Kim Phuc and the Rest of Us

TUCSON — I've stayed silent on what I know about that spine-chilling Associated Press photo of 9-year-old Kim Phuc running in pain and panic with two little brothers from napalm flaring behind them 53 years ago down a road in Vietnam.

It is time for some clarity.

That single image portrays why war is hell in a way no words can. Yet today as countless Kim Phucs suffer worse in much of the world, trust is fast diminishing in all "journalists," even those who risk their own lives to get their stories straight.

"The Stringer," a new documentary on Netflix, provides exhaustive forensics and emotional corroborating testimony to make a case that Nguyen Thanh Nghe, another Vietnamese photographer, took the picture for so long attributed to Nick Ut.

Accurate credit is important for history and the photographers involved. What matters far more is what AP labeled the photo: "The Terror of War."

Heated public comment, much of it by people who have not seen the film, illustrates the damage of today's open mic mediascape. When anyone with a keyboard or a microphone can chime in, truth is a moving target.

This is what I know — and what I don't. I have no case to make, one way or the other. June 8, 1972, was long ago. But one crucial moment is burned indelibly into my memory.

Horst Faas emerged from the AP photo section in Saigon to show bureau chief Richard Pyle and me, then alone in the newsroom, the negative he had selected from pictures that Ut and others had taken in Trang Bang.

We both said AP would not show frontal nudity. He shook his head, then messaged the photo chief in New York, who agreed the picture was too powerful to ignore. It went to newspapers around the world before I saw anyone else come into the bureau.

Controversy rages over which photographer was where on Route 1. For me, truth comes down to a single question. Did Faas purposely attribute someone else's picture to Nick Ut? For complex reasons, I believe he probably did.

Horst was a German photomeister for whom the word, legendary, falls short. I loved the guy, but not blindly. Only Nick knows who took that photo. The Pulitzer is still his. The World Press Photo award is in limbo. AP stands by Nick but admits some doubt.

Those who take journalism seriously need to consider hard facts with open minds.

Beyond its step-by-step investigation, "The Stringer" also suggests the changed credit was a willful action by AP, a half-century coverup tinged by racism and exploitation among Western news organizations. It was not.

The AP I knew in the 1970s was a different agency entirely. That is the problem with after-the-fact delving into oral histories and testimony from people who may be scrupulously truthful, deeply opinionated, loyal to friends or simply full of crap.

Horst was sardonic, with a dark wolfish sense of humor. At times, he said things to shock. Those who knew him well looked for a twinkle in his eyes that said otherwise.

He won his own Pulitzer, the first of two, for courageous, hard-slogging forays, focusing his Leicaflex on combat and its "collateral damage."

After Peter Arnett moved to CNN, I inherited his title of Special Correspondent to cover stories across the globe. In 1994, Horst and I followed the old Ho Chi Trail along the border with Laos. Then we went to Hanoi where he initiated his "Requiem" project.

He worked with military archivists to produce a thick book to honor unknown Vietnamese photographers from both sides .

We then went to Hanoi where he initiated his "Requiem" project. He worked with archivists to produce a thick book to honor Vietnamese photographers from both sides.

Early in the war, he sent Nick's older brother on an assignment that got him killed. Horst, hit hard, hired Nick so his family had income. The two grew close. Shortly before he died in 2012, he visited me in Paris. Kim Phuc, not yet an issue, did not come up.

I'll write more in January about how newsgathering has since changed, with guidance on how to find reliable sources and crucial background in a world on the boil.

One point is essential. Despite its benefits, artificial "intelligence" threatens to make all of us ignorant at a time human survival is being pushed to its limits. We need fresh, firsthand reporting far more than secondhand lookbacks.

There is much to say; I'll start from the beginning.

Gary Knight, a straight shooter with a serious intellect, runs the VII Foundation in Arles, France, to train young photojournalists. We are old friends. At some point in our travels, he asked about chatter that someone else took that timeless picture.

I had heard it, too. In hindsight, it had been an open secret among a lot of Vietnamese working with international news organizations who were reluctant to lose jobs they badly needed by speaking out.

The war had taken a sudden uptick as U.S. forces began winding down. Horst and I came from our Singapore bureau to help. He took charge over Carl Robinson, the photo editor. A curious synchronicity belies simple narratives of "foreign" and "local."

Carl, an American with missionary parents, grew up in the Belgian Congo. Horst was in the Hitler Youth until American troops took him out of Germany. He covered Congo wars for AP not long before I arrived in Kinshasa to report on the continuing mayhem.

Carl was a "local hire," married into a Vietnamese family. With two kids to feed, he was not about to talk back to Horst. He was convinced someone else had taken the picture but did not know who.

He says he wrote "str" for stringer on the caption but when Horst told him, "Nick Ut, make it Nick Ut," he reluctantly complied. I was on the other side of a closed door and cannot confirm that. But it has a solid ring of truth.

Carl seethed quietly. After the war, he and I hung out a bit in New York where I spent a year at the Council on Foreign Relations. He never mentioned it.

I tried to discourage Gary when he told me about his film project. Why ask an unanswerable question so long after the fact? That was certain to cause bitter disputes among old colleagues and friends.

But I offered to help behind the scenes, and I connected him with Carl. Gary spent two years tracking down Nghe, along with his TV producer wife, Fiona Turner, and committed researchers in Vietnam.

