Eddie Adams made me weep long before I knew his name.
With his camera he caught the faces of the Vietnam War: soldiers hardened too young, barefoot children with dead eyes, burned villages with smoke still hanging in the air, mothers collapsed around their dead. His photos seared the front pages of newspapers around the world, making the war painfully real.
The chilling execution of a handcuffed prisoner on a Saigon street caught in a split second just as the bullet slammed against the helpless man's head is the one that would change Adams' life and the war along with it.
Titled "Saigon Execution," the 1968 photo would win him a Pulitzer, but over the years much more of Adams' work would move, shock, uplift, unite and sadden us, as we discover in Susan Morgan Cooper's love letter of a documentary, "An Unlikely Weapon."
Just about everyone starts smiling as they talk about Adams, a sardonic old soul even in his early years. And Adams on camera doesn't disappoint. He wears disdain like armor. His assessment of the Pulitzer photo? Badly composed, bad lighting.
He shrugs, he swears, he shakes his head in disgust. Yet you feel the caring behind the cursing, feeding into the photos he takes. What his contemporaries saw was an artist's eye.
Cooper uses wide-ranging talks with Adams, other photographers, his family and a cadre of journalists on the ground with him during the war, including Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw, to create a picture of a complex mind with a gift for capturing humanity and inhumanity with heartbreaking force.
We first encounter him walking down a New York street more than 30 years after Vietnam, wearing the black fedora that was his signature and talking about the meaning of a life's work. "Nobody gives a damn, we're all going to die, we're disposable," he says.
When war would wear him out -- he covered 13 of them -- he would come back to the States and shoot celebrities and presidents for magazines such as Time, Life, Parade and Penthouse.
As Adams talks, or narrator Kiefer Sutherland fills in the gaps, his photos fill the screen. It can feel like a family album, so familiar do they seem. President Ronald Reagan pumping iron, Mother Teresa on the streets of Calcutta, singer Marc Anthony caught midleap in a gritty alley.
