Liberated by the Viet Cong, nine photographs from a St. Louis student committee
A 1968 St. Louis student committee poster set nine photos of civilian dead under "Liberated by the Viet Cong" to argue the U.S. must keep its commitment.
Techniques named on the archive record
Fear appealCard stacking
Date
1968
Made by
National Student Committee for Victory in Vietnam (St. Louis, Missouri)
Medium
Poster
Country
United States
Regime
Johnson Administration
Source
Identified Openly sourced: the speaker is who they say they are
Source
Library of Congress , retrieved October 2, 2026
Source
U.S. publication without copyright notice; LoC: no known restrictions on publication Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print
Object, image, and catalog record from the FRAME archive. Text on this page is CC BY 4.0. Image rights are as the archive records.
Liberated by the Viet Cong is a 1968 poster distributed by the National Student Committee for Victory in Vietnam, of St. Louis, Missouri. Nine photographs of dead and wounded civilians, each captioned as a Viet Cong killing, are offered as "only a sample" of what South Vietnamese could expect if the United States failed to keep its commitment.
What it prints
Content note: the poster shows photographs of dead and wounded civilians, some with bound hands.
The archive describes a wide sheet with nine black-and-white photographs. Each has a short caption naming the Viet Cong as the killers and giving a year from 1964 to 1968. The headline puts "liberate" in the enemy's mouth and turns it around. One caption puts the word in quotation marks.
- LIBERATED BY THE VIET CONG -
[...]
Two of over 70 bodies exhumed from mass graves in the yard of Gia Hoi primary school show hands still tied as they were assassinated three weeks prior during the TET offensive to "liberate" the imperial city of Hue.
[...]
This is only a sample of what many South Vietnamese can expect should the United States fail to fulfill our commitment to those valiant people.
DISTRIBUTED BY: NATIONAL STUDENT COMMITTEE FOR VICTORY IN VIETNAM, 21[illegible] North Clay Avenue, St. Louis, Missouri 63122
Who made it
The poster names its distributor, the National Student Committee for Victory in Vietnam, with a St. Louis address. FRAME codes the issuer as a movement, the audience as the domestic public, and the source as openly identified. The copy is from the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, retrieved 2 October 2026, recorded as a U.S. publication without copyright notice.
How to read it
FRAME tags fear appeal and card stacking, and its description notes what the sheet leaves out: the photographs have no credits and the captions give no sources. Some captions name a place and a date; others say only "Killed by Viet Cong terrorists, 1966." A reader is asked to accept the attribution of every death on the strength of the caption.
That matters because the argument at the foot is a policy argument. The poster says American failure to keep "our commitment" would bring more of the same. It is a legitimate thing for citizens to argue, and a student group printing it under its own name and address is free speech working as intended. The weakness is in the evidence. Unsourced photographs of atrocities ask for trust they do not earn on the page.
FRAME object record, Liberated by the Viet Cong, 1968. National Student Committee for Victory in Vietnam (St. Louis, Missouri).
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, item 2015649398, retrieved by the archive 2 October 2026. Rights as recorded: U.S. publication without copyright notice; no known restrictions on publication.
