Vietnamese General, Subject of Pulitzer Prize Photograph. He received worldwide notoriety for being part of the subject of phot-journalist Eddie Adams' 1969 Pulitzer Prize photograph entitled "Saigon Execution." The graphic image had Brigadier General Nguyen Nago Loan pointing a handgun at the head of the handcuffed Viet Cong prisoner, Nguyen Van Lem, in a Saigon street on February 1, 1968. The second photograph in the series shows Lem on the ground after being shot in the head. Although it was said that Lem was a member of the military, he was not wearing a military uniform at the execution but civilian clothes. At the time of the execution, Loan was the chief of the South Vietnamese National Police and had charged Lem with the murder of a fellow officer, his wife, six children and an eighty-year-old mother. Besides photographer Adams witnessing the execution, a photographer from NBC was present. Shortly after this incident, Loan was seriously wounded by machine gun fire, requiring a leg to be amputated. His photograph appeared once again in the headlines, this time with an Australian news correspondent carrying a seriously wounded Loan on his back from the front lines. He was hospitalized in Australia and then the United States for a long period. When he returned to Saigon, he was given a desk position with little authority. General Loan and Eddie Adams communicated with each other during the war, with Adams later respecting some of Loan's military decisions. As a young man, Loan had studied to become a pharmacist but decided to join his country's military in 1951 as firm South Vietnamese nationalist. He became a pilot studying in Morocco and the United States, and did fly missions early in the war. He spoke fluent English. In 1975, at the fall of Saigon, Loan and his family escaped to the United States, but could never escape the image of him in the Pulitzer Prize photograph bringing hardships to him and his family. At first, he had difficulty entering the United States as he had been labeled as a troublemaker. Eventually, he settled in Virginia. The family owned and operated for over ten years a restaurant, the Les Trois Continents in Washington D. C., which was often the target of hateful slurs directed toward Loan being painted on the restaurant's walls. The award-winning photograph had greatly impacted his reputation. "Two people died in that photograph," Adams wrote following General Loan's death from cancer in 1998. "The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera."