating in the protest,  Sandra Scheuer, age 20, a speech and hearing therapy student who was walking to class, and William Schroeder, 19, a psychology student and ROTC member, also walking to class, were all killed by National Guard bullets.

It's the reaction to the event that causes our long winded recollection of it here.

In 1970 Americans were still divided over the Vietnam War, but the mass of American people had pulled away from strongly supporting it. The 1968 Tet Offensive had been an American tactical victory and a NVA disaster, but the public was so shocked it no longer supported the war or trusted the Government.  In the 1968 Election the Democrats paid the price and Republican Richard Nixon, with a "secret" plan to end the war came into power.

If Nixon ever had a "secret" plan to end the war, we don't know what it was, but it quickly became pretty unmanageable for him.  His basic strategy seems to have been to turn the war over to the South Vietnamese, and let them fail, which he ultimately did, but in trying to get breathing room to do that he ended up having to occasionally expand the war or the war's violence. The Kent State protests were over the invasion of Cambodia, which had just occurred.

Young college bound people had turned against the war.  Middle Americans, however, were hoping in Nixon to find a way out.  Kent State turned a lot of those people against the war as well.  Americans moved to the left.  By 1972  and 1973 they'd moved substantially to the left.  The collapse of the Nixon Administration with Watergate brought a wholescale distrust of the Republican Party that had come in to power as it was perceived that the Democrats had no solution to the war.

Sort of like Donald Trump and the GOP coming in as it was perceived that Biden was senile and Harris a bad candidate, and they were all responsible for COVID era inflation. . . 

The shift was massive.  Large elements of the American population went from weakly opposing the war to strongly opposing it, and strongly backing an increasingly left wing Democratic Party. The military, both active and reserve, was held in open disdain.  Law enforcement also was.  The active duty military would not recover its reputation for well over a decade and the Guard for two decades. Contempt for policemen remained widespread into the 1980s.

On the other side, however, right wing Americans backed cracking down on protestors and what happened at Kent State, regarding the use of arms as justified.  I can remember this still being discussed in the 1980s.  The right's hard drift in this directly helped shit it out of politics for the rest of the 1970s.  The pre 1973 Republican Party never fully recovered and in order to come back into power in 1980 the Republican Party had to seduce Southern Democrats who were hardcore right wing populists, thinking that they could control them.  The entire event went a long ways towards giving us the modern Democratic and Republican  Parties.

We are starting to see history rhyming right now.

Donald Trump was elected in no small part because most Americans eligible to vote, don't.  He's massively unpopular with large elements of the American public.  While his supporters do not like to acknowledge it, and some cannot believe it, the majority of Americans do not like or support him.  Trump himself, who is not a smart man, and whose been coddled by wealth his entire life, can't grasp why he isn't loved.

But there is no doubt that the Democrats helped bring his rise about due to ignoring many issues that we've referenced here for years.  Immigration is certainly one of them.  In reality, even though nobody wants to portray it this way except for those on the Republican hard right, most Americans have had enough of largescale immigration.  Frankly, most Americans would like to see the country have a smaller population than it does.  It's not just illegal immigrant that upsets people, it's immigration.

People wanted something done about that, but they did not want the Sturmabteilung in their cities, just as people wanted an end to the Vietnam War, but didn't want to bomb Hanoi and invade Cambodia to get there, and they didn't want National Guardsmen killing college kids on campus.  In short order, they'd make it pretty clear that they didn't want a President who covered up a paranoid breakin, although they did return him to office in 1972.

We're seeing the same thing now.

People don't want militarized police at all, and they don't want masked policemen patrolling their cities dragging people out of cars. They don't want men who have been trained as part of ICE special units shooting women in the street.  No amount of excuses as to why this occurred are going to matter at all.  Middle American started shifting this past week, which it already was doing.

