'The Weight of Their Past': Reconstructing Memory and History Through Reproduced Photographs in Thi Bui's Graphic Novel The Best We Could Do

THE WEIGHT OF THEIR PAST: RECONSTRUCTING MEMORY AND HISTORY THROUGH REPRODUCED PHOTOGRAPHS IN THI BUI’S GRAPHIC NOVEL THE BEST WE COULD DO Isabelle Martin University of Kentucky | Fall 2017  Thi Bui’s debut graphic novel The Best We Could Do tells the story of her family as it becomes entangled with that of the Vietnam War. In 1975, with the falling of Saigon to Communist forces, Bui’s family flees to Malaysia, joining a mass exodus of South Vietnamese people who escaped from Vietnam in the bowels of small cargo boats. Begun during Bui’s time as a graduate student, this project of chronicling her family’s history becomes recontextualized after the birth of her son. As Bui herself experiences becoming a mother, what started as an investigation of the impact of the Vietnam War on her parents’ lives, a project born of her desire to understand and grow closer to them, thus becomes an attempt to address questions of home, belonging, and displacement. Told through her family’s stories of history and heritage, The Best We Could Do works to both reconstruct Bui’s connection to Vietnam and to recollect her family’s story as it fits within the larger cultural context of the Vietnam War. The stories are accompanied throughout the novel by personal and historical photographs, which—with the exception of the family’s identification photographs scanned directly onto the page—are not digitally reproduced within the novel, but instead hand-drawn by Bui. Historian Nancy Pedri writes that advancements in digital media have simplified the process of incorporating photographs into other mediums such as graphic novels, which are typically created through a combination of paper-and-ink and digital illustration. Despite these advancements, which render simple the process of digitally embedding photographs into the work, the hand-drawing of actual photographs is common in graphic novels. Pedri asserts that this is due to the nature of comics and graphic novels as multimedia forms of storytelling and that the illustrational quality of these photographs allows them to serve both documentarian and aesthetic functions. Nancy Pedri, “Thinking About Photography in Comics,” Image & Narrative 16, no. 2 (2015), 1-13. Borrowing terminology from historian Ann Cvetkovich, I will hereafter refer to these hand-drawn photographs in graphic novels as reproductions. Ann Cvetkovich, "Drawing the Archive in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home," Women's Studies Quarterly 36, no. 1 & 2 (2008): 114, doi:10.1353/wsq.0.0037. Having fled from Vietnam when she was just three years old, Bui’s own memories of her homeland are few; thus, she often serves as a historian, “documenting in lieu of remembering,” Thi Bui, The Best We Could Do (New York City, NY: Abrams ComicArts, 2017), 180. and furnishing the narrative with memories and stories collected from her parents, Má and Bô, and older sisters, Lan and Bich. These stories recollect the family’s life in Vietnam as the war unfolds around them. Though learning of her own family’s history, Bui receives the recollections as an outsider. As Roland Barthes writes, “History…is constituted only if we consider it, only if we look at it—and in order to look at it, we must be excluded from it.” Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 65. Bui’s inability to remember any part of her family’s life before their exodus places her at a distance from the narrative, and returning to Vietnam with her family as an adult, she becomes more conscious of what she has lost—carefree childhood memories, a remembrance of a Vietnam not ravaged by conflict, an opportunity to know her parents as the people they were before they became burdened with the stresses of the war. Having grown up on American soil, a member of what is known as the 1.5 generation of Vietnamese refugees—who were born abroad and came to the United States as young children Faith G. Nibbs and Caroline Brettell, Identity and the Second Generation: How Children of Immigrants Find Their Space (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2016), 3. —Bui has one foot in each culture, navigating what post-colonial theorist Homi Bhabha describes as an interstitial, in-between space occupied by displaced minorities. This uncertainty of culture, according to Bhabha, results in both a sense of misdirection and an opportunity to examine the complexities of cultural identity, and from these complexities, to forge a new conceptualization of identity altogether. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 1. Not simply a platform for telling her family’s story, The Best We Could Do offers Bui the opportunity to explore the complexities of her own cross-cultural identity. For Bui and her family, as six Vietnamese refugees among thousands, photographs served not simply as proof of identity–as we see in The Best We Could Do with the inclusion of the family’s actual refugee photographs—but as proof of existence, connections to the country they continued to call home long after they had fled. However, as asserted by Susan Sontag, photographs assume a kind of paradoxical authority: while certifying and documenting the experience or existence of a subject, the photograph also draws attention to the ephemerality of said subject, at once immortalizing it as something it will never be again. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York, NY: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1977), 11. For Vietnamese refugees like Bui, having been dislocated from the country that granted them their cultural identity, photographs served as “hallowed signs of our haunting by the past that were emblematic of a lost time, a lost place, and in many cases, a lost people,” Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 193. at once reminding refugees both of their homeland and of their displacement from it. Relying on “seeking an origin story that will set everything right,” Bui, The Best We Could Do, 41. Bui attempts to forge a new identity for herself by reconciling the life she left behind and the life she has created, and through the documentation of her family history, she attempts to relinquish her claim on Vietnam as a homeland. A confusion of identity is a common feeling for members of the 1.5 generation, the children of immigrants and refugees, and adoptees—including myself. I was adopted from South Korea when I was three months old, and though I am not considered an immigrant, I have experienced the sense of placelessness and nonbelonging that seem to drive this aspect of Bui’s narrative. If the circumstances had been different, South Korea would be my home. But everything I know about the country, I have received with a certain sense of detachment. Whatever connection I have to it now is frayed because of the distance, both physical and emotional, between South Korea and me. Sontag reminds us that, when reproduced in a book, a photograph becomes “an image of an image.” Sontag, On Photography, 5. Additionally, while the camera serves as a form of participation structured by distance and passivity, turning “people into objects that can be symbolically possessed,” Ibid., 14. Bui reinforces her personal attachment to the subjects and events of the source photographs as she reproduces them, becoming a witness to their documentation in her sustained and close attention to them. Incapable of recounting the memories for herself, she participates in the telling of her family’s history through illustration, what Cvetkovich refers to as an “archival mode of witness.” Cvetkovich, “Drawing the Archive in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home,” 114. Yet in reproducing the photographs by hand-drawing, Bui complicates her own participation by adding another, more immediately personal, valence, inserting her own voice into the stories and memories captured within the photographs, but simultaneously producing them at another level of remove. The simple, sketchy line work with which Bui draws each photograph gives it a sense of lightness and ephemerality—perhaps calling attention to the impossibility of total recollection and the inevitability of forgetting, each reproduction looks as though it is already disappearing, a memory beginning to fade. Reproducing source photographs that captured the Vietnam War, Bui considers the role of photography in constructing collective memory. Widely regarded as one of the most controversial wars in American history, the Vietnam War was also the first war to be publicly broadcast through news coverage and photographs. Images such as Eddie Adams’s Saigon Execution and Hubert van Es’s The Fall of Saigon were circulated transnationally, thus constructing a “window on the war.” Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York, NY: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2003), 31. Though born in Vietnam and self-identifying as a “product of war,” Bui, The Best We Could Do, 325. for Bui, these photographs are sources of confusion, as they work to construct an image of the war that challenges the stories told by her parents; furthermore, as these war photographs were primarily circulated outside of Vietnam, in addition to documenting the war, they also contributed to the rest of the world’s permanent association of Vietnam itself with conflict. One of the foremost visuals of the war, Eddie Adams’s Saigon Execution (fig. 1) is also one of the most famously misconstrued. The image of a South Vietnamese general pointing a gun to the head of a Viet Cong soldier earned Adams a Pulitzer Prize in 1969, an accolade he never felt he had deserved, particularly since, as Bui expresses, Adams “knew the context of the shooting, and that it was absent from the photograph itself.” Bui, The Best We Could Do, 208. With Nguyễn Ngọc Loan, the South Vietnamese general, internationally denounced as a callous murderer, the photograph’s transnational circulation marred the rest of the world’s perception of South Vietnam and catalyzed the American anti-war movement, overlooking the fact that the Viet Cong soldier Nguyễn Văn Lém himself had murdered an entire family only hours before the photograph was taken. Bui draws the iconic