Inside the Battle Over ‘Napalm Girl’

S
aigon, Vietnam, June 8, 1972. Just before sunrise, a small group of newsmen slid into combat fatigues and safari jackets before slipping through the waking city in a convoy of vans and rental cars. As they sped northwest, they snaked past legions of people seeking refuge, a silent cortege of poverty and misery. Burdened with all they could carry and cradling children in their arms, the civilians formed a great river of sorrow flowing south as the newsmen scurried north for their rendezvous with the war.

The journalists were racing some 30 miles to a town called Trảng Bàng, to cover the third day of a North Vietnamese offensive against the South Vietnamese army. For most of the them, the day would end as routinely as it had begun. Once there, the journalists loitered on the road and waited; they smoked, talked, checked equipment, then smoked and talked some more. It was shaping up to be another unexceptional day in an already decade-long war — 99 percent waiting, one percent action. Among the group were several South Vietnamese military photographers, including a trained cinematographer and photographer who sometimes freelanced for local press to supplement his meager salary. Sometime around midday, he saw a white flare drop on the town and shouted to his colleagues that an airstrike was incoming. 

Two South Vietnamese A-1 Skyraiders released a stick of napalm canisters, which cascaded like airborne baguettes onto the primrose-yellow Cao Đài temple. But the bombers hit the wrong target. The pilots incinerated their own soldiers and a group of women and children who had been seeking sanctuary from the war in a place of prayer. 

The village of Trảng Bàng exploded in fire and was consumed by black smoke. Soon the group of women and children, napalm on their clothes and burning into their skin, fled from the scorching temple, bolted through a field, turned onto Highway 1 headed southeast, and raced toward the line of men — troops from the army that had just bombed them and the group of journalists dressed like soldiers.

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Alan Downes, a cameraman with Independent Television News, was on his knees. He told a colleague he couldn’t film what was happening before his lens, yet he managed to compose himself and capture the pain. He focused on the children in his viewfinder: a nine-year-old girl named Phan Thị Kim Phúc and four others, running toward his rolling camera, screaming.

Kim Phúc, her brothers, and her cousins ran past Downes, who was with two other TV crews and a stills photographer — six men lined up across a two-lane highway, filming the children as they approached. In a fraction of a second, a photographer snapped what would become one of the most celebrated photographs of all time, often called “Napalm Girl” or “The Terror of War.”

The devastating black-and-white image — so cruel it dares you to look away — has become a defining depiction of America’s most brutal war: a naked girl running, her skin smoldering from napalm. The photograph captures, like few others, war’s raw violence, inhumanity, and despair. It is the deliberate work of a gifted photographer who instinctively grasped what was in front of him and created a decisive image that would ricochet within hours into the world’s conscience, where it still lives 53 years later. The documentation of pain and suffering would win a Pulitzer, galvanize the antiwar effort, and turn a photographer into an overnight sensation. The British war photographer Sir Don McCullin has called it the best photograph of the conflict. Susan Sontag proclaimed it “the signature Vietnam War horror-photograph.” 

The photo has always been credited to a Vietnamese Associated Press staff photographer, Huỳnh Công “Nick” Út, who was on the road that day. Út has told many stories over the decades about the horrific attack and his work. But a few years back, rumors began circulating among my colleagues in the photojournalism community that Út did not make that image.

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For the past two years, I have been part of a team, along with award-winning producers Fiona Turner (to whom I am married) and Terri Lichstein (formerly of ABC News), reporting on the photograph’s origins. Our investigation is the subject of a new independent documentary film, which I also executive-produced, called The Stringer. Multiple on-the-record sources stepped forward during our reporting to dispute the accounts of Út and the AP. We also commissioned a forensic-analysis team to examine the available data, images, and film from that day. Their conclusion: What we have been told for more than 50 years about who took the most indelible photograph of the war is unlikely to be true.

Who took the photo does not change its profound impact, but it does alter some of what we know about the culture of the Saigon press corps during the glory days of war correspondence. And our film has caused disruption and fierce anger among veteran photographers all these decades later. Starting before The Stringer had even premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, a handful of journalists from the Vietnam era, as well as friends of Nick Út, were calling for the film to be shelved — despite never having seen it. Others have contacted employers of people who support the film, condemning their stance and threatening to sever business ties over the issue.

This visceral reaction might be because The Stringer probes more than the authorship of a single photograph. It invites conversations about the potency and mutability of memory, our collective desire for uplifting narratives and uncomplicated heroes, and a grasping for certainties where there may be none to be found. The revised history also questions the behavior of colleagues we have put on pedestals and whose careers inspired others to follow. And it does so in the face of a photograph that is foundational, as is the period of journalism it represents. What is happening in the photograph is not in dispute, but a great deal of what happened outside of it is.

Both Út and the AP declined to be interviewed for the film. An attorney for Út tells Rolling Stone his client “had no intention of helping Knight … by participating in Knight’s defamatory efforts.” The AP says it “declined to enter a nondisclosure agreement with the filmmakers.” (In a letter from July 2024, the filmmakers asked the AP to “agree to an embargo” until “an agreed upon date of publication.”) 

