Re: Dang Van Phuoc: Discarded in Life, Claimed in Death.
Donald Kirk
They treated him like shit in life and reclaimed him in death. AP’s obituary for Vietnam War photographer Dang Van Phuoc is tidy, respectful, and incomplete — which is why I’m writing this. Readers can find it here.
DVP was one of the best, and one of the bravest, and the version they’ve published leaves out the parts that matter most.
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When I arrived on AP’s Saigon photo desk in March 1968, he was already a legend — the tough, unflappable photographer out of the Marine‑run Press Center in Danang who made new arrivals feel at home and guided them into the field. He’d watched Viet Cong execute his father in their native village, later lost his mother, and carried that history into the war. He was often out on point.
Start with AP’s version of his injury, because that’s where the mythology begins to fray. Phuoc didn’t lose his eye to an explosion, as the obit politely suggests. He took an AK-47 round point‑blank to his right eye while rushing a Viet Cong foxhole with South Vietnamese Rangers south of Danang in late 1968 — a classic near‑death escape. He was medevaced to Saigon and then to an eye hospital in Bangkok, where he was treated and later fitted with a prosthetic. His combat-photography days were over.
He moved down to Saigon after that, where my wife Kim‑Dung and I came to know him and his wife Hoa as close, years‑long friends.
By early 1975 he saw the collapse coming long before most of us did. While I was still hoping for a last‑minute cease‑fire, he was already packing up his life. He asked me to send a few boxes of personal mementos out through the APO — family photos, keepsakes, even several of my own pictures. When the evacuation flights began, he was moved out with the other Vietnamese staff and their families, ending up in Guam as Saigon fell behind him on 30 April 1975.
Once in California, AP dismissed its Vietnamese staff with $3,000 each and kept on only two — Nick Ut, because of the Pulitzer, and DVP, because he’d lost an eye working for them.
Then someone upstairs decided that “Asians are Asians,” and sent them back across the Pacific: Ut to Tokyo, DVP to Hong Kong with his wife and two children. They were put on local salaries, barely enough to survive, and neither spoke the language. DVP was miserable. He eventually paid his own way to New York, where I took him upstairs to see AP President Keith Fuller and ask for a stateside assignment. Fuller turned him down. DVP resigned and returned to Southern California to start over.
None of that made it into the AP obituary, of course. The version they published ends in Guam with “little more than the clothes on their backs and a bottle of milk,” and skips what happened next — the dismissals, the $3,000 payouts, the return postings on local salaries, and the fact that DVP had to pay his own way to New York to ask for a job he still didn’t get.
The only good that came out of his Hong Kong period was personal, not professional. With mail into Vietnam impossible under the U.S. post‑war embargo, he became a conduit for my wife Kim‑Dung to hear from her family — including the news that her father had been sent to a re‑education camp.
We later settled in Australia, and he and Hoa rebuilt their lives in Southern California. We kept in touch over the decades — letters, calls, the occasional visit and occasional reunions — including one where he quietly told Kim‑Dung the name of the real photographer of the Napalm Girl photo.
It was off those bare‑bones details he’d once shared with us that I began my own search for the real photographer — Nguyễn Thanh Nghệ — four years ago, a trail that eventually led to last year’s release of The Stringer documentary, now on Netflix. DVP kept his distance from all that. He preferred not to be involved.
In the end he outlived almost everyone from that old Saigon world, but the past never left him. We spoke for the last time in March. It was a brief call — he was pleased the real Napalm Girl story was finally out — but we couldn’t manage a meet-up. And now he’s gone. DVP was 91.
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