The right in turn is making the classic mistake on doubling down on the shooting, trying to justify it.  The officer had PTSD, we are told in which case he shouldn't have been there and in which case it means, implicitly, if he had fully had his faculties he wouldn't have shot.  The shooting was justified as it wouldn't have occurred if she wasn't there protesting, which is true but is true about every government act of violence wherever it occurs, from Tehran to Kent State.  The film shows he was justified, just as, we were told at the time, the film at Kent State, which is in fact much more dramatic, shows that the Guard shooting was justified.  No, it shows the opposite.  

And finally, and not too surprisingly in our current era, there's the character attacks, which nobody who has participated in this discussion here has engaged in.  Renee Nicole Good was a lesbian flake.  She was woke. Well, she was a lesbian and she may have been a flake, but that doesn't mean, as is implied by those statements, that it was okay to kill her.

Nixon's managed to get elected, and handily, in 1972.  Part of the reason for that is that the Democrats, as they tend to do, just flat out botched the election.  They botched the election of 1968, and they did it again in 1972, although their 1972 candidate was better than 1968.  Had they run from the center, Nixon may well have lost.  It was all unraveling already however, and by 1973 he'd bring himself down in scandal.

Before he finally resigned, those around him were extremely concerned by his mental state.  He was drinking heavily and impairing himself accordingly.  Trump's becoming impaired quite rapidly by dementia.

Trump is unraveling, politically as well as mentally, right now.  Americans are already upset by his continual weirdness, and a man elected on the promise of no more wars seems really eager to start them, while openly admiring some of the worst foreign powers that exist.  Sending Guardsmen into the streets, as he has done, has been no more popular in 2026 than it was in 1970, and the same thing is beginning to occur. A National Guard that worked hard to avoid the errors of the 1960s and recover its reputation is finding it besmirched, and ironically by one of the very people who didn't serve in the 1960s.  ICE and the Border Patrol, which most Americans had no opinion on before 2025, are regarded, and rightly, with suspicion.  Now they're going to be disdained.

If there's any hope in any of this, it's this.  The country did get over the events of the 60s and 70s and start to recover, although it would really take into the mid 1980s to do it.  Looking back, almost everyone agrees that both sides were too extreme at the time.  Part of the reaction in 1970s was that Americans didn't want a government that would kill American kids, and after the completion of the Nixon regime it didn't want one that foreign kids either.  We're probably headed in the same direction.

Footnotes:

1. In my case I happened to accidentally drive right into the middle of a Nation of Islam protest on Martin Luther King Blvd in Denver.  It was large and I was the only person of my demographic on the street, and was driving a pickup truck with Wyoming plates at that.

I'll say, however, that the protestors were very gracious.  I could see them looking at me, but as Wyomingites often find, I was protected in part by my cluelessness.

2.  People hate it when this is stated, but the 9mm is a worthless military round.  

A military sidearm serves one of two purposes, use or ceremony.  If its to be used, it actually should stop the opponent immediately, keeping in mind that an armed combatant in war is a much different target than those the police normally face.  Most of the time when a policemen uses a firearm a single bullet from a light weapon will stop the opponent who is much less motivated than a soldier in war.

For that matter, in most trained police forces the first resort anymore is to a taser, not a sidearm.

9mms were a Continental European round in armies which at first used pistols as sort of a gentleman's thing.  Officers carried them, and rarely used them. By World War One that had changed, but the 9mm had set in.  By World War Two any soldier who had the option to carry a .45 ACP rather than a 9mm did, which is why you see British Airborne so frequently armed with M1911s.

The 9mm hung on, however, and by the 1980s those armies used them had gone to the multiple shot, "double tap" technique, acknowledging its deficiencies.  The round spread to the U.S. at the instance of NATO which wanted the service to play nice on this topic.

3.  Ross wasn't green, so that doesn't explain what occurred.  What might, however, is that he's seen too much service, quite frankly.