On May 6, the AP released a 97-page report that marked the culmination of what it says was its own yearlong investigation into the photograph, including analysis of footage from the scene, interviews with Út and “others in the AP office that day,” and a 3D-model reconstruction of the event. The results, according to an introductory summary: “AP has concluded that it is possible Nick Út took the photo. However, that cannot be proven definitively due to the passage of time, the death of many of the key players involved, and the limitations of technology. New findings uncovered during this investigation do raise unanswered questions, and AP remains open to the possibility that Út did not take this photo.” The summary of findings goes on to state: “AP’s standards say ‘a challenged credit would be removed only if definitive evidence … showed that the person who claimed to have taken the photo did not.’ All available evidence analyzed by AP does not clear that bar. Thus, the photo will remain attributed to Út.”

In June, the Amsterdam-based nonprofit World Press Photo, which in 1973 awarded Út the Photo of the Year for “Napalm Girl,” released a report on its own five-month investigation into the photograph, which determined “its authorship cannot be definitively established.” Drawing on material from both The Stringer and the AP report, as well as its own archival research and interviews, World Press found that “the cumulative evidence strongly suggests that it is highly unlikely that Nick Út is the author of ‘The Terror of War’ photograph.” The organization stripped Út’s credit from the photo. (Út’s attorney says World Press “never sought any input” from Út after an initial outreach — a claim the organization denies — and alleges they had “made up their mind to punish Nick Út from the start.” The attorney also cites a letter signed by 640 photographers urging World Press to rescind its decision and restore Út’s credit.)

Út’s first, and for a time only, public comment after the film’s release was a statement he posted to Facebook in February, which read, in part, “I took the photo of Kim Phúc. I took the other photos from that day that show her family and the devastation the war caused. No one else has the right to claim that I did not take that specific or any other photo attributed to me because I am the creator of all the work I’ve done since day one.” Út added that “this accusation […] is a slap in the face of everyone who dedicated their entire lives, careers to creating authentic, real and true images in very difficult situations like the Vietnam War.”

In a statement provided to Rolling Stone, Út’s lawyer disputes the findings laid out in The Stringer based on several factors, including the accounts of numerous eyewitnesses on the scene that day who still believe Út took the photo; the AP’s investigation, which concluded Út could have been in position to take it; and the 50 years that passed before another photojournalist, whom he claims has a “vendetta” against Út, surfaced allegations about its origins. The statement begins with a simple declaration: “Nick Út took the famous image.” 

THE MEN AND WOMEN who covered Vietnam as journalists were a decidedly mixed cast. There were seasoned reporters who’d covered World War II and had a hard time believing they were being misled by U.S. officials. Young Ivy Leaguers like David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, and Fox Butterfield brought their privilege to the front. And wigged-out stoners like my friend and mentor Tim Page and his pal Sean Flynn hitched rides to the darkest zones of the war carrying Nikons, Leicas, and “uppers” and “downers.” Some photographers there were already legendary — Philip Jones Griffiths, Don McCullin, and Larry Burrows. Some were becoming so, like the female war reporters and photographers who battled prejudice and emerged on the scene, including the spectacularly courageous Australian Kate Webb, the French Catherine Leroy and Françoise Demulder, and the Americans Elizabeth Becker and Frances FitzGerald.

“Kim Phúc emerged from the smoke crying and on fire. It was very powerful.”

New York Times photographer Fox Butterfield

The Vietnamese journalists operating in combat zones didn’t include Ivy Leaguers, didn’t include women, and didn’t include men who could afford to go to war stoned; they had too much at stake. They reported on the disintegration of their own country during the day and managed the needs of their families at night. There were dozens of freelance and staff Vietnamese journalists crisscrossing the country for every agency and broadcaster. They were ubiquitous, indefatigable, and extraordinarily brave. The backbone of the press corps, many of them died and have been overlooked in the retelling of the war. Other than Nick Út, the Vietnamese have been mostly whitewashed from the history of the journalism of their own war.

The regular AP reporting staff in Saigon in early 1972 comprised bureau chief Richard Pyle, American correspondents George Esper and Mike Putzel, chief Vietnamese reporter Huỳnh Minh Trinh, as well as photo editor Carl Robinson and photojournalists Lê Ngọc Cung, Đặng Văn Phước, and Út. The 1972 offensive had been wretched for AP, which was being regularly beaten by its main rival, United Press International. With four Pulitzer Prizes in Vietnam since 1963, AP wasn’t accustomed to being second-best. This could be why the AP bosses sent in more manpower, including Peter Arnett, Mort Rosenblum, Yuichi “Jackson” Ishizaki, and the legendary photographer and regional chief photo editor Horst Faas. Faas’ job: Beat UPI back into second place and win the photo coverage. 

Faas was born in 1933. A child of Nazi Germany, he lived in Berlin and, in his own telling, was a member of the Hitler Youth in World War II. He once told me his trench was overrun by Russians who killed or executed everyone around him and that he was saved by a Russian sergeant who told him to go home to his mother. He spent the following years living in a divided, impoverished postwar society. Photojournalism offered him an escape route, and he seized it. Faas had a colossal aura in Vietnam — Falstaffian, fueled by fine wine and refined food, able to entertain for hours with his great sense of humor. He could be distant, gruff, and intimidating, and he was also capable of great generosity, loyalty, and compassion. He covered the Vietnam War for 12 years, proving instrumental in four of AP’s eventual five Pulitzer Prizes from the war and helping to create what became a mythical news bureau. If the war in Vietnam marked the pinnacle of war journalism, and AP had a legendary perch in that war, much of it was due to Faas.

I met Faas in London in the early 1990s, when I was a young photographer working in the war in Bosnia. He was then in his sixties and had mellowed, but he had a real presence. He was at the time head of AP Photos for Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, and was close to retirement. He invoked admiration and respect in young photographers who had worked for him during the Balkan wars. He was a company man: He loved AP, and AP came first — but if you worked hard and delivered the goods, he would back you in the field. By then, he wore a suit to work, enjoyed long, boozy lunches in El Vino on Fleet Street, rode his Brompton bike to the office, and relished his role as a revered elder statesman.

Faas, Tim Page, and I worked together to train young photographers in Vietnam in the early 2000s. You could tell that Faas loved giving back, and he was a great teacher, direct and concise. His commitment to Vietnam to the end of his life was as unequivocal as his commitment to journalism and the AP.

In the years following the war, Nick Út was accruing a kind of global celebrity that was rare for a photographer. I never met Út back then, but I was aware of the awards and international acclaim he was earning. For “Napalm Girl,” he had been celebrated with a Pulitzer Prize, the World Press Photo of the Year, the Overseas Press Club of America award, the George Polk Award, and, later, the U.S. National Medal of Arts. He met heads of state, the pope, and the queen of England. The AP posted him to Tokyo, and then Los Angeles, where he worked for the next 40 years. He seemed to me a worthy advocate for photojournalism as he traveled around the world with Kim Phúc, a United Nations ambassador and advocate for peace. Now, in retirement, he still travels the globe giving speeches and presentations.

In early November 2022, I was asked to teach a workshop in Hanoi the following spring with Nick Út and the storied war photographer James Nachtwey, in memory of Tim Page, who had recently died. It didn’t take long to decide to go. Vietnam is where my children come from and has special meaning in my family. I was keen to reconnect with my old friend James, who I hadn’t seen for a while, to meet Nick for the first time, and to do something for young Vietnamese photographers in memory of my old mentor Tim.

But before embarking to Vietnam, on the 23rd of December, I was at my Massachusetts home when I happened to check my junk-mail folder. I opened a message that had sat there for nearly a month.

Dear Gary:

Through Mort Rosenblum from a while back, I am wondering if we could discuss the Napalm Girl photo and its provenance. I may be of assistance — and vice versa.

Best regards,
Carl Robinson

Carl Robinson had been the AP photo editor in Vietnam in June 1972. He had typed out the caption on the print of Kim Phúc that was transmitted from Saigon on June 8. Robinson was referring to information that I and a mutual friend, the former AP bureau chief Mort Rosenblum, had discussed on another, earlier teaching gig in Vietnam. Robinson was in Vietnam at the time, and recalls visiting the workshop and talking to Mort. My memory of those interactions is incomplete, but I recall Mort telling me that the AP photo editor working in Saigon in June 1972 had recently told him that Út hadn’t taken the photograph known as “Napalm Girl.” Mort and I continued to talk about this when we met over the following year or two, but we all moved on; rumors aren’t uncommon in our field.

I responded to Robinson’s email, asking for context. A lengthy follow-up message mentioned Faas, Út, photographers for the South Vietnamese army (ARVN), and Peter Arnett, an AP journalist who had won the 1966 Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting for his work in Vietnam. Robinson’s detail was extraordinary:

We had several rolls of black & white film of the incident, Nick Út’s and those of three Vietnamese freelancers, often official ARVN photographers, out making extra money.   

As usual, under Horst’s system, each roll was meticulously logged in with a double set of stick-on numbers: first beside the photographer’s name in a school exercise book and second on the actual roll of film for processing in the darkroom. 

The two pictures Jackson had already chosen and printed up focused on the girl — one full-frontal running towards the camera, and [another] from the side as she ran past […] We both hesitated.   

AP had a thing — not actual policy — about showing any nudity, even boys and girls. […] Well, the side shot, then. Discreet but still dramatic, Jackson and I agreed. As I prepared to type up the caption for the radio-photo and short-wave transmission to Tokyo, I double-checked the strips of film negatives and their numbers for the byline on our chosen picture. The side shot was from Nick Út and the full-on shot from a freelance photographer.

Then, Horst Faas walked back into the photo office from his long lunch down at Le Royal with his longtime colleague Peter Arnett, who was also back in Saigon for the Easter Offensive. Horst looked at what Jackson and I were doing. As I pointed out, we really couldn’t see [using] the girl’s naked frontage, which even seemed to show pubic hair.   

Pointing straight at that picture, Horst ordered, “No, we will go with this one.” He checked the negative, ordered a tighter crop, and sent Jackson back into the darkroom for a new print. 

…I began typing the caption on our hulking Underwood typewriter. SAI, for Saigon, a hyphen and then a number; the dateline; the date of June 8; and a tight three lines about the picture. Horst hovered over my right shoulder as I typed.   

Typically, at the end of each radio-photo caption came the photographer’s by-line with an “stf/name” for a Staffer or “str/name” for a Stringer, or freelancer. And that’s when Faas leant into my ear and ordered me to put Nick Út’s name on the picture — and I just did it. I didn’t argue back. 

Reading Robinson’s second email, I understood that if what he said was true, if the name on this photo had been changed deliberately, this was of enormous importance. Public trust is fundamental to the value of journalism, and if the press wants to hold the rest of society to account, it has to start with itself. (Út’s attorney condemns Robinson’s “50 year + delay” in making his claim public, and accuses him of “intentionally waiting” until Faas and other “key witnesses had passed.” He also alleges that Robinson has “clear animus toward Nick Út and the AP, as disclosed in his own book and other correspondence.”)

