'Napalm Girl' Photojournalist Nick Ut Retires After 51 Years With AP

Legendary photojournalist Nick Ut has captured tens of thousands of images in his five decades with the Associated Press. But his work will undoubtedly be remembered most for the historic "Napalm Girl" photo from the war in Vietnam.

A young Vietnamese girl runs screaming from her village after a napalm bomb was dropped on it. The napalm has burned off her clothes and singed her skin. The 1972 photo shows the chaos and atrocities of the Vietnam War, and many believe, eventually helped end it.

The photo won Ut a Pulitzer Prize at age 21. He believes it probably helped save the girl's life, even before it was developed and put on the news wire.

"I saw her arm burning, her back burning," Ut said.

He put down his camera, gave the girl water to drink and poured it on her burns. Then he took her in his van to the nearest hospital. When doctors there refused to treat her, suggesting a children’s hospital two hours away, Ut flashed his press pass and said her photo would likely be on the front page of every newspaper the next day.

She was treated.

"Nobody believed she [was] still alive that day," Ut said.

Not even himself. But she survived. The "Napalm Girl” in Ut’s Pulitzer Prize winning photo is Kim Phuc. She’s 53 years old, a mother of two, and lives in Canada.

Ut retired from the Associated Press this week after 51 years. His career began at age 15 when he started working for the AP in Saigon, but he wanted to start even earlier. According to the AP, Ut's older brother Huynh Thanh My was an AP photographer who was killed by Viet Cong rebels in 1965. At his brother's funeral, Ut approached the late Horst Faas, photo editor for AP's Saigon bureau. Peter Arnett, AP's Saigon correspondent at the time, remembers the disappointing moment for Ut.

"He wanted to follow in his brother's footsteps." Arnett told KQED. "He wanted to be a war photographer, and Horst looked at him -- this 14 year old kid at the time -- and said, 'maybe in the future, but you’re too young. You have to go back to your family.' And Nick said, 'the AP’s my family now.'"

Ut persisted, and Arnett remembers the AP agreed to use him carefully as a street photographer in Saigon. But when the war escalated, that changed.

"In January and February of 1968, Saigon became a war zone," Arnett said. "And Nick’s street photography pictures suddenly showed violence, brutality and death, and that was his beginning as a war photographer and we know how successful he has been in that field."

Ut had to flee Vietnam. He spent some time in refugee camps and worked briefly in Tokyo, before winding up in the AP’s Los Angeles bureau. Most of his career was still ahead of him.

He shifted from images of war to those of sports, civic leaders and celebrities.

"Lucille Ball, John Wayne, Bette Davis. I'm so lucky," Ut said. "They're all dead. I have a picture."

Sometimes the celebrities were in tough spots. Paris Hilton in tears. Actor Robert Blake on trial. Michael Jackson.

"Everyone [in] trouble, they're gonna see me," Nick said.

This is the ideal place for me to disclose that I know Nick Ut. I was a radio reporter in Los Angeles for almost 9 years and there was no avoiding him. When I saw him out in the field with his cameras, I knew I was in the right place.

The AP bureau and my office were in the same downtown office complex. In the parking lot, I noticed we were both attached to our Acura Legend cars from the early 1990s. We could chat way too long about how much we loved these vehicles that we should have traded in or junked years before.

Ut is one of those people who has never met a stranger. He's an unassuming bon vivant who regularly invites friends and colleagues to his favorite Vietnamese restaurants in Orange County. (I get to tag along sometimes because my wife works for the AP.)

That’s where I found him just weeks before his retirement date -- at the Song Long restaurant in Westminster -- with other journalism legends, including Peter Arnett.

There was Richard Drew, the AP photographer who took the "Falling Man" photo from Sept. 11.

"He’s always been an inspiration to me," Drew told me. "Of Course that famous photo that Mr. Nixon didn’t like ... and he thought that it had been a doctored photograph, and it really turned the tide of the war."

That last part was a journalism history lesson to me, something I hadn't heard before. Drew referred me to the secret recordings from the Nixon White House. I reached out to the Nixon Library so I could listen myself.

The audio is challenging, but then-President Nixon and H.R. Haldeman can be heard discussing Ut's photo of Kim Phuc just days after it was taken.

"I wonder if that was a fix," Nixon says.

"It might have been," Haldeman replies.

For Richard Drew, the moment in history is particularly relevant today.

"It’s sort of like we’re going through now with our 'fake news' cycle," he said.

Also in the restaurant with Nick Ut: Retired AP reporter Linda Deutsch, the Grand Dame of covering high-profile court cases. She told me that often when Ut went to photograph a celebrity for one of her stories, the celebrity treated Ut like a celebrity. A lot of his peers in the press corps do the same.

"Other photographers immediately make a path for him," Deustch said. "He’s very small. Nick is like five foot tall. He never has anyone standing in front of him. Because out of respect for him, they always give him the front row spot."

I can confirm that I saw that happen plenty of times.

Nick Ut’s retirement will be noticeable on a lot of front rows -- and a lot of front pages.