photograph multiple times in supplementing Bô’s telling of the Têt Offensive of 1968, in which he was roused from his bed in the middle of the night and forced to kneel in the street as his and his neighbors’ identities and registration were questioned by a number of South Vietnamese soldiers, including Loan, the very general whose reputation Adams’s photograph had spoiled. Angry at being treated like a criminal by one of his own people, yet simultaneously disgusted at the world’s memory of Loan as a murderer and Lém as a victim, Bô’s story is charged with tension, his feelings complicated and contradictory. Bui’s multiple reproductions of the famous photograph call attention to these emotional complexities as the accompanying text addresses the reductive attitude of the anti-war movement—the ability to homogenize the Vietnamese captured in the photographs without recognizing the individual subjects, their lives and stories, or the context of the photographs themselves. Reproducing instead of digitally incorporating the photograph, Bui challenges the inherent authority of its immediate documentation, considering not only how the photograph contributes to the construction of a public sentiment, but also how the details of the photograph change as it becomes embedded in one’s mind, underscoring Sontag’s notion that “[m]emory has altered the image, according to memory’s needs.” Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 30. The first reproduction of the photograph (fig. 2) features the main subjects, Loan and Lém; auxiliary details are either diluted, like the South Vietnamese soldier standing behind Loan, or left out entirely, like the Saigon street that served as its backdrop. In Bui’s reproduction, those details are merely incidental—the two men are the subjects that will be remembered. This sentiment undermines a fundamental aspect of the photograph’s origin story: far from being staged, or even anticipated, Adams captured the event by pure base instinct, a “reflex picture” taken as he watched Loan raise his pistol. Donald R. Winslow, “The Pulitzer Eddie Adams Didn’t Want,” The New York Times, April 19, 2011, https://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/19/the-pulitzer-eddie-adams-didnt-want/. The photograph was not intended to vilify anyone; rather, it was perceived by both Adams and Loan as “something that simply happened in war.” Ibid. The auxiliary details Bui has chosen to omit situate the photograph within a setting, projecting the titular execution into reality; in eliminating these details, Bui effectively illustrates Saigon Execution as it might exist in one’s mind and memory, as if Bui had drawn the photograph as it was being described to her. The reproduction of the photograph a couple of pages later (fig. 3) exhibits more detail, demonstrating a closer attention—Lém’s expression is the focal point of this reproduction, with Loan’s pistol-bearing hand creeping into the frame from the left side. Sketched glimpses of the Saigon backdrop are visible behind Lém, but the important detail in this reproduction is the painterly splatter of blood that tracks from Lém’s head off the page. There is no trace of blood in Adams’s source photograph, as it was captured in the second just before Loan pulled the trigger; yet the photograph’s significance as an image of the brutal Vietnam conflict permits a propensity for mental exaggeration. If one were describing the photograph from memory, it might not be unlikely to recall blood splatters that do not exist. The reproduction is entirely grayscale, save for the rust-colored blood; not only drawing one’s eye immediately to the splatter, Bui also proposes that the most memorable aspect of this photograph is the violence connoted by the blood—that what is remembered most vividly is a detail that is entirely absent from the photograph, placed there by false memory. Bui’s reproduction of Hubert Van Es’s The Fall of Saigon (fig. 4) continues to consider the stories told by these war photographs, and how they came to serve assumptions of the war instead of its realities. Captured in April 1975 on the day before the surrender of South Vietnam, The Fall of Saigon (fig. 5) expresses the desperation and panic of South Vietnamese citizens as they attempt to escape from the city before it is overrun with Communist troops. As they clamor to board a lone US helicopter on the rooftop of a building in downtown Saigon, there is a sense of futility—the ladder leading up to the building is strained with people, and the helicopter appears terribly small. This escape helicopter, according to Van Es, was only intended for about eight passengers—it took flight with twelve to fourteen on board. The rest of the civilians on the rooftop waited hours for more escape helicopters to arrive; they never did. Hubert Van Es, "Thirty Years at 300 Millimeters," The New York Times, April 29, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/29/opinion/thirty-years-at-300-millimeters.html. The means of escape are simply inadequate; the sense of panic, paramount. Famously known as the photograph that “captured the end,” Keith Bradsher, "Hugh Van Es, Photojournalist