Going After Cacciato Socratic Seminar 5

“It's safe to say in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true “It's safe to say in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true. . . . In any war story, especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.“ - Tim O’Brien

What do you see in this photo? What is its narrative?

This piece of photojournalism This piece of photojournalism. Many viewers believed that the executing general, General Loan of the South Vietnamese military, was a war criminal due to this very famous photo that tuned US public opinion against the Vietnam War.

The other side of the story… The executed man, Nguyen Van Lem, was an alleged Viet Cong assassin who targeted Saigon’s police officers and their families. Lem was believed to be responsible for the murder of one of Loan’s own officers and their families as a part of a Viet Cong offensive that included beheading noncombatant women and children in war-torn Saigon.

Pulitzer-winner photographer Eddie Adams told his former boss about the moment he snapped the infamous photo: “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.” Source: http://socialnewsdaily.com/60524/youve-seen-this-image-but-do-you-know-the-backstory/

After the execution, General Loan told Adams: “They killed many of my people, and yours, too.” Another source has him saying: “These guys kill a lot of our people, and I think Buddha will forgive me.”

Consider “One of Tim O’Brien’s most important statements about the inherent problems of understanding and writing about the Vietnam experience appears in [chapter 39] of his novel… titled ‘The Things They Didn’t Know’” (Steven Kaplan, The Undying Uncertainty of the Narrator in Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried." Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction). Considering this statement and the photo of the street execution of the Vietcong fighter, To what extent does the effect of framing, filters, and perspective have on the way the narrative is conveyed to an audience and how the audience perceives the narrative? Which chapter do you argue is most significant of the novel if O’Brien’s purpose for this novel is to demonstrate the inherent problems of writing about a traumatic experience?