The Death of Hugo Van Es

Hugh's famous picture was often believed to show a helicopter evacuating people from the roof of the US embassy in Saigon . In fact it was an apartment building that housed employees of the CIA.

"Like so many things about the Vietnam war, it's not exactly what it seems," he wrote in the New York Times in 2005.

Van Es was part of what became a famous generation of reporters and photographers who covered the Vietnam war, and many of those colleagues were quick to pay tribute to him on Friday.

"His sunny demeanour endeared him to his colleagues and to the American and Vietnamese soldiers he photographed," Peter Arnett told AFP.

Arnett called him "one of the few Western photographers willing to take the risks of witnessing the war's end."