The Bow That Shocked the World
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The American war in Vietnam, lasting from 1964 to 1973, is widely considered history’s first “television war.” Through television and other mass media, images of the conflict were brought directly into American homes, allowing viewers to experience the horrors of war in near real-time. As covered in our previous video What is Napalm Anyway and Who Invented It? some of these images, like that of badly-burned Vietnamese girl Phan The Kim Phuc fleeing her recently-bombed village, would help turn public opinion against the war. Others, however, had a more galvanizing effect. In April 1967, LIFE magazine ran a photograph by correspondent Lee Lockwood, showing Lieutenant Commander Richard A. Stratton, an American prisoner of war, bowing submissively before his North Vietnam captors. This image exposed the brutal regime of mistreatment and torture inflicted by the North Vietnamese on captured American servicemen, sparking widespread outrage and leading to a dramatic shift in the prosecution of the war. This is the disturbing story of the Stratton Incident, the bow that shocked a nation.