4.  For much of the Vietnam War the National Guard was hard to get into.  

The history of this isn't very well remembered.  The Vietnam War was a big war, for the U.S, from 1965 until 1972.  Contrary to what's popularly imagined, the majority of soldiers who served in Vietnam were volunteers, which is in fact somewhat complicated by the fact that people facing conscription often volunteered prior to being drafted.  Conscription itself had been in place since about 1948, after briefly terminating after World War Two.  Setting that aside, the U.S. had conscription pretty continually since 1940.  Most men expected to be conscripted form 1940 forward and therefore, for that reason, they planned on military service as an aspect of their immediate post high school life.  Those going to college and university obtained deferrements, up until the late Vietnam War period, which were just that, deferrements.  They entered the service after they were done with university, which was the case for my father and two of my local uncles.  Usually, although not always, that meant that they entered the service as officers and chose their branches, none of which was the case for men who were simply conscripted.  Added to that, as conscripts only served two years, the service often assigned them to Reserve units following their active duty service, which was the case for one of my uncles.  Indeed, men who were part of ROTC units often found that they were assigned to hometown Reserve units rather than active duty units, which was often to their frustration as it mean six years of Reserve duty rathe rather than two years of active duty.

As a lot of working class men who didn't intend to go to college didn't want to do two years away from home and disrupt their post high school lives, the Guard and Reserve were already popular options before the Vietnam War.  That meant that it was nowhere near the case that men who were in the Guard were avoiding Vietnam.  At the time a hitch in the Guard for an enlisted man was at least four years (it might have been six).  Therefore, men who joined the National Guard as late as 1965 and prior to the Marines being deployed at Da Nang were still in the Guard in 1969.  The war itself did not really start being unpopular until 1967 meaning that somebody joining the  Guard in 1967 was still it at least until 1971.  And the war would have had no impact on retention as the service was never going to call up anyone who had completed Reserve or Guard duty.

This does not mean that nobody joined the Guard to avoid Vietnam.  I know at least one person who in fact did just that.  But getting into the Guard was hard.  Getting into the Reserve also was, although I know one person who joined the Reserve in order to avoid going to Vietnam.

People who really wanted to avoid joining the service, however, were better off finding a doctor who would qualify them as medically unfit, or, up until the end when conscription deferrements changed, staying in university.

Finally, contrary to what people imagine, some Guardsmen in fact served in Vietnam.  Not many, but as the war went on some Guard units were called up and deployed to the war.

Related Threads:

In Memoriam. Renee Nicole Good.

Labels: 2020s, 2026, Homicide, In Memoriam, police, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Zeitgeist

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Split Screen, additional labels.

Nguyễn Chí Thanh. Accidental Legal Muse.

Nguyễn Chí Thanh. By Sử dụng hợp lí - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=118355303

 

Nguyễn Chí Thanh is the man who caused me to go to law school.

Eh?

Now, Nguyễn Chí Thanh was a General in the North Vietnamese Vietnam People's Army and former North Vietnamese politician who died in 1967, when I was just four  years old.  How could this be?

Well, he was the figure who thought of what became the Tet Offensive of 1968.

From a Vietnamese middle class family, Thanh's father died when he was 14 which forced Thanh into farming, as his family entered poverty.  Perhaps it was this experience which lead him in 1937 to join the Vietnamese Communist Party, which in turn lead to being sentenced to French labor camps.  He was both a political and military figure, and following 1960, was principally a military one.  It was his idea to launch what became the Tet Offensive of 1968, a disastrous, in military terms, general uprising that cost the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese over 100,000 casualties, over twice as much as the Southern effort lost, and which ended so badly that Gen. Võ Nguyên, who accented to the plan and help prepare it, thought that he was going to be arrested and potentially suffer the fate of all who get blamed for stuff in Communist societies do.

Thanh didn't get the blame, for the military failure.  Nor did he get the credit for the massive political success, as the offensive shocked the American public and lead to the US abandoning South Vietnam to its fate.  He was killed from wounds sustained by a B-52 raid in 1967.

What's that have to do with law school?

Well, this.

In 1980, I had to write a paper in my community college freshman composition class.  I was still in high school, but I only went half days and took freshman comp at the college in the afternoon.  I wrote a detailed paper on the Tet Offensive of 1968, taking the position that the U.S. had won the battle militarily, but lost the war due to it due to the huge public reaction.