I couldn’t let my doubts go this time. Further examination was needed. Importantly, if Út didn’t take the photograph, who did? With Fiona Turner and Terri Lichstein, I embarked on an intense preliminary investigation. We read every book and essay on the matter we could find, reviewed all of the available photographs and film, and talked to as many eyewitnesses as we could trace, including David Burnett, who was then a young photographer on assignment for The New York Times, and Mort Rosenblum. We wanted as much information as we could get before we went to Vietnam, where I hoped to teach the workshop and interview — and perhaps challenge — Robinson.

In March 2023, I arrived in Hanoi with James Nachtwey and Nick Út. It was awkward; I considered talking to Út about the accusations, but until I had interviewed Robinson and determined whether what he said was credible, it was premature to confront Út. I would just be repeating a rumor. The following week, I flew to Ho Chi Minh City to meet Turner and Lichstein and to interview Robinson, who was by then close to 80.

Years earlier, Robinson had created a Google Group, Vietnam Old Hacks, an online forum for veteran Vietnam War reporters dozens of members strong; his claims that Út didn’t take the photo, which until then had been shared only between small groups of colleagues, resurfaced there. Those who question why Robinson took so long to come forward, and why others have been so reluctant to speak, might find some answers in those pages. Former Newsweek correspondent Paul Brinkley-Rogers reacted to Robinson’s allegation by likening him to “a snake hissing in the dark.” Journalist Barry Fox had responded with a bit of catnip: “Alan Downes, the ITN cameraman who was there and shot the news film of the ‘Napalm Girl’ story, denied that Út was even there. Downes told me this shortly after Út won the award. He was as much baffled as anything else.” Peter Arnett — who wasn’t on the road in Trảng Bàng or in the bureau when the film was being processed in the darkroom — had tried to discourage Robinson in 2009, writing, “You must be aware that the AP with all its resources, and Horst and his many friends, along with Nick Út himself and his Vietnamese associates, and all those AP staffers who take pride in their Vietnam service, will do everything possible to discredit you and your assertions, and challenge all of what you say.” (AP tells Rolling Stone, “It’s clear from the time and resources AP has dedicated to investigating this claim that we’ve taken the question about the authorship of its image extremely seriously.”)

“This accusation is a slap in the face of everyone who dedicated their lives to creating images in difficult situations like the Vietnam War.”

Nick Út

Downes was an esteemed cameraman with ITN for decades. His harrowing footage from Trảng Bàng had enhanced his reputation. But Downes had died in 1996 and could not confirm for us his bafflement. That Út was there is beyond doubt; we see him in photographs and film from that day, and we know he shot many photos while there. But buried in Downes’ footage was a piece of evidence that has been hidden in plain view for 50 years.

Downes had filmed many of the journalists present at the scene of the photograph. (Those who weren’t in his film are in still photographs made that day.) In particular, Downes was one of the six people in the group of newsmen closest to fleeing civilians, all of whom were capturing Kim Phúc and the other children as they ran toward them.

Kim Phúc has written powerfully about her experiences, and makes it clear she believes Út took the photo, stating that one of her uncles and other journalists and eyewitnesses have told her so. In a statement issued in January, she said, in part, “Nick took the image and he deserves the credit he has received. He is a good man who fully deserves to be treated with respect, dignity, and kindness. I am so thankful he was not just a photographer. He is my hero for putting down his camera […] and saving my life.” 

She has also noted that she has no memory of who took the famous photograph. In her autobiography, Fire Road, she writes, “The sum of what I know from that day and the days to follow, I owe to Uncle Út. His memories became my memories.” It is a poignant statement, not just in what it shows about the depth of her trauma, but also the kindness and generosity she feels has been shown to her by Út.

We began to compile a list of the surviving eyewitnesses to the moment, which included Út; Hoàng Văn Danh, a freelancer sending photos to UPI; Fox Butterfield of The New York Times; Donald Kirk of the Chicago Tribune;  David Burnett; Trần Văn Thân, an NBC soundman; Christopher Wain, the ITN TV correspondent who worked with Downes; and a man in a white shirt, black trousers, and a black vest, who we were told went by the name of Nghệ.

WHILE ÚT REFUSED MULTIPLE requests to talk to me, he has been interviewed many times about the day’s events, and his account is widely available. Although his story has become accepted as fact, he has told slightly different variations, embellishing some details over time. In a more recent telling — an opinion piece he wrote for The Washington Post in June 2022 — Út offers this description:

When the bombs exploded, we didn’t know whether anyone had been injured. All morning, the village had seemed empty. But many people were hiding inside the village temple.

As we came closer, we saw people fleeing the napalm. I was horrified when I saw a woman with her left leg badly burned. I can still see so vividly the old woman carrying a baby who died in front of my camera and another woman carrying a small child with his skin coming off.

Then I heard a child screaming, “Nong qua! Nong qua!” Too hot! Too hot! I looked through my Leica viewfinder to see a young girl who had pulled off her burning clothes and was running toward me. I started taking pictures of her.

Then she yelled to her brother that she thought she was dying and wanted some water. I instantly put my cameras down so I could help her. I knew that was more important than taking more photos. I took my canteen for her to drink and poured water on her body to cool her off, but it created more pain for her. I didn’t know that when people get burned so badly, you’re not supposed to put water on them.