Who Covered Vietnam, Dies at 67," The New York Times, May 15, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/16/business/media/16vanes.html. The Fall of Saigon came to visualize the United States’ failure to successfully rescue Vietnam from Communist takeover. For Americans, the war in Vietnam was over; but for the South Vietnamese, as Bui reveals, the conflict continued as Communist forces entered Saigon. While the world expected a bloodbath with their arrival, in actuality there was no massacre and little violence—instead, Saigon became thick with constant surveillance, friends and colleagues disappearing without a word, perhaps having fled or even having been arrested, but one never found out. The Fall of Saigon connotes that the war ended very suddenly and abruptly and that evacuation was sought immediately. However, Bui and her family went on to remain in Communist Saigon for three more years; thus, the story told by this photograph misleads. Other reproductions throughout the graphic novel continue to address the role of photography in challenging memory, though operating in a more immediate and personal context. Bui’s reproduction of war photographs like Saigon Execution and The Fall of Saigon considers photography’s ability to construct and impact a collective memory, and while the memory of the Vietnam War is a central theme to The Best We Could Do, Bui is also telling her family’s story, in particular questioning her own recollections of the relationship between the war and her family history. Marianne Hirsch argues that family photographs express “a very private kind of self-portrait [that] provokes a moment of self-recognition which…becomes a process of self-discovery, a discovery of self-in-relation.” Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 2. Using reproductions of family photographs to draw contradictions between her own memories and the stories told to her by her parents and sisters, Bui contemplates the sense of absence and loss that inevitably come with the passing of time, reinforcing the ephemerality of the events captured by photographs. While Sontag argues that the photograph’s ability to capture and immortalize its event or subject grants it “a kind of immortality (and importance) it would never otherwise have enjoyed,” Sontag, On Photography, 11. Bui considers most prominently not what has been immortalized within these photographs, but instead what has been lost. In The Best We Could Do, she primarily considers this loss as it applies to her relationship with her mother, a recurrent theme in the graphic novel, particularly in considering Bui’s feelings of inadequacy and indebtedness, both as a daughter and as a mother herself. Reproduced photographs of Má as a young woman introduce her as a person Bui is unable to recognize as her mother. In one moment in the novel, the family, having already lived in America for several years, receives a box of old photographs from Vietnam, “a treasure trove of memories” Bui, The Best We Could Do, 134. that provides a link to the homeland they left behind. Having often been told she looks just like her mother, the young Bui is particularly struck by photographs of Má that reveal her as “someone I wanted to be as a little girl…a princess in a home far more beautiful than mine…in a country more ancient and romantic than the one I knew” Ibid., 135. (fig. 6). The lovely little girl in these photographs is not the Má who works long hours, takes grueling college courses, and rushes to feed six mouths, but a stranger loosened from the realities of a life ridden by war and evacuation. In fact, the girl in these photographs has never seen such turmoil, might never become a refugee, making her existence impossible—yet, having been captured by the camera, she is also eternal. Sontag writes that photographs, “both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence…expressing a feeling both sentimental and implicitly magical…are attempts to contact or lay claim to another reality.” Sontag, On Photography, 16. As a child, Bui sees these photographs as at once an affirmation of a distant world of beauty not impacted by the war, and, because these images are of her own mother, a direct link to this carefree life. Bui recognizes herself in these photographs, a revealing but uncanny and unattainable recognition. Drawing not only the photographs of Má, but also her memory of the moment when she first saw them, Bui reveals herself as both a spectator of the photographs and a witness to her own memories of encountering them. This moment is about not just the images of Má as an unrecognizable, carefree young woman—it is just as much about this first time Bui encounters her as such. An illustration of Barthes’s notion of the punctum, the “brief and active” Barthes, Camera Lucida, 49. detail that causes recognition in a photograph, this is understood to be the first instance in Bui’s life in which her perception of her mother is challenged, a realization that continues throughout the novel to cause a dissonance in their relationship as Bui struggles to reconcile the images of Má as a mother and as a woman with a life completely her own. Má’s reminiscences on her childhood are difficult for Bui to tolerate, since it seems that the best times of her life, her fondest memories, are all from before she met Bô and became a wife and mother. Capturing the photographs from the night her parents met (fig. 7), Bui does little to alter the reproductions in order to draw attention to her parents—for example, the people and the decorations in the photographs seem to be treated with the same level of attentiveness to detail, and the reproductions consist of contour lines with no shading, giving them little depth. In the photograph on the left, the figure assumed to be Bô stands behind Má and is barely distinguishable from the other subjects, and in the right photograph, while both Má and Bô wear distinctive expressions, their features more detailed, Má seems to command more attention simply by being slightly more centrally placed in the photograph; Bô, off to the side, is almost obstructed by a man in the foreground. Looking at these photographs, Bui says she “can feel the hormones surging,” Bui, The Best We Could Do,193. but in her reproductions those charged emotions are absent. Arguing that we, as third-party spectators, stand outside “the familial network of looks,” Hirsch, Family Frames, 2. Marianne Hirsch asserts that we cannot see someone else’s family photographs the way they can. In reproducing these photographs, Bui brings herself closer to them, reading their emotions through both her sustained study of the photographs, in order to reproduce them, and her familiarity with their subjects. She applies to these reproductions a personal experience and intimacy we are incapable of sharing; thus, her participation in this aspect of her family’s history—for which she was absent—is structured by her interaction with these photographs. Having married Bô mostly because he was desperately ill and, believing he would not survive, she wanted to make what might be his final few years happy, Má approaches the institution of marriage with resistance from the outset. She equates it with feeling strained and, after Bô makes a full recovery, trapped. Photographs of their wedding ceremony (fig. 8) illustrate a sense of ambiguity—it is difficult to determine whether or not these are reproductions of actual photographs. Bui frames some of them with an old-fashioned lace border, yet the weight of the lines is heavier and more consistent with her illustrational style. Whether or not these photographs are reproductions, Bui channels the same narrative function—the wedding photographs call attention to the inconsistencies between what the photographs capture, how the subjects are expressed, and how they really feel. Bui reveals her mother’s indecisiveness about marriage as the subject of these photographs: in the center photograph in the second row, Bô grins widely at the camera and Má, whose face is cut off by the frame, seems to wear an expression of unhappiness that was not supposed to be captured by the camera. Though in the immediate next photo, Bô’s face is cut off by the frame in a similar fashion, his expression is more candid and relaxed, not illustrating the same uncertainty or disappointment. Although it is unclear whether or not these are reproductions of existing wedding photographs, Bui uses them to illustrate her mother’s feelings of isolation and disappointment, emotions rarely captured in the context of one’s wedding day, calling to mind Sontag’s identification of photographs as “not so much an instrument of memory as an invention of it or a replacement.” Sontag, On Photography, 165. By drawing these potentially nonexistent photographs, Bui borrows from photography’s ability to shape and alter memory; instead of challenging this characteristic, she utilizes it in order to reconsider a past event. Bui’s reproductions of family photographs primarily serve to pose contradictions, sometimes between her memories and reality, sometimes between how the subject feels and how they appear. While often an attempt to loosen memory’s hold on the past, Bui goes on to challenge these reproductions with the incorporation of her family’s identification photographs (fig. 9), the only instance in the graphic novel of photographs which are not reproduced by Bui but instead digitally incorporated. These photographs were taken at processing camps after registration in order for refugees to receive asylum. Linda Ho Peché, "Religious Spaces: "Boat People" Legacies and the Vietnamese American 1.5 and Second Generation," in Identity and the Second Generation: How Children of Immigrants Find Their Space, ed. Faith G. Nibbs and Caroline B. Brettell (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press), 150. Set upon a background of reproduced anonymous identification photographs, these photographs served as proof of existence and evacuation for refugees fleeing to new places, leaving everything behind—their identities would have been their most prized possessions in these moments. Yet as Bui sets her family apart by illustrating the rest of the identification photographs in contrast to their digitally scanned ones, she also grants each reproduced