David Burnett is a photojournalist based in New York.
One of the filmmakers’ main justifications for the documentary, “The Stringer,” is that there needs to be truth, even uncomfortable truth, in all that we do as journalists.
“The Stringer,” released in November on Netflix, documents an investigation by photographer Gary Knight into the provenance of the unforgettable 1972 photograph formally titled “The Terror of War,” but more commonly known as “Napalm Girl.” The searing image shows 9-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc running naked toward the camera in terror and agony — she had torn off her burning clothes — along with other children caught in an errant South Vietnamese napalm attack. Associated Press photographer Nick Ut won a Pulitzer Prize for the photograph, but the film posits that another person, a freelance stringer named Nguyen Thanh Nghe, actually took the photo, only to be inexplicably denied credit when an AP editor attributed it to Ut.
Of course we as journalists should always honor the truth. I am among only a handful of journalists still alive who were on the scene that day when the napalm strike led to so many civilian casualties and then the famous photograph. I chose not to participate in the making of “The Stringer” out of concern that the filmmakers were seeking to prove only a prior conclusion. (Several of my photos — initially shown to Knight in colleagueship and good faith — were used in the film without my permission or attribution, potentially creating the inaccurate impression that I agreed with the filmmaker’s viewpoint.) This is the truth of what I observed of a film intended to get at the truth.
I recall the moment with great clarity: Just minutes after the napalm attack, I was standing on the road outside the village of Trang Bang with Ut and freelance reporter Alex Shimkin when we saw the first of the children fleeing toward the road through a cemetery. I was preoccupied with trying to put a new roll of film into my vintage Leica, a camera that was incredibly difficult to load if you didn’t doubly trim down the film leader (which I never did).
My attention was primarily on my camera, but Ut and Shimkin’s reaction when they saw the victims remains powerfully fixed in my mind. Without hesitating, they began sprinting down the road, advancing well beyond all the other journalists except for the United Press International stringer who ended up on the right side of the uncropped version of the photograph (also reloading his camera).
At that moment, none of the other journalists were moving down the road. Their sprint separated Ut and Shimkin from the rest of us, and it has been my long-held strong belief that in the following minute or two, once the children reached the road, “The Terror of War” was taken.
Shortly after that, within a couple of minutes, the disparate group of journalists that had been lined up on the road began moving forward toward where the victims were gathering. There was subsequent additional filming and photography, but this was definitely after the famous photograph was taken. In my images of the stunned villagers and the journalists, there are a few pictures of Nghe, but none show him out in front, where Ut and Shimkin were.
Did I actually see Ut photograph 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.
The subsequent return to Saigon and the processing of the film are stories that are well known. In “The Stringer,” AP photo editor Carl Robinson claims that bureau chief Horst Faas directed him to put Ut’s name on the caption envelope. In my experience, there is a 2 percent chance that the absolutely wildest claims might be true, but to me, the account lacks veracity. What is absolutely true is that once the picture had been printed and was being wired out to the world, Faas congratulated Ut in a very Faas-like way, saying in his unmistakable German accent, “You do good work today, Nick Ut.” That is word for word what he said.
Thankfully, Phuc survived the attack, though she endured years of treatment for her burns; now in her 60s, she lives in Canada. Faas died in 2012, so he can’t speak to the allegation made against him. Nghe maintains that he took the photograph, and Robinson, who never raised this issue while Faas was alive, agrees. After an investigation prompted by the documentary, the Associated Press found no reason to remove Ut’s name from the photograph. Ut has said he was “gratified” by the AP’s finding. “This whole thing has been very difficult for me and has caused great pain,” he wrote in statement. “I’m glad the record has been set straight.”
I was gratified, too. In my mind, Nick Ut, having been the first and only photographer to race down the road toward the oncoming children, was the only one who could have taken the picture. We are, of course, hemmed in by the media documentation that survives from more than a half-century ago, none of which was “time coded” and thus which provides a choppy and incomplete version of what happened and when. But some things live on as memories — strong memories — and for me, that day in Trang Bang feels like yesterday.
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