One problem with Út’s account is the camera. He has frequently told the story of using a spare Leica M2 to make this decisive frame. But the AP investigation found that the camera used to make the photograph was “unlikely” to have been a Leica, and especially not the camera Út donated to the Science Museum in London, where it was displayed as the camera that took the famous photo. Different brands of cameras produce slightly different-sized negatives, and by examining the dimensions of the negative, AP determined that “Napalm Girl” was “likely” made with a Pentax. A Pentax and a Leica M2 bear little resemblance to each other and, for a professional photographer, would be difficult to confuse.

Út’s attorney tells Rolling Stone that Út inherited two Pentax cameras from his brother, a photographer who had been killed on assignment for AP, and “carried [one of them] every day as a talisman.” He continues, “Nick Út has explained that the day the photo was taken, Horst Faas complimented him and told him it was a great Leica picture. At the time, Nick was 21 years old and certainly listened to his boss and mentor. He knew Horst was a Leica proponent and accepted Horst’s statement. Nick used multiple cameras that day and turned in eight rolls. He could not possibly know in the chaos of that day which roll came from which camera.”

How Faas would have been able to differentiate a Leica negative from a Pentax negative with his naked eye is difficult to fathom; they are nearly indistinguishable but for a difference in size of fractions of millimeters. 

Another wrinkle in Út’s account is the timeline. In the past, he’s claimed he was photographing the elder woman and, through his viewfinder, saw Kim Phúc running down the road. Yet an examination of photographs and footage from the day indicates that Kim Phúc came out of the village before the elder woman, and she fled very soon after the napalm hit. As Kim Phúc runs toward the camera, the smoke from the burning fuel is still so black it is not even possible to see the Cao Đài temple. By the time the elder woman came down the road carrying the baby, the wind — which historical weather reports indicate was at its strongest right after the bombing — had dispersed most of the smoke, and the temple had become visible. In ITN’s film footage, we see that Kim Phúc and the children have run past the camera significantly before the elder woman comes into view. Út’s photographs of the elder woman appear to have been made after Kim Phúc ran down the road, not before. 

Út’s attorney tells Rolling Stone, “Seeing all the footage and other images that have now been shown to Nick, he is convinced he was confused by the chaotic events that unfolded that day as to the sequence.” Being confused in combat is understandable; it happens to many of us, and it might suggest the possibility that this is not the only important detail about which Út could be confused. 

In the films and photographs made that day, Út is visible wearing his distinctive helmet with a tab sticking out of it, a flak jacket with “AP” written on the back, short sleeves, his camera bag, poncho, and watch. Burnett has often noted how his friend Út took the photo while he, Burnett, missed it because he was rewinding his film. He’s said he recalls seeing Út run up the road with Newsweek stringer Alex Shimkin. Burnett has repeatedly said he did not see who took the photograph, but he is convinced Út did, saying that, to his recollection, Út was the only person in the right position to have gotten the shot. Butterfield, who also maintains Út took the photograph, told us in August 2024, “Kim Phúc emerged from the smoke crying and on fire. It was very powerful. Not sure who else was there. I wasn’t paying attention to [Út], I didn’t know him at that time. I was moving all the time, because the scene was moving, and we didn’t know what was going to happen next.” 

When pressed, neither Burnett nor Butterfield is able to say they actually witnessed Út take the photograph, and no one else has come forward to say definitively that they saw him take the photo. Burnett has referred to a lone photographer we can see beyond the concertina wire earlier in the sequence as Út, which might make it possible for Út to have been in the right place at the right time. But that is not Út; we believe it’s a military photographer, later identified by the AP as Huỳnh Công Phúc. (Both AP and World Press, in their own investigations, concluded based on available footage that Huỳnh Công Phúc could plausibly have been in the right area to take the “Napalm Girl” photograph, though no one has to this point come forward claiming he did. Huỳnh Công Phúc died in 2009.) The military photographer is carrying a bag and wearing camouflage, not the U.S. military olive-green that Út was wearing; he wasn’t wearing a flak jacket, as Út was, and he bears no resemblance to the person Út identified as himself that day years later on his own Instagram feed. And besides, the picture of that lone photographer beyond the wire is credited to Út in the AP archive, in which case Út couldn’t be in the photograph. We know the TV crews and photographer who made the images of Kim Phúc all moved beyond the concertina wire. In one intriguing photo, we see a photographer in a white shirt and black vest photographing the children as they run past the TV crews, putting him in an ideal place to have taken the photograph moments before.

HOW DO YOU FIND SOMEONE maybe called Nghệ with nothing but a 50-year-old photo of a small figure whose face is partly hidden by a camera? We weren’t even sure of the name, which was given to Carl Robinson’s wife by a Vietnamese AP photographer who claimed it belonged to the person who had really taken the photo. 

Robinson, his wife Kim-Dung, Terri Lichstein, and the Vietnamese reporter we hired to work with us, Lê Vân, came up with an idea to hire a prominent local blogger who had an extensive network through his Facebook page, both in Vietnam and in the diaspora, to find Nghệ. In March 2023, we agreed on a fee of $1,000, and the blogger, Nguyễn Ngọc Vinh, posted the photo along with a message asking anyone who thought they might know the man in the white shirt, dark trousers, and dark vest — who might be called Nghệ — to please contact him.

Three days later, a retired film technician from Los Angeles, Chinh Dao, responded. The man in the photo was his friend Nguyễn Thành Nghệ. Chinh and his brother Thang had met Nghệ in the late Eighties and worked with him at FotoKem in L.A., printing films for Hollywood studios, where Nghệ spent much of his postwar life building a career to support his family in California. Chinh later told us, “I hope, I hope that story is going to come out soon. My friend Mr. Nghệ has been waiting for the whole of his life.” 