refugee portrait in the background a sense of individuality and distinctiveness—a certain lopsided smile, or a tuft of hair that is slightly askew. While Bui’s reproductions of other photographs, like images of war and of her parents’ history, aim to reconsider photography’s role in shaping memory, these identification photographs image a memory that refuses to allow itself to be forgotten or misconstrued. In asserting her family’s identity as boat people, Bui challenges the narratives that would undermine that identity, asserting what Viet Thanh Nguyen calls “an ethics of remembering one’s own.” According to Nguyen, American attitudes toward the southern Vietnamese involved “limited opportunity to tell their immigrant story,” and Vietnamese attitudes involved “reeducation camps, new economic zones, and erasure from memory.” Suppressed and silenced on both ends by the US and Vietnam, the southern Vietnamese, themselves a displaced and interstitial people, came to prioritize telling their own stories. Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies, 9. Additionally, for Bui especially, this evacuation served as a major point of transition—a total rupture from Vietnam with the understanding that when she returns, it will be as a visitor, a tourist, and never as a citizen. Though only three years old in this photograph and incapable of remembering it or the time in Vietnam that preceded it, Bui’s history as a refugee is one that cannot be rewritten, misremembered, or redrawn—for her, this evacuation is the most direct impact of the war on the rest of her life, the moment that catalyzes her feelings of cultural displacement and in-betweenness. Far from being a traditional family portrait, Bui’s family’s refugee photographs paradoxically assert both her family’s belonging to Vietnam and their fracture from it. While the hand-drawing of actual photographs is common in graphic novels, particularly graphic memoirs, in The Best We Could Do, the illustrated quality of the photographs reinforces the absence of actual photographs, thus reflecting the placelessness Bui feels as a Vietnamese refugee caught between two countries. These illustrated photographs symbolize both the connection to and the disruption from the country to which she should have belonged. While the project of documenting her family’s history is initially born of her desire to understand and fill in the gaps in her memory, Bui’s illustrated photographs emphasize the loss they embody—because she cannot remember the events to recount them in her own words, her drawing them itself becomes a way for her to retell the stories they visualize. She therefore has the freedom to construct the story, but that freedom is put in direct conflict with her inability to remember and her total disruption from Vietnam, the country she identifies as “not my home, though it should have been.” Thi Bui, “Q&A with Thi Bui: Writer, Illustrator, Teacher,” interview by Terry Hong, Bloom, June 13, 2017. Web. https://bloom-site.com/2017/06/13/qa-with-thi-bui-writer-illustrator-teacher/. Now a parent, Bui’s identity is no longer structured by the past and the country she left behind. Through constructing a narrative of her family’s history, Bui is able to remember in order to move on, relinquishing her claim on Vietnam as a homeland and embracing a future focused on the life she has created.  Works Cited Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Bradsher, Keith. "Hugh Van Es, Photojournalist Who Covered Vietnam, Dies at 67." The New York Times, May 15, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/16/business/media/16vanes.html. Bui, Thi. The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir. New York City, NY: Abrams ComicArts, 2017. Cvetkovich, Ann. "Drawing the Archive in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home." Women's Studies Quarterly 36, no. 1 & 2 (2008): 111-28. doi:10.1353/wsq.0.0037. Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. Nguyen, Viet Thanh. Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Nibbs, Faith G., and Caroline Brettell. Identity and the Second Generation: How Children of Immigrants Find Their Space. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2016. Pedri, Nancy. "Thinking About Photography in Comics." Image & Narrative 16, no. 2 (2015): 1-13. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York, NY: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1977. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. Van Es, Hubert. "Thirty Years at 300 Millimeters." The New York Times, April 29, 2005. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/29/opinion/thirty-years-at-300-millimeters.html. Winslow, Donald R. "The Pulitzer Eddie Adams Didn't Want." The New York Times, April 19, 2011. https://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/19/the-pulitzer-eddie-adams-didn’t  fig. 1 Eddie Adams, Saigon Execution, 1968 Courtesy The New York Times fig. 2 Thi Bui, The Best We Could Do, 206. fig. 3 Bui, 209. fig. 4 Bui, 211. fig. 5 Hubert Van Es, The Fall of Saigon, 1975. Courtesy The New York Times. fig. 6 Bui, 135. fig. 7 Bui, 193. fig. 8 Bui, 196. fig. 9 Bui, 267. 25