That thesis is widely held now, but at the time, not so much.

Sometime in the next couple of years, I had an American history class of some sort.  I can't recall, but I do recall it was well attended.  Unbeknownst to me at the time, the professor was a lawyer, but one who had largely not practiced, if he ever had, after doing a stint in the U.S. Navy.  I had to write a paper, and what I did, which was legitimate, was to revise and dust off my preexisting one.

Keep in mind, this was in the typewriter days, so that was more difficult than it might sound.  Indeed, writing in general was more laborious in those days.

Anyhow, when it came back, I had received an A, and the professor had marked "You should consider an analytical career".

The part of the story I usually don't tell is that I asked my father, "what's an analytical career"?  That's probably as I don't want to have my father tagged with any other problematic career stories other than the one that's been mentioned before, which is unintentionally dissuading me from becoming a game warden. Anyhow, he mentioned lawyer.  I think that's the only analytical career he mentioned.  It's probably the only one that occurred to him, and frankly, it is hard to think of analytical careers.

And hence the seed was planted.

October 30, 1968: the Uljin-Samcheok Landings

On this day in 1968 the North Koreans landed a commando force on South Korean shores in an attempt to establish guerrilla bases in South Korea.  The attack was part of a delusional series of increasingly aggressive moves that grossly underestimated the lack of support for communists in South Korea.

The landings promoted a massive reaction in the South with 70,000 troops being deployed to counter the 124 commandos who landed and attempted to infiltrate South Korean villages.  110 of the force were killed.  Under 70 South Koreans, of which 23 were civilians, died in the event.  Three Americans lost their lives.

Coming in the hottest year of the war in Vietnam, and dating back to an attempted raid in January that coincided with the Tet Offensive, this event served to remind that the Korean War had ended in an armistice, not a true peace, and the North Korean effort continued; even violently.

Phase Three of the Tet Offensive Commences. August 17, 1968

Cẩm Lệ Bridge reopened on August 24, 1968 after having been held by the Viet Cong.

The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong launched the third, and final, phase of the Tet Offensive, eight months after the offensive had first commenced, by launching strikes on 27 South Vietnamese cities and towns, 47 airfields and 100 outposts.  This concluding phase would last a month and a half.

The operation was similar to the earlier, better known ones, and involved mass assaults on numerous targets as well as a large number of raids.  Th e fact that this could be done after the massive losses the NVA and the VC had sustained to date was impressive but there is good evidence that by this stage in this operation the Communist forces, which had been surprised by the success of the earlier phases, simply did not know what to do.  The results were similar in that the positions were all retaken by late September and the Communist forces sustained significant losses in the effort.

Some major 1968 events we already missed.

 USS Pueblo.

This blog won't become the This Day In 1968 Blog, like it threatened to become for 1915, 16, 17, and 18.

But it is 50 years ago, and it was quite a year, as already noted.  We may, therefore, take note of some things that occurred during it.

Here's what we already missed:

January 4:  Mattel introduced Hot Wheels.

I, and every boy I knew, loved those little cars.

Shoot, I still do.

January 5:  Alexander Dubcek chosen as the leader of the Czech Communist party, ushering in the Prague Spring.

This seemed to usher in some hope that Communism in Eastern Europe would evolve into Democratic Socialism, something, it would would soon show, that the USSR was not prepared to accept.

January 21.  The Battle of Khe Sanh, a diversion of for the Tet Offensive, commences.

The battle was one of the few real sieges of the American war in Vietnam.  The Marine Corps defended the base valiantly, supplied from the air by the United States Air Force.  In April the siege ended when the U.S. Army reestablished ground connection with the base.  While an American victory of a sort, the fact that the NVA was capable of laying an American force to siege, would be a factor in the change in the public's mind on the war.   And, we started to look like the French, in a way, with there being shades of Dien Bien Phu.

January 22:  Rowan & Martin's Laugh In debuts. 