Chinh sent a message to his brother in Los Angeles, who called Nghệ right away. “Really, some people are looking for me?” Nghệ said, according to Thang. Then, says Lê Vân, Nghệ, who was in the Mekong Delta on vacation, called the blogger: “I am the one you are looking for.”  

Nghệ was by then 85 years old. In an interview the following day, Lê Vân found him lucid but frail. The story she heard from him seemed to corroborate and add to Robinson’s. When asked which photos he took on June 8, 1972, he said, “The one with the naked little girl whose clothes were burned.” Lê Vân asked him, “The one that won the Pulitzer later on?” “Yes,” he replied. When she returned home to Ho Chi Minh City, Lê Vân says, she burst into tears and then called us.

We intensified our effort to reconstruct the narrative of June 8, 1972. Then, inevitably, things started to go sideways. The blogger we had hired understood the impact of what we had found and threatened to publish the story of Nghệ in Vietnamese on Facebook unless we gave him $10,000. We didn’t, and he published what he had. While the foreign press didn’t notice, Nick Út did, and promptly posted a photo of himself in Trảng Bàng on his Instagram page. Út then went on Bolsa TV — a U.S.-based Vietnamese-language media organization — and defended himself. Separately, he also proclaimed that AP would sue anyone who challenged his authorship. Soon after, the network of veteran Vietnam correspondents we had been talking to closed ranks. Portentously, it began to get ugly as friends and colleagues of Faas attacked Robinson’s credibility.

In his appearance on Bolsa TV, Út referred to Nghệ as a driver for NBC, but he was neither a hired driver nor had a job for NBC. Nghệ was freelancing on spec and had NBC accreditation. Like many photographers in wars before and since, he needed accreditation to access combat zones if he was working as a freelancer; at the time, news bureaus would often give them out in exchange for a first look at your material. Nghệ says he drove to Trảng Bàng that day and took Út as a back-seat passenger, then drove directly back to Saigon after the work was over, also with Út in the back seat. This may explain why Út refers to him as a driver.

As our reporting soon bore out, Nghệ was far more than a driver. Piecing together information from him, his children, and Department of Defense records, we formed a picture of his life and his dedication to the craft of making pictures.

Born to his father’s mistress, Nghệ was raised by a surrogate family that received money from his father. Around age 18, he left home to study cinematography at college, and around the late 1950s, he started work as a cameraman and photographer for the South Vietnamese army. He received signals training from the U.S. military in New Jersey in 1961 and then returned to Vietnam. Later in the war, because of that training, he was seconded, or essentially loaned, by the South Vietnamese army to the CIA PsyOps program transmitting broadcasts to North Vietnamese forces for “Mother Vietnam,” a propaganda unit of the CIA.

By 1970, Nghệ had become a first sergeant and an experienced war photographer. While his civilian colleagues donned tailor-made combat fatigues, he would sometimes slip out of the office in street clothes and photograph the war to earn extra money to support his three children by selling photos to local newspapers. He says he carried a Pentax Spotmatic — the type of camera AP’s extensive investigation suggests was used to take the photo — loaded with black-and-white Kodak Tri-X film, and used a 50mm lens. He also used a Bolex film camera, he told us, so he could double up and sell film to the TV networks.

June 8, 1972, was the first and last time Nghệ says he ever sold photos to AP.

It was Nghệ’s brother-in-law, the NBC soundman Trần Văn Thân, who recounts going with Nghệ to sell the photos to AP. Thân was one of the six men in the first group of newsmen closest to the Cao Đài temple who were filming Kim Phúc and the children running toward them.

Thân was one of the last people we were able to track down and interview. He summarized the material from our two interviews in November 2023 and May 2024 in a letter he sent me shortly thereafter, describing the events on the road. “While we were filming,” he wrote, “Nguyễn Thành Nghệ stood on my left side and took a photo of the burned girl. After finishing, I said to Nguyễn Thành Nghệ, ‘Today, there were no reporters from the news agencies UPI and AP here. Give me the film; I’ll help sell it to AP.’”

“You must be aware that the AP with all its resources . . . will do everything possible to discredit you and your assertions.”

AP reporter Peter Arnett, to photo editor
Carl Robinson in a public chat forum
for Vietnam War photographers

Thân explained to us that “the office of NBC News and the news agency AP [were] just a wall apart, so we [were] very familiar with each other.” Thân says he went with Nghệ to sell his photos to AP and feels certain about the role of Horst Faas in what followed: “He selected the photo of the burned child and returned all the other film rolls to me, giving me 20 dollars for the photo he chose. Along with it, there was one [print] picture of the burned child. I handed everything to Nghệ.”

Thân describes the “surprise, shock, and fury” he and Vietnamese colleagues felt when, a few months later, the photo of the burned child won an international award for Út. Thân says he dared not utter a word about the deceit at the time. The directors of AP and NBC News were, he explains, very close. “I had to stay silent; otherwise, I could lose my job and my source of income,” he told us, his voice at once plaintive and matter-of-fact. “How would I support my family?” 

One of several reasons Arnett, Burnett, Butterfield, and others are convinced Út took the photograph could be that, by their own accounts, Faas told them so. None of them have ever claimed they definitively saw who pressed the shutter. In books and interviews, they have shared how they heard Faas congratulate Út in the AP office. Burnett and Arnett may have witnessed that, but if Faas’ own telling of the story is to be believed, they would have arrived too late to see the film being delivered to the AP bureau and being processed, and neither of them claim to have seen the caption being typed. They just have Faas’ word. 