After Gary turned up convincing evidence, I agreed to be interviewed on camera to add an historical backdrop. That war was long before reporters were dunked into "pools" or "embedded" with minders who at times order them around like shavetail recruits.

Today's restrictions and censorship mean combat photos are often military handouts. Back then, with only rare, faltering phone links to their news desks, reporters had to go see things for themselves. Luck meant being in a place where luck happened.

Accredited correspondents had the nominal rank of major, allowing us to bump captains on down for flights into hot zones. Our bosses had no way to second guess us. If we lost their trust, we were yanked back to a desk.

At those Five O'clock Follies press briefings, we hounded officers until they gave us real answers or waffled until it was plain they had something to hide that we needed to dig out on our own.

Little of that made it into the documentary. The director, Bao Nguyen, a Vietnamese American born in the 1980s, went into broader generalities about discrimination.

One exchange stands out.

Nghe says he spent a lifetime watching someone else get credit for the crowning picture in his life's work. Briefly, he had proof to claim it was his. Along with a standard $20 stringer fee, he was given a print of the picture.

He taped it onto the family fridge, but his wife tore it up when their young kids kept ogling it. Gary finally met him and expressed amazement that an organization that had stolen the picture from him would so brazenly give him evidence of theft.

That suggests the Saigon photo staff knew he had taken it. But I am confident New York had nothing to do with it. Back then, AP was run by newspeople who rose through the ranks. Wes Gallagher, a "general manager" not a CEO, fiercely defended its credibility.

As I was about to post this dispatch, news came that Peter Arnett had died in California at 91. He and Horst were inseparable throughout the war. Peter won his own Pulitzer for intrepid, insightful reporting.

Once Wes, a correspondent in World War II, tried to kill a story about U.S. troops looting after a battle. G.I.s, he said, do not loot. The desk in New York rebelled, and Wes relented.

Working from archives risks inevitable distortions. For instance, researchers found few photos attributed to AP's Dang Van Phouc, which supported a thesis that his pictures had been credited to others with more Western-sounding names.

In fact, much of his prodigious output was lost after the war. Richard Pyle, just before his death in 2017, said this about him in the New York Times' Lens newsletter:

"Mr. Phuoc, utterly fearless and wounded so often he lost count, once carried a wounded G.I. twice his weight to safety but never caught up with the communist thugs who killed his father, a village chief."

After Netflix released "The Stringer," it became a cause célèbre. In a Washington Post op-ed, photographer David Burnett described what he saw that day on the road and insisted that Nick made the shot.

I asked AI about AP's 97-page investigation, which lasted for most of a year. This is an excerpt of what came back:

"That...introduces a pivotal moment from the Vietnam War: Associated Press photographer Nick Ut emerging from the darkroom holding a fresh, wet print of his iconic 'Napalm Girl' in 1972, a powerful image that shocked the world and fueled anti-war sentiment, highlighting the horrific civilian impact of the conflict. 

"Here's a breakdown of the moment and its significance: Ut had just captured the photograph of 9-year-old Kim Phuc fleeing a napalm attack in Trảng Bàng, Vietnam. He quickly processed the film and stepped out with a small, still-wet print, a tangible piece of the horror he'd witnessed."

It made no sense. Nick was not in the bureau when the photo was selected and sent. A darkroom assistant, not Nick, processed the film.

I tracked that down to a Burnett blog post in 2014. Dave has a lot of admiring friends, Nick and I among them. He is a pro. In 1974 at Juan Peron's funeral in Buenos Aires, he eluded the pack to climb into the cathedral dome for a shot down at the open casket.

His Post op-ed concludes: "Did I actually see Ut photograph Kim Phuc on the road? Of course not. Especially in a life-and-death situation, when you are concentrating on what you yourself see around you, making the pictures that you see, you aren’t watching what others are doing."

Yet he appears 50 times in the AP report, which concentrated on Trang Bang. It says it interviewed people in the Saigon bureau. Only Pyle and I were in the newsroom when Horst made his call. Richard has died. No one consulted me.

At the end of "The Stringer," reconstruction by Index, French forensic experts, used satellite images, video recordings, aerial photos and 3D modeling to situate each photographer at Trang Bang when the photo was made.

They concluded that Nick was standing to the side 250 feet away 15 seconds after the photo was taken. He would have had to run about 80 yards, then return, without appearing in any camera crew's footage. This, their report said, was "highly unlikely."

But Nghe was exactly in position with an NBC crew. A retired soundman who was there said Nghe had waited for the fleeing villagers to approach. He had studied photography for years, and the U.S. Army sent him for training in New Jersey.

Nghe used an Asahi Pentax, which an examination of the negative showed was the camera used. Nick carried Nikons and Leicas. He says also carried his brother's old Pentax for luck, but it is unlikely he used it.

"Nick Ut came with me on that assignment, but he didn’t take that photo," Nghe finally had a chance to say publicly. "That photo was mine."

Racism and discrimination are tough to pin down. "Vietnamese" is a generality. Those in this saga were individuals from distinct backgrounds in an intricate society from different circles in a long-divided country. There were friendships and enmities.

Likewise, some white-guy Americans and Europeans I worked with felt themselves superior. But most were, and are, fascinated with a rich ancient culture of people with the "terror of war" forced on them. Gary Knight, for one, is clearly among them.

The dogged, resourceful team behind "The Stringer" did what it set out to do, positing an open question and then answering it. I wish the narrative had stopped there.