World: Angle Shots

Strung up by his heels from a tree limb, the Viet Cong prisoner, his face twisted in pain, was being interrogated by Nung mercenaries working with a U.S. Special Forces unit in the jungle near Due Phong. The photograph caught an ugly tableau found in every war, and it was widely reprinted in the U.S. press, often with indignant captions. As so often happens with coverage of Allied harshness, neither the picture nor many of its captions told the whole story.

A Viet Cong sniper had opened fire on a group of refugees near a Catholic church, killing a baby. The Nungs, tough fighters of Chinese ancestry, ran a patrol out after him, picked up a Vietnamese without any identity papers —as the Viet Cong usually travel. After 15 minutes hanging upside down, he confessed to being the sniper, was cut down unharmed and hauled off to prison. So reported the photographer Sean Flynn, 24, the son of Errol Flynn, who has been following the action in Viet Nam for three months as a combat correspondent for Paris-Match. Flynn's dispatch was largely ignored, but the inflammatory picture was not.

Such pictures are hardly ever balanced out by coverage of the Viet Cong's far more common tactics of terror and brutality, for the very good reason that the Communists want no photographers around. Since the beginning of 1964, some 2,700 Vietnamese government officials have been killed or kidnaped by the Viet Cong while trying to go about their civilian duties. Another 9,000 Vietnamese peasants were killed or kidnaped last year alone, though they had no connection whatsoever with the government. The kidnaped are usually forced into Viet Cong military service or labor gangs. The dead are those who refuse—and die undocumented.