Carl Robinson is not close with Út’s most vocal supporters, and is something of an outsider among expat reporters who covered the war, but that doesn’t disqualify him as a credible witness. Nor does his self-acknowledged drug use, which many Út supporters have cited in an effort to discredit him. (If his recreational drug use in the early Seventies in Vietnam makes him unreliable, where does that leave the rest of the press corps?) What is certain is that the truth cannot be established solely by what took place in the AP Bureau; it must come, ultimately, from the road to Trảng Bàng.

Fortunately, that road is littered with evidence in the form of photographs and film.

Acknowledging the distance in time between what happened in a small village in Vietnam in 1972 and now, and understanding that there are so many conflicting accounts by Út, Faas, Nghệ, Thân, and other eyewitnesses, our filmmaking team engaged the French NGO Index Investigation, one of the world’s leading independent forensic-investigation companies, to examine all of the data and evidence we had gathered. Relying on a careful review of the available documentation — including photographs taken that day, aerial images, U.S. satellite imagery of Trảng Bàng from 1972, video recordings, and information about the height, clothing, and equipment of journalists on the scene — the firm created a 3D model in which all of the relevant players were positioned along the axis of the Trảng Bàng road. Their movements were reconstructed in chronological order. 

The Index report referred to a “frame-matching” technique that allowed precise positioning of various people present on the road that day at different times. It used still images and film that show Nghệ in his white shirt and dark vest, the film crews with their cameras and sound equipment, the tall ITN reporter Christopher Wain, Út wearing his distinct helmet with the tag, his AP flak jacket, short sleeves, a bulging camera bag on his left hip, poncho, and watch, and reconstructed the scene. Index initially concluded that just seconds after the picture was taken, Út was located roughly 200 feet away from that spot; following the AP report, which introduced new information, Index revised its estimate of the distance to roughly 75 meters or 250 feet.

Francesco Sebregondi of Index says, “Nick Út’s presence at that specific moment in the ITN news video makes it highly implausible that he could have taken the ‘Napalm Girl’ photograph. Indeed, in order to shoot ‘Napalm Girl,’ and appear in that frame of the ITN footage walking toward the scene he would have had to cover a distance of approximately 75 meters in a matter of seconds, and do so outside of the ITN camera’s frame. 

“This seems very unlikely,” Sebregondi continues, “and editorially, doesn’t make any sense that he would want to move away from the action. We can conclude that it is highly unlikely that Nick Út took the ‘Napalm Girl’ photograph.” Út’s attorney dismisses the Index findings as “junk science,” citing the AP’s analysis, which posits that the distance Út would have covered was less than 75 meters. (AP’s investigation disputes some elements of Index’s report, but the core findings were supported by World Press Photo’s investigation.) 

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Archival photos and 3D forensic reconstructions by Index Investigation place Út’s account in question

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CREDIBLE JOURNALISM RELIES on credible authors, credible editors, and credible news organizations. If, as our reporting and the Index forensics suggest, Nick Út didn’t take the photograph, why wouldn’t he have said anything? Út wouldn’t talk to the filmmaking team, so we haven’t been able to ask him. But one theory concerns the power and authority of Horst Faas. If Carl Robinson, an established photo editor and a fellow American, didn’t feel confident enough to challenge Faas, why would the young Vietnamese photographer Út, the most junior person in the office? Robinson maintains he changed the byline exclusively at Faas’ bidding, suggesting that Út had no agency and was never consulted on the matter. 

How could AP bosses in New York have allowed such an egregious offense to happen? The agency proudly calls itself “the most trusted source of fast, accurate, unbiased news.” AP HQ would not have known at the time who took the photo, and would have trusted their people in the field, just as other news organizations would. According to a post Peter Arnett wrote in November 2015 on Vietnam Old Hacks, modern-day senior AP editors had by then heard the rumors about this photo and dismissed them. (Arnett did not reply to the filmmakers’ request for an interview, and AP says that “there has been no serious challenge to this photo’s authorship until now.”) 

And how could Faas have knowingly perpetrated such deception? This is the question that, in my mind, deserves the greatest scrutiny. Faas writes that he was returning from lunch with Arnett when he first saw the photo. He has also written he was returning from an assignment. Memory can play tricks on all of us, but his recounting of the moment he first saw the photo doesn’t change: “When I got back to the office,” he wrote, “I glanced at films edited by others, not out of lack of trust, but because I thought a second look was often helpful. And there, without a doubt, the best photo was the one that had been discarded. Richard Pyle, then bureau chief, remembers me saying, ‘I think we’ve got the next Pulitzer!’ … The film was processed by one of the editors. He did not select this photo because the little girl was naked, and the rule at AP was to not show a naked young girl, especially a pubescent girl. That editor, Carl Robinson, fearing that the photo was too risky and wouldn’t get by the New York office, suggested other photos, all of which were good but just hovered around the subject.”

“I’m voicing a truth that has weighed heavily on my heart for over half a century.”

NBC sound engineer Trần Văn Thân

Faas’ instinct for prize-winning photographs was acute. He took credit for training Malcolm Browne, who photographed the image of a self-immolating Buddhist monk in 1963, and, in 1968, he’d picked out Eddie Adams’ photograph of Brig. Gen. Nguyễn Ngọc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner. He won his first Pulitzer for photography from Vietnam in 1965 and his second from Bangladesh in 1972.