Funny, and irreverent, and featuring a mild form of the exist humor that characterized a lot of American humor at the time, it was hugely popular.

January 23. The USS Pueblo taken.

As if there wasn't enough grim news, the seizure of an American vessel, and the poor performance of the Navy's officer corps as it happened, made the Americans look anemic and caused concern that the Korean War was about to revive.

The ship is still held by North Korea.

January 30.  The Tet Offensive launched.

We'd win the battle, but the public's mind was lost by the fact that the NVA and VC could launch such a major offensive after years of war.  A desperate gamble on their part, it proved to be a gamble that would pay off.

January 31:  The US embassy in Saigon attacked by the Viet Cong.

Part of the Tet Offensive, of course.

February 1:  Viet Cong terrorist Nguyễn Văn Lém is executed by Nguyễn Ngọc Loan,  South Vietnamese National Police Chief.   The famous photograph by photographer Eddie Adams would go on to be a factor in the turn of American opinion against the war, but Adams regretted taking it and in fact held Nguyễn Ngọc Loan in high regard.

All that and 1968 was just a month old.

Lex Anteinternet: Is it murder?. The Face of the Executioner.

Earlier this past week I ran this item:

Lex Anteinternet: Is it murder?: The episode of Burn's and Novik's documentary on the Vietnam War prominently featured the prize winning photo and film footage of Nguyễn Ngọc Loan, head of the South Vietnamese National Police shooting Nguyễn Văn Lém in the head, in the streets of Saigon, with a revolver, during the 1968 Tet Offensive.  The podcast that came about on the topic of the documentary (it wasn't part of the documentary, it's oddly a podcast about each episode of the documentary, very prominently featured the same thing.

And then the whole week turned to crud and became exceedingly weird, so I was not able to followup as I had intended.  I'm doing so now.

The item linked in above, as people will recall,  dealt with the topic mentioned above.  I noted in that post that:

Indeed, in the rough justice sense, the photographer who took the famous still photograph came to deeply regret it.  He later stated about the photograph:

The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths. What the photograph didn't say was, "What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American soldiers?

He, Eddie Adams, later went even further, and apologized to Loan for the photograph.  Upon Loan's death at age 67, Adams stated:

The guy was a hero. America should be crying. I just hate to see him go this way, without people knowing anything about him.

No answers.  Just a lot of awful questions.

I didn't say a lot more about Loan. Right now, unless you've looked into it, you know about as much about Loan as you do about Lem.

Well, let's correct that.

Loan was about 37 years old at the time the photograph was taken, and the head of the South Vietnamese National Police. He'd live another thirty years after this photo was taken.  He was an ardent Vietnamese nationalist and was noted to not accord Americans any special treatment in the ares he was in charge of.  He openly disagreed with some American backed efforts  including the CIA backed Phoenix Program that sponsored assassinations.  He was a sponsor of hospital construction.  A few weeks after this photograph was taken he was badly wounded in a battle and his life was saved by an Australian journalist.  He lost his leg as a result of his wounds.

He moved to the United States in 1975, after the South fell, and opened a pizza restaurant in a mall.  His identify was later made known and he was harassed to the point where he had to close it. He died of a heart attack in 1991 at age 67.  His wife died a few years later of cancer, also at age 67.

Bad guy, or a guy acting badly in one bad moment?  Or none of the above?

What about these guys:

These are American military policemen and the men on the poles are German commandos who are about to be executed as they infiltrated American lines wearing American uniforms.  Specially chosen for their ability to speak English, they were quite a concern to the U.S. Army during the Battle of the Bulge, but they were largely (or maybe completely) caught and executed.

Now, that execution is completely legal under the law of war, or at least it was at the time.  I wager now that it would be regarded as murderous, but it wasn't at the time.  And because it wasn't at the time, and because of course we won the war, this is never questioned.

How about this.

At one point, during the World War One, John J. Pershing, the commander of the American Expeditionary Force, authorized officers to shoot men who were fleeing the battlefield.  You don't hear much about this, and I strongly doubt that the license was used while it existed, but it did briefly exist.

That sort of conduct would clearly be illegal, then and now, but there was a time when the use of deadly force in that situation was regarded as legitimate, if not legal.  Pershing apparently believed he had sufficient latitude so as to be able to order it. It was, we might note, fairly common in some armies at that time, if not the US Army.

Changing times?  Different circumstances? Selective blindness?

Is it murder?

The episode of Burn's and Novik's documentary on the Vietnam War prominently featured the prize winning photo and film footage of Nguyễn Ngọc Loan, head of the South Vietnamese National Police shooting Nguyễn Văn Lém in the head, in the streets of Saigon, with a revolver, during the 1968 Tet Offensive.  The podcast that came about on the topic of the documentary (it wasn't part of the documentary, it's oddly a podcast about each episode of the documentary, very prominently featured the same thing.

In the podcast, the shooting is repeatedly referred to as a "murder".

Was it.

First some background.

As noted Nguyễn Ngọc Loan was the head of the South Vietnamese National Police.  He was not, as the speakers in the podcast incorrectly stated (and I can't recall what the documentary stated) an army officer.  He had been, but at the time of the shooting he was the head of the police.

Nguyễn Văn Lém was what we'd normally refer to now, and was occasionally referred to then, a terrorist.  He was in handcuffs and under arrest as he'd been detained after his actions in the offensive.  Head of a small unit, Lém had eariler captured ARVN Lieutenant Colonel Nguyen Tuan and his family and attempted to force the Colonel to show them how to drive tanks.   Lieutenant Colonel Tuan refused.  Lém killed then killed Col. Tuan, his wife, six children and his eighty year-old mother by cutting their throats.  There was one survivor, a seriously injured ten year old boy.

So, quite frankly, Lém was a real bastard.  A bastard, we'd note, of the Communist true believer type from all over the globe for whom such actions were not uncommon.  And things like this were not uncommon during Tet.

So, getting back to Loan, was his shooting of Lém a murder, or something else?

That may be trickier to determine that a person might suppose.

Let's start with this.  What's murder?

Every human community on earth recognizes that there's such a thing as murder and that its one of the most horrible of crimes.  But nearly every human community also recognizes that not every instance of one human killing another is murder.  Rather, generally, most societies of all types hold that killing another human being without an extreme justification is murder.  Killings in self defense are not murder.  Killing in defense of others, which extends out, commonly, to how we view actions by the police and the ultimately the military, are not murder.  Most people agree on that much.

Beyond that, there's other instances of humans killing other humans that are not generally regarded as murder, but they get trickier.

Actually, it's not even beyond that. We mentioned policemen and soldiers, but let's break that down.

That policemen are authorized to use deadly force in their work is not doubted by anyone, but where that line is drawn is not agreed upon and never has been.  In some societies (and this is something directly relevant to what we are discussing here) police use of deadly force has been regarded as very wide indeed, although not usually to the level of summary execution. . . always.

Under the Common Law, at one time, the police in Common Law jurisdictions were regarded as authorized to use deadly force to apprehend a suspected felon up until he was apprehended.  That's where the old line that we used to shout when we played police as kids, "Stop in the name of the law" came from.  If you didn't stop, back in the day, a policeman could shoot you.  There were no investigations or anything much that happened.  That's the way it was. Fleeing from the law is still regarded as evidence of guilt (a questionable proposition).  Not all that long ago that presumption went pretty far in what it authorized.

Indeed in some regions of our own country the use of deadly force against suspected criminals was regarded as so proper that there was a common assumption that the police need not really bring a suspect in alive. In the American West it was truly the case that sheriffs and marshals shooting suspects in the sticks was pretty accepted.  This generally applied to average citizens as well who were generally regarded as authorized to act on what everyone knew to be against the law.  Indeed, a sheriff in North Dakota openly questioned Theodore Roosevelt as to why he simply had not shot some suspects he chased down over a long distance who had stolen a boat.  It seemed odd to the sheriff, and it would have seemed odd to most residents of the west at the time.  Hanging thieves and murderers, even by civilians, was seen as perfectly legitimate and an extension of the proper enforcement of the law.  The scene from Lonesome Dove in which cowhands hang murderers is pretty much spot on.  People didn't worry that much about taking people to the law and they felt authorized to simply "carry it out".  A much different concept of the law, to be sure.

Carrying on, even now in some regions of the world the police can go very far in using deadly force and not be regarded as acting outside of the law.  A friend of mine who was in the Navy in the 1970s recounted being on leave in a Caribbean nation when a fellow sailor had his wallet lifted.  They ran to a nearby traffic policeman and pointed otu a fleeing man they knew to have taken it.  The officer unholstered his pistol, shot the fleeing man, and gave them the wallet back.

We'd regard this as a shocking violation of the law and murder.  There, he was simply acting as a policeman.  The old Common Law in full force.

Indeed, beyond the Common Law, there's the "old law" we've spoken of before.  Restraint on the use of deadly force in revenge or self protection or out of a sense of justice is a societal restraint.  While all people everywhere recognize murder, most cultures at one time sanctioned a lot of violence and most people still sympathize with a type of it that's well beyond what the law allows.  There are a lot of movies on this topic in the Western World where restraints on official killings are the highest.  In spite of that, the man or woman acting in revenge who takes life outside of the confines of the law remain popular.

More on all of this in a moment.  Let's talk about soldiers in war first.

There's sort of a general concept out there that any killing in war is legitimate, but it isn't.  Indeed, since World War Two it is in fact the case that people all over the world have tolerated less and less deadly violence in war.  Wartime never authorized wholesale slaughter, although there's been plenty of it.  As early as the aftermath of World War One there were war crime trials and during the war itself the the Germans were rightly condemned for their murderous actions against Belgian and French civilians.  Some have noted how this played into Allied propaganda, but the fact of the matter is that the Germans during the Great War already foreshadowed what they'd do in the Second World War and were condemned for it.  Soldiers are not to kill civilians. Nor are they to kill Prisoners of War.

Not that don't both happen and the latter, in fact, has often been tolerated.  Indeed in various ages it was highly tolerated.  An order to give "no quarter", i.e., don't bother with taking prisoners, was at one time regarded as a legitimate order for various reasons, often because the battle had become too much of a mess to sort out friend from foe quickly.  At least since some point in the 19th Century, however, such orders have not been regarded as legitimate, and indeed have been regarded as illegal.  That doesn't mean that they haven't been given or suggested.

For Americans, a lot of struggle over such suggestions came about during the later stages of the Indians Wars, by which time most Americans did not regard them as legitimate.  By that point they'd frankly stopped, although tragically the battle that such things are most associated with, mistakenly, occurred in that period, Wounded Knee.  Wounded Knee was more of a general mess than people suppose and less of a real massacre.  Real massacres did occur however, particularly prior to the 1870s and often not by Federal troops but mustered militia. Bear River in Idaho and Sand Creek in Colorado are good example of real unformed massacres by men marching under the Stars and Stripes.  The latter is a particularly heinous example.

By the Philippine Insurrection Americans were no longer willing to tolerate it and the one example some agitated people mention today, inaccurately attributing it to Pershing who had nothing to do with it, is an example of one commander authorizing very broad deadly force. That resulted in an investigation which was aimed towards a prosecution but that did not occur as the sufficient evidence could not be gathered. That did stop such actions in the prosecution of that war, however.

The shooting of prisoners again arose, although not in the public eye, as a feature of World War Two even with the American military. It's still a topic that isn't addressed much, but generally what occurred is that there were instances in which certain units simply stopped taking prisoners or mostly stopped.  In Europe this tended to to occur, on a very limited basis, where those units had suffered from the same conduct by the Germans. As a reprisal, they stopped.  In the Pacific, however, it was very widespread.  Taking Japanese prisoners was dangerous anyhow and the war in the Pacific degenerated to some extent to one with heavy racist overtones.  Not many Japanese soldiers attempted to surrender but a lot of Americans weren't very interested in taking Japanese prisoners anyhow.

