Full disclosure: Nick Ut is an old friend from my Vietnam days, and I have long believed he took one of the greatest war photographs ever made — “The Terror of War,” known universally as “Napalm Girl.”
I also believe he exemplifies something rarer than photographic brilliance: the instinct to cast off professional detachment when humanity demands it. After making the photograph, he put his camera aside and helped deliver its burned, screaming subject, nine-year-old Kim Phúc, to medical care. That sequence of acts — bearing witness, then intervening — has always mattered to me as much as the image itself.
It is therefore dismaying to see a new documentary, now airing on Netflix,
“The Stringer,” attempt to strip Nick of authorship and honor. The film purports to prove that Ut did not take the photograph at all — that it was instead shot by a Vietnamese stringer and wrongly attributed.
I am relieved, and grateful, that one of the most respected Vietnam-era photographers still alive, David Burnett, has now stepped forward with a detailed eyewitness account that powerfully reinforces Ut’s version of events.
The Photograph and Its Original Story
On June 8, 1972, South Vietnamese aircraft mistakenly dropped napalm on friendly positions near the village of Trang Bang. Journalists clustered along Highway 1 heard the explosions and saw civilians fleeing through a cemetery toward the road. Among those journalists was Nick Ut, then a 21-year-old Associated Press photographer, and freelance reporter Alex Shimkin.
What followed became one of the defining visual records of modern warfare: naked children screaming in agony, soldiers walking numbly behind them, and at the center, Kim Phúc — her clothes burned off, arms outstretched as if in crucifixion, her face contorted in pain. The photograph flashed around the world within hours. It won the Pulitzer Prize and permanently altered public understanding of the war, not because it was polemical, but because it was irrefutable.
For most of recent memory, Ut’s role remained clear and uncontested. He shot the photograph, rushed to help the children, poured water on Kim’s burns, wrapped her in a poncho, and drove her to a nearby hospital, insisting she be treated. These were not embellishments added later; they were part of the original, contemporaneous record.
The Netflix Challenge
Half a century later, “The Stringer,” produced by the VII Foundation under the supervision of photojournalist Gary Knight, challenges that settled history. It leans heavily on the belated recollections of Carl Robinson, a former AP photo editor, who now claims that his one-time Saigon boss, Horst Faas, instructed him to credit Ut for a photograph actually taken by a Vietnamese stringer.
To flesh out the story, director Bao Nguyen relies on digital reconstructions, speculative timelines, and resurrected memory — memory that waited decades to surface. He and his producers discount eyewitnesses who were physically present at Trang Bang, substituting inference for observation. They also imposed non-disclosure agreements on key interviewees, including Robinson, effectively shielding their claims from independent scrutiny. That alone should give pause.
But the film’s credibility collapses when measured against the testimony of David Burnett, who was there.
David Burnett’s Eyewitness Account
Burnett, a veteran photographer who covered Vietnam from 1970 to 1972, has just published a pointed essay in The Washington Post, followed by a longer, more detailed account on Facebook. His recollection is not theoretical; it is visceral.
Burnett recalls standing on the road outside Trang Bang moments after the napalm strike with Nick Ut and Alex Shimkin. As the first children emerged from the cemetery, Burnett was struggling to reload his Leica, an infamously difficult task under pressure. What he remembers with absolute clarity is that Ut and Shimkin immediately sprinted down the road, ahead of every other journalist, toward the oncoming children.
In Burnett’s words, those two were “by far” the first journalists in position. The photograph could only have been taken in those first moments, before the rest of the press corps dispersed and fanned out. Burnett did not see Ut press the shutter — nor would one expect him to in a life-and-death scramble — but given who was there and where they were, he concludes that Nick Ut was the only person who could have taken the picture.
Burnett also recalls something else, small but decisive. Back at the AP bureau in Saigon, after the film was processed and the image printed, Horst Faas congratulated Ut in his unmistakable German accent: “You do good work today, Nick Ut.” Burnett insists those words are exact.
Burnett’s account also introduces a troubling factual and ethical complication surrounding the documentary’s production. In early conversations with Gary Knight — before any mention of a film — Burnett shared a selection of his own black-and-white photographs from Trang Bang as background material. When he later learned that those materials might be used in a documentary challenging Nick Ut’s authorship, Burnett explicitly declined to license his images. Despite that refusal, multiple photographs he took at Trang Bang appeared in the finished Netflix film, without attribution or permission.
Verify, Verify, Verify
When “Napalm Girl” first erupted into public consciousness, U.S. intelligence agencies searched diligently for some way to discredit the photograph — to prove it a fake. The idea that allied aircraft had napalmed civilians in a friendly-fire incident was the last thing Henry Kissinger needed as he was secretly negotiating a ceasefire. As hard as the intelligence community tried, it found nothing in Nick Ut’s work that cast doubt on its authenticity or integrity.
Two weeks later, Newsweek stringer Alex Shimkin died while covering yet another lethal moment in the war. Horst Faas, Ut’s supervisor and staunch advocate, lived to the age of 79, dying of natural causes in 2012 amid widespread acclaim for a lifetime of exemplary war coverage on multiple fronts.
The absence of these two key figures did not deter the producers of “The Stringer.” A year ago, they debuted their documentary at the Sundance Film Festival. As controversy flared, World Press Photo, a trade advocacy group which had named “Napalm Girl” its Photo of the Year in 1973, launched an investigation. Five months later, the organization suspended its attribution credit for Ut but reassigned it to no one else, stating that it lacked “sufficient evidence pointing definitively” to another photographer.
Even so, World Press Photo’s executive director maintained that “visual evidence” and information about the “likely camera used that day” indicated that two other Vietnamese photographers “may have been better positioned” to take the photograph.
So much for eyewitness testimony like Burnett’s.
Meanwhile, the Associated Press launched a year-long probe of its own and concluded there was no definitive evidence that anyone other than Ut had taken the photograph. AP reaffirmed Ut’s credit, citing archival research and interviews with surviving eyewitnesses, including Burnett.
A particular point of contention for AP was the filmmakers’ use of nondisclosure agreements. AP said those agreements had frustrated its efforts to review evidence and it called on the production team to lift them so it could examine all relevant materials, including commissioned visual analyses and first-hand testimony. The silence from the VII Foundation remains deafening.
Why Nick Ut Matters
Nick Ut wears his persona, blemishes and all, so guilelessly that you want to hand him a shield and a coat of armor to protect him from cynical reality. He seems almost destined for the role he played at Trang Bang: the gung-ho photographer charging instinctively into danger to get the shot, then instantly transforming into the rescuer who sets his camera aside to save the victim of the horror he has just recorded.
The Nick Ut I know would never have the ego to contrive either role. He would never second-guess the moment. He is instinct incarnate. He would not recognize a self-promoting schemer if one were staring him in the face.
I have heard him described, sympathetically, as an uncomplicated, straight-ahead guy. I take that as the highest praise. How many of us know, viscerally, how to do the right thing in the moment, without calculation, without rehearsal?
The Final Offense
In case you haven’t noticed, there is a sick irony at the heart of “The Stringer” and what Burnett says about the filmmakers. If they indeed heisted his photographs and used them without permission, as he alleges, they’ve committed the very sin they wrongfully lay on Nick Ut. They’re discredited by their own apparent hypocrisy and dishonesty.
History does not belong to those who reconstruct it most cleverly half a century later. It belongs to those who were there, who ran toward the fire, and who remember, not as theory, but as lived fact.
Nick Ut took the photograph. He earned its honors. And the photograph still stands — not as an artifact to be litigated into oblivion, but as an enduring act of witness, courage, and human decency.