Faas is the only person who knows why he allegedly told Robinson to change the name from Nguyễn Thành Nghệ to Nick Út. But Faas is dead. So what could have motivated him? We know the decision was made quickly. The film could not have been in the bureau for much more than three hours, and Faas was at lunch for some of that time, so perhaps he didn’t think it through; perhaps it was impulsive. He would have had no loyalty to the stringer Nghệ, having never met him, and Nghệ says he had never sold an image to AP before that day. Faas was, however, loyal to Út, a young staffer he’d mentored after Út’s brother, Huỳnh Thanh Mỹ, was killed while working for AP a few years prior. Giving this image to Út wouldn’t make up for his brother’s death, but is it possible Faas thought it would make Út more secure at AP? 

As AP director of photography Hal Buell recounts in From Hell to Hollywood, a 2021 book about Út, Faas had already sent a message to New York alerting them to the idea that this photo would be “an icon of all time.” He knew it had the potential to win prizes, and prizes — like being wounded in action — burnish a journalist’s reputation. There was another consideration: Faas, along with Arnett, Mort Rosenblum, and Jackson, had been flown into Saigon to support the bureau because — according to Robinson — AP was “losing the play” to UPI. This was not a moment for an “icon of all time” to be transmitted with the byline of a stringer, underscoring that the AP staffer had missed the photo. That could signal to New York that the bureau had failed. Faas wasn’t used to failure.

Tim Page once claimed to me that Faas had put his name on the work of Vietnamese photographers and taken credit for them as his own. Page was one of my mentors, and his word mattered to me. That wasn’t the first time I had heard such a story from one photographer about another; the profession — like most others — is not free of jealousy. Nevertheless, while misattribution never happened to me, I had seen it happen to other young photographers, especially local photographers, as I was building my own career, and the allegation didn’t seem implausible. At a meeting in June 2024, the widow of French photographer Michel Laurent had told me that her husband left AP for the French agency Gamma after Faas transmitted images from Bangladesh in 1972 co-bylined with his name and Laurent’s. The photographs won the Pulitzer Prize, with both men’s names on them. She claimed to me that the photos were 100 percent Laurent’s. (Pulitzer tells Rolling Stone, “This is the first we are hearing” of such an allegation.)

Had Faas grown to rationalize occasionally changing the credit on photographs over nearly a decade of war? Would this explain how he might have taken something from a stringer he didn’t know, given AP and the younger brother of his dead colleague the kudos, and enhanced his standing at the agency?

WE MAY NEVER KNOW why Nick Út was seemingly given something he never asked for. But we know that countless Vietnamese photographers and reporters worked in anonymity during the Vietnam War, not out of choice but because their work was not credited at all, or was credited to others. To this day, dozens of gifted and courageous Vietnamese photographers, cameramen, and reporters remain unknown and unrecognized for the brilliant work they produced. They accepted that status quo because they had no choice. The politics of race and power, and the suffocating presence of the U.S. military, meant they were outsiders in their own country; they knew no one would listen, because they weren’t equal. Some of them still don’t feel safe talking now.

Among those outsiders is the last person we tracked down from the full-frame version of the photograph of Kim Phúc that the AP sent around the world. A Vietnamese photographer, he took photos of the children as they came across the field toward the road but then ran out of film. Repeatedly mistaken by Fox Butterfield and others for David Burnett in the famous photograph, he can be seen on the right, wearing a helmet and urgently rewinding his camera. His name is Hoàng Văn Danh, a freelancer who sold photos to UPI, AP’s main competitor. 

In September 2024, after all our emails with Carl Robinson, after all our interviews, after meeting Nghệ, after Index’s forensics investigation, we met Văn Danh. We showed him the photograph and asked him if he recalls Nick Út standing next to him.

“Nick? No, no, no,” he answered emphatically. “He wasn’t there, he was way back.”

Of those who had special knowledge of that day, Nghệ’s brother-in-law, the NBC sound engineer Trần Văn Thân, who was standing next to Nghệ when the photograph was taken, was one of the most torn by the course of events. Thân says he sold those images on Nghệ’s behalf to the AP, but his account had never entered the public record. (In fact, he had become estranged from Nghệ after the latter separated from Thân’s sister.) The letter he wrote to us in fall 2024 with details of the day ends as a lament:

Though [I] remained silent, I couldn’t forget that incident. Until today, more than half a century later, this incident still lingers bitterly in my heart. It’s the truth, why hide it?

I’ve never spoken this truth out loud. My soul is still troubled, restless, because I feel like I am someone who concealed the truth!

Today, I’m telling this truth. I saw Nguyễn Thành Nghệ taking the photo of the burned child with my own eyes.

After decades, Trần Văn Thân released his burden: “I’m writing these words, remembering and voicing a truth that has weighed heavily on my heart for over half a century.” 

I asked Nghệ how he felt when he learned his name may have been deliberately removed from the photograph. He replied, “I’m just sad, not knowing what to do. My life is not equal to them, so I lost, there’s nothing more I can do.”

Since The Stringer premiered at Sundance in January, there have been suggestions by some journalists that this story should not have been told; they posit that in this moment when journalism is being so savagely undermined by the very forces it seeks to hold to account, the last thing we need is to reveal our own failures. But journalism is essential to democracy, and it is in the interests of both the press and the public that trust in the Fourth Estate is repaired. That can’t be done if we choose to ignore accusations of wrongdoing in our own profession. The passage of time may increase the anguish of self-examination, but the search for truth is always worth the cost.