In Vietnam something like that occurred, but on a much more limited scale.  As this became known it became widely circulated in the American press and after the My Lai massacre it became very widely know.  "Search and Destroy" missions and the like tainted the American military for years in the minds of the American public even though most US troops never served in units that either conducted them or committed any atrocities.  None the less, some atrocities did occur.

Which gets back to what is considered legitimate in war. Atrocities never are, but conduct towards prisoners and even combatants has varied widely. At one time, an order of "no quarter" was regarded as legitimate.  It certainly isn't now.  The French were regarded as barbarous at Amiens for raiding the English rear and killing the boys in the train, a truly hideous act.  The Welsh in the same battle killed a lot of French downed chivalry, which was regarded as bad monetary practice.  Standards haven't been always exactly the same.

So what does that all have to do with Nguyễn Ngọc Loan and Nguyễn Văn Lém?

Well, maybe more than we think.

Both Vietnamese sides took prisoners during the Vietnam War but the north uniformly treated them horribly.  NVA treatment of prisoners was based on the Communist concept that anyone fighting a Communist nation is guilty of a crime. The Soviets treated German prisoners of war the same way during World War Two (the Nazi treatment of Soviet prisoners was more purely genocidal).  The NVA treatment of prisoners was itself criminal. And when their fortunes appeared good they were not above mass execution of civilians.  The ARVN may not have been sweethearts towards prisoners they took, but htey were much better and there was always an official policy of trying to convert prisoners to the Southern cause.

Of course, not all prisoners were uniformed by any means, which creates the classic franc tireur problem.  For years it was regarded as perfectly legitimate to execute, on the spot, men bearing arms but not wearing uniforms.  Nations complained about it, but it was regarded as legitimate.  And execution of men captured wearing your uniforms against you also routinely resorted in execution. The United States in fact did this during World War Two when it captured Germans wearing American uniforms.  Military Police shot them.  No trial, just execution.  Nobody has ever suggested at any time that the US was acting improperly in doing that.

So, where does that leave us.

Well, I don't know .

I have to presume that the Republic of Vietnam had some sort of judicial code that prevented the execution of suspects.

I know that the Republic of Vietnam, with American assistance, was carrying out a program of assassination of suspected Communist agents in the countryside, which seems to be much the same thing.

What the actual standard in the country was is hard to know, particularly given the level of corruption that was common in South Vietnam.

So, was the killing of Nguyễn Văn Lém an extra judicial police murder or simply a rare filmed example of common South Vietnamese justice in action?  Or was it a battlefield execution of a franc tireur, if that practice was still regarded as legitimate by the Republic of Vietnam.

Did South Vietnam have an official death penalty for murder?  Most nations have had one at some time. Indeed most nations have had one that applied more broadly than murder, to be sure.  That has generally not been regarded as illegitimate for true crimes.  But it's also generally been regarded as requiring a real fair trial as well.

No trial here.

So was this, then murder?

That's hard to know.  It was probably technically at least a crime and that crime was murder (although the author of the Wikipedia article on Loan argues that it was not technically illegal).  And it was horrible.  But Lem had done something horrible. But that doesn't sanction a horrible extra judicial murder.  But maybe that was official justice in South Vietnam.

Indeed, in the rough justice sense, the photographer who took the famous still photograph came to deeply regret it.  He later stated about the photograph:

The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths. What the photograph didn't say was, "What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American soldiers?

He, Eddie Adams, later went even further, and apologized to Loan for the photograph.  Upon Loan's death at age 67, Adams stated:

The guy was a hero. America should be crying. I just hate to see him go this way, without people knowing anything about him.

No answers.  Just a lot of awful questions.

None of which even begin to approach the question of whether such actions are moral.  I would say clearly not, but my view may be in the minority on a lot of the questions I've raised.