My two dong worth
Donald Kirk
Famed Photo of Vietnamese Girl Fleeing Battle Comes Into New Focus
A documentary, 50 years after the war, looks into the question of who clicked the shutter.
A young Phan Thi Kim Phuc was photographed running in excruciating pain with napalm burning her flesh. The photo was distributed by the Associated Press bureau in Saigon. AP
American and South Vietnamese forces were repelling the North Vietnamese Easter offensive in mid-1972 when I hired a car and driver outside the Continental Hotel in central Saigon. Willy Shawcross, later famous for his books on wars in Cambodia, Vietnam, eastern Europe and the Middle East, and his girlfriend, asked if they could jump in.
I said I’d heard there was fighting up Route One, toward the Cambodian border. About 40 miles northwest of the Vietnam capital, we saw thick black smoke billowing from a village across the rice paddies. A propeller-driven A1 Skyraider was flying up and away while the silvery forms of jet fighters glistened far off in the haze.
On a side road, a naked girl and small boy, seared by napalm, were running toward us. South Vietnamese soldiers were down the road, not far from the Cao Dai temple that dominates the village, named Trang Bang. The girl and her brother were hustled into a van to go to a hospital in Cu Chi, a few miles to the east.
While I remember that moment like it was yesterday, I would not have guessed that a photo of the girl fleeing the fighting would become one of the most famous photographs in history. The girl, Phan Thi Kim Phuc, survived, eventually settled in Canada, and is now a goodwill ambassador for Unesco.
On the outskirts of the battle, an American, working for an NGO, talked to me hysterically about the horrors of what the Americans were doing. I reminded him the Skyraider was VNAF— Vietnam air force — and the American 25th Infantry Division that once roamed the area had pulled out a year and half earlier. “Vietnamization” was the name of the game.
My story, written in my room in the Continental Hotel, ran with the picture of the girl and her brother near the top of page one of the Tribune, but I didn’t see it until much later when I got back to my base in Tokyo. I had assumed that Nick Ut, the AP photographer credited with the shot, had taken it, since he got the credit and, next year, a Pulitzer for one of the most iconic images of the war.
Now we are learning, from a documentary named “The Stringer,” that the picture may have been taken not by Nick but by a free-lancer named Nguyen Thanh Nghe, who also sent his film to the AP bureau in Saigon.
The source for this disclosure is Carl Robinson, who was working in the AP bureau in Saigon for the photo chief, Horst Faas. A stern task master, Horst told Carl to credit Nick Ut. Carl lived with what he saw as the falsehood of authorship for decades until he decided to disclose the truth. That’s the crux of the documentary that not only explains the scene up close but also relies on experts who dug up just about every conceivable source of imagery and commentary. .
One of those old shots even shows the backs of correspondents from several papers, including a guy with the Chicago Tribune — that would be me. The producer of the film, Fiona Turner, emailed that my “recollections” had been “very useful in helping us put together the timeline and understanding of the story as it unfolded,” but I had to tell her I had no idea who took the shot. Then I got a call from a woman with the AP who was out to show that AP had been right all along.
Not knowing the background to the controversy, I told the AP woman, whose name I can’t recall, that she should get in touch with Carl, who had told me several times that Nick hadn’t taken the shot. I also referred her to Fox Butterfield of the New York Times, whom I encountered there. Carl had asked me not to repeat what he said, that it was confidential, but then, urged by an anti-war freelancer, Tom Fox, who had been in Saigon, he disclosed the truth as he believed it.
Oddly, at a reunion of old-time Vietnam War correspondents in April at Saigon on the 50th anniversary of the defeat of the American-backed Saigon regime, I saw Nick and Carl passing each other in our hotel. Neither seemed to notice the other.
Some of us boarded a bus, laid on by the Vietnamese press people, for a visit to Cu Chi, not to see the hospital that had saved the lives of the girl and her brother but to look at the tunnel complex where North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces hung out during the war.
The film makes a pretty convincing case for crediting Nghe, but I doubt if the evidence would stand up in any court. There are too many ways to shoot down the claims, and one has to respect the words of two old-time stars, Peter Arnett, AP correspondent, and Dave Burnett, whose photos still show up everywhere. They both refused to be interviewed, but both swear by Nick. Dave, like me, was there.
To me, however, what really counts is the image, not who shot it. The value of this film lies in large measure in publicizing the tragedy of that day. That message is far more important than the relatively minor issue of who clicked the shutter.