Navy’s first Vietnamese admiral survives family massacre at hands of executed man in immortal war photo from 1968

The navy’s first Viet­namese admi­ral near­ly lost his life as a child dur­ing the Viet­nam War and was forced to pre­tend to be dead to sur­vive, even­tu­al­ly escap­ing from his coun­try of birth.

In 1968, at the age of 9, Huang Nguyen was involved in an inci­dent in which a pho­tog­ra­ph­er cap­tured an image that became world-famous.

Pho­tog­ra­ph­er Eddie Adams took pic­tures of Bay Lop, a Viet Cong guer­ril­la being exe­cut­ed by South Viet­namese Gen­er­al Nguyen Ngoc Loan.

In 1968, the pho­to was pub­lished in news­pa­pers around the world and served as proof that war was unjust, and spurred anti-war protests in the Unit­ed States.

But Adams, a for­mer Marine Corps pho­tog­ra­ph­er, says there’s more to this pho­to than meets the eye.

Bei Lop, the sub­ject of the pho­to, was exe­cut­ed after mass mur­der­ing six peo­ple in Saigon, Huang Nguyen’s father, Colonel Nguyen Tuan of South Viet­nam, and his wife, moth­er, and chil­dren (five boys and one girl).

Despite receiv­ing three bul­lets to his arm, thigh and skull, Huang Nguyen sur­vived. He lay next to his moth­er’s body for two hours after the cold-blood­ed mur­der, accord­ing to Military.com.

After dark, Nguyen man­aged to escape the com­mu­nist guer­ril­las and went to live with his uncle, a colonel in the South Viet­nam Air Force.

After the fall of Saigon in 1975, the Colonel and Nguyen, now a 16-year-old nephew, fled to the Unit­ed States.

They were just two of about 125,000 Viet­namese refugees who fled to the Unit­ed States after the fall of South Viet­nam to North Viet­namese forces.