Letter to the Washington Post about David Burnett's piece.

[Carl Robinson]

Well, nice of 'em to run my counter to David's story of his long-told version of the famous Napalm Girl photo and who took it because Horst Faas said 'Good work, Nick' ... Well, he's wrong.  

Opinion | I was the photo editor for ‘Napalm Girl.’ Nick Ut did not take the photo. - The Washington Post

Here is the text: 

Dear Editor: I am prominently mentioned in David Burnett’s Dec. 18 Thursday Opinion essay, “The debate over the ‘Napalm Girl’ photo doesn’t shake me. I was there.,” and feel compelled to respond. Put plainly: Burnett is wrong. The Associated Press’s Nick Ut did not take that photograph. It was taken by a stringer, Nguyen Thanh Nghe.

I was a local‑hire photo editor at the AP in Saigon that day in June 1972. I knew it was taken by a stringer, or freelancer, but was ordered by my superior, Horst Faas, to put Ut’s name on the caption. Fearing for my job and family, I complied — a decision that has weighed on me for 50 years.

Burnett’s recollection of Ut rushing ahead of the line at Trang Bang has long been discredited. He admits he was focused on changing the film in his Leica. His supposed proof — Faas telling Ut “good work” in a German accent — is equally flawed. By then, the wrongly captioned photo had already been processed and radiophotoed to Tokyo under my supervision. I had gone home, visibly upset, as my wife recalled in “The Stringer.”

Burnett has repeated this account for years in lectures and interviews, despite being told the truth by me in 2011. His persistence has helped entrench a myth that contradicts the record.

Burnett witnessed only the dawn of the Napalm Girl legend — and its false attribution to Ut. The record is clear. Journalism demands fidelity to fact, not mythmaking. Memory, however vivid, cannot override documented truth.

Carl Robinson, Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia