“Napalm Girl”: The Story Behind the 1972 Trảng Bàng Photo

The History Behind the “Napalm Girl” Photograph

The photograph known as “Napalm Girl” was taken on 8 June 1972 on Route 1 outside Trảng Bàng, a village about 40 kilometres northwest of Saigon. It shows nine-year-old Phan Thị Kim Phúc running naked and screaming after a South Vietnamese napalm strike hit civilians by mistake. The Associated Press distributed it under the credit of its 21-year-old Vietnamese photographer Huỳnh Công “Nick” Út, and its formal title is “The Terror of War”. It won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography and World Press Photo of the Year, and it remains one of the most recognised images of the twentieth century.

Below is what happened that day, how the picture reached the world despite a rule against publishing nudity, what became of the girl and the photographer, and why, more than fifty years later, the question of who pressed the shutter is being argued again.

What happened at Trảng Bàng on 8 June 1972

By June 1972 North Vietnamese troops had pushed into the area around Trảng Bàng, and families had sheltered for days in the grounds of a Cao Đài temple. South Vietnamese aircraft were called in to strike enemy positions nearby. One plane dropped its napalm on the road and the temple area instead, where villagers and South Vietnamese soldiers were gathered.

Napalm is a jellied fuel designed to stick to whatever it touches while it burns. Kim Phúc’s clothes caught fire, and she tore them off as she ran. Around her in the frame are her brothers and cousins; her older brother Phan Thanh Tâm, on the left, had lost an eye. Two of her younger cousins died from their burns.

A wider version of the scene, above, shows what the famous crop leaves out: soldiers walking calmly behind the children and a fellow photographer reloading film at the right edge. Journalists from several agencies and TV networks were on that road, which is why the moment was recorded on film and in still images from several angles.

Other frames from the same minutes show the cost to families. In this one, a woman walks toward the cameras carrying a badly burned small boy, one of Kim Phúc’s relatives who did not survive.

Saving Kim Phúc, and getting the photo published

The photographers did more than take pictures. Water was poured over Kim Phúc’s burns, and Ut, by his own long-repeated account, put her and other injured children into the AP van and drove them to the hospital in Củ Chi. Staff there were overwhelmed, and he has said he used his press card to insist that the girl be treated rather than left to die. She spent more than a year in hospitals and needed many operations.

Back at the AP bureau in Saigon, the picture ran into an agency rule against showing frontal nudity. Photo chief Horst Faas, a two-time Pulitzer winner, argued for an exception, and the photo editor in New York, Hal Buell, agreed that the news value outweighed the rule. The image was transmitted worldwide and appeared on front pages within days.

Its power was obvious at once, and it made some people uncomfortable. White House tape recordings later revealed President Richard Nixon asking his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, whether the picture had been “fixed”. It had not; other journalists filmed the same scene.

A common claim is that the photograph “ended the war”. That goes too far. US ground troops were already largely withdrawn by mid-1972, the Paris Peace Accords followed in January 1973, and the fighting between North and South continued until Saigon fell on 30 April 1975. What the picture did was give millions of people an image of what the war was doing to civilians, and it became a lasting reference point in arguments about war and the press.

Kim Phúc’s life after the photograph

For years Kim Phúc struggled with pain and with being a symbol. After the war, Vietnamese authorities used her image for propaganda, and she was sent to study in Cuba. In 1992, during a refuelling stop in Gander, Newfoundland, she and her husband left their flight and asked for asylum in Canada. She lives in the Toronto area.

She later became a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador and founded the Kim Foundation International to help children hurt by war. She has spoken often about forgiveness, and in her memoir Fire Road (2017) she describes how faith helped her live with what happened.

Ut stayed close to her. The pictures above show them together over the decades: as a child with the young photographer, and as adults. In 2022, fifty years after the attack, Ut was with her in Miami when she completed her twelfth and final round of laser treatment for her scars, under dermatologist Dr. Jill Waibel, as NBC News reported.

Who is Nick Ut?

Huỳnh Công Út was born on 29 March 1951 in Long An province in the Mekong Delta. His older brother, Huỳnh Thanh Mỹ, was an AP photographer who was killed while covering the war. Ut asked to follow him into the agency, and despite worries about losing a second son of the same family, AP took him on as a teenager, first with darkroom work and assignments around Saigon.

The photograph above is from the funeral of his brother, a loss that pushed the younger Ut toward the same work. Within a few years he was covering combat, and he was wounded several times.

These AP images show the range of his war work: a young photographer lying flat in a field, a helicopter landing in a cloud of dust, civilians and soldiers taking cover in tall grass, a blindfolded prisoner led by troops, and a frightened mother and child aboard a helicopter. In 1971 his close friend and colleague Henri Huet was killed in a helicopter crash over Laos, one of many photographers the war took.

When Saigon fell in 1975, Ut was evacuated, passed through a refugee camp in California, and was then posted to AP’s Tokyo bureau. In 1977 he moved to the Los Angeles bureau, where he would spend most of his career.

From war photography to Hollywood

In Los Angeles, Ut covered everything from sport to celebrity trials. His camera caught Michael Jackson climbing onto the roof of an SUV to greet fans outside the Santa Maria courthouse in 2005, during the trial in which Jackson was acquitted. He also covered Paris Hilton’s 2007 jail case; Wikipedia notes that the best-known frame of her crying in a sheriff’s car, often credited to Ut, was in fact taken by Karl Larsen.

He has joked that the red carpet was harder than the battlefield because of the crowds and his short height. Colleagues describe him as a cheerful, tireless presence at events across Southern California.

The selection above runs from Muhammad Ali training in a gym decorated with a welcome sign, through a staged fashion shoot and a tense courtroom moment, to Dan Aykroyd lying beside his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Jackson waving from the SUV roof, and a celebrity stepping out of a car at a Los Angeles court.

Ut retired from AP in 2017 after 51 years. His honours include the 1973 Pulitzer, World Press Photo of the Year, the Leica Hall of Fame (2012) and the US National Medal of Arts (2021), which he was the first photojournalist to receive.

The 2025 dispute over who took the picture

In January 2025 a documentary, The Stringer, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. It argues that the photograph was taken by Nguyễn Thành Nghệ, a Vietnamese freelancer who was on the road that day, and that the credit went to Ut, an AP staffer. Its sources include Carl Robinson, a former AP photo editor in Saigon, and members of Nghệ’s family.

AP responded with two internal reviews. Its second report, published on 6 May 2025 and running to 96 pages, used interviews, surviving negatives, camera analysis and a 3D model of the scene. It found “no definitive evidence” to change the credit. It also acknowledged problems on both sides: the image appears to have been made with a Pentax camera rather than the Leica Ut long said he used, while Nghệ was the only one of ten witnesses AP reached who believed Ut did not take it. Age, missing records and the deaths of key people mean the question may never be settled with certainty.

World Press Photo, after its own review, suspended its attribution of the 1973 award to Ut in May 2025 without naming anyone else as the author. Ut has always said he took the picture and has called the claims deeply painful; Kim Phúc, through her representatives, has also defended him. For now, AP and the Pulitzer Prize page continue to credit Huỳnh Công Út.

Whatever the outcome, two things are not in doubt: the attack on Trảng Bàng happened as the picture shows, and Kim Phúc survived because people on that road stopped to help her.

Sources: Image credits: AP Images / Nick Ut. The Pulitzer Prizes: Huynh Cong Ut, 1973 Spot News Photography; Associated Press, 6 May 2025: AP finds no definitive evidence to change credit; CNN via KRDO, 19 May 2025: World Press Photo suspends attribution; NBC News, 2022: Kim Phúc’s final burn treatment; Wikipedia: Nick Ut; Wikipedia: The Stringer.

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