Famous Vietnam Evacuation Photo Mislabeled for Decades, Says Photog

By: E&P Staff It's one of the most famous and widely published news photographs of the past century: An American helicopter taking off, it was said, from the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, exactly 30 years ago today, as the North Vietnamese took the city, leaving a line of potential evacuees behind. It worked as a breaking news photo, and as metaphor.

There's just one problem. For 30 years, says the photographer who shot it, that photo has been improperly captioned in newspapers and other media. The scene pictured, he writes today, actually transpired on the roof of something called the Pittman Apartments in downtown Saigon, where the CIA station chief and his associates lived.

The photographer, Hubert Van Es writes in a New York Times Op-Ed this morning that "like so many things about the Vietnam War, it's not exactly what it seems." He reveals that he "very clearly" labeled the scene at the time, but apparently "editors didn't read captions carefully in those days, and they just took it for granted that it was the embassy roof, since that was the main evacuation site."

One newspaper that apparently did get it right at the time: The New York Times. A search of archives for the paper for April 30, 1975, shows that it ran the photo on page one, with the caption: "A crewman for an American helicopter helping evacuees to the top of a building in Saigon for fllight to a U.S. carrier."

But Van Es writes that the wrong labeling that did often appear "has been carried on in the form of incorrect captions for decades. My efforts to correct the misunderstanding were futile, and eventually I gave up."

Van Es also describes his decision to stay in the city when others fled. He currently lives in Hong Kong. The photo in 1975 carried a UPI credit. It is now credited to Bettman/Corbis.