THE ROAD FROM TRANG BANG

I think now, looking back, we did not fight the enemy, we fought ourselves--and the enemy was in us . . . The war is over for me now, but it will always be there--the rest of my days . . . But be that as it may, those of us who did make it have an obligation to build again, to teach to others what we know and to try with what’s left of our lives to find a goodness and meaning to this life.

--From “Platoon”

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So many gut-wrenching images emerged from the Vietnam war: Malcolm Browne’s photograph of the public immolation of a Buddhist monk; Larry Burrows’ images of bloodied and mentally exhausted soldiers in the muck on a hilltop south of the DMZ and the chaotic scene on board a helicopter where two GIs had just been gravely wounded; Eddie Adams’ 1968 photo of the execution of a Viet Cong prisoner on the streets of Saigon; Huynh Cong “Nick” Ut’s photograph of a naked 9-year-old Vietnamese napalm victim fleeing her burning village of Trang Bang.

Ut’s photo ran in newