Eddie Adams: What A Guy

(CBS)  You may have seen in the paper that the great Associated Press photographer Eddie Adams died. He was 71. It was Lou Gehrig's disease. Eddie won the Pulitzer for a picture he took in Vietnam of a South Vietnamese colonel executing a Viet Cong agent, a picture he came to hate after he learned the agent had killed the colonel's family.

When I was a young newspaper reporter in Vietnam, Eddie and I often traveled together and we had a deal. He taught me how to cover a war and take pictures. In return, I caught cut-lines for him. That is, I took down the names of the people he photographed and wrote captions for his pictures.

He was as brave a guy as I ever knew and traveling with him had its moments. Once, when a Buddhist riot broke out and the American government didn't want us to cover it, an American MP pulled his pistol and told us to come no further. Eddie raised his camera and said, 'OK, you pulled that pistol. Now just use it.' The problem was the MP was aiming at me, not at Eddie. We talked our way out of it and later Eddie just laughed and said he was pretty sure the guy was just bluffing.

Eddie's friend Pete Hamill wrote this week that whenever he saw Eddie after the war, Eddie would always remark on what a glorious day it was. And so he did. Because long after the rhetoric is spent, long after the generals' explanations and the politicians' debates over who was right and who was wrong has ended, what those who are sent to fight our wars and those who have seen the killing up close always remember first is simply that they survived to see another day.

Eddie Adams, what a guy.


By Bob Schieffer