Connecting Historical Dots

I had an interesting reminder last night as I watched my usual recorded copy of yesterday's Jeopardy game show. One of the questions asked about a man we met one time - thirty years ago. In 1977, we'd just moved to Fairfax, VA and we enjoyed going to a small pizza restaurant in Burke. The owner of the place was a kind Vietnamese man who would come over to our table and pick up Deborah, who was only only six or seven months old at the time, and carry her around the restaurant, introducing her to employees and customers alike. We always enjoyed going there and enjoyed the nice owner who was so friendly. Then one day my sister Becky, and her husband Mark, asked us if we recognized the man. There was something that had always seemed familiar about him, but I couldn't figure out what it was. I'd always been a news nut and never missed Walter at 6:00 every night. So when they told me he was the man in one of the most famous pictures from the Vietnam War, the old proverbial light clicked on. This was one of the shocking pictures from that war that became one of the many symbols for the anti-war folks for why we shouldn't be there. This is the guy who had been carrying my daughter around.
He was South Vietnamese General Nguyen Ngoc Loan and the photographer just happened to walk around the corner and snap this picture the second he fired one shot into the Viet Cong officers head, dropping him instantly. Of course, like most controversial photographs, there was more to the story than the picture could tell. The VC officer had just killed at least eight people. Just a few years later, the good general was running a pizza restaurant in Northern Virginia and holding my daughter. Isn't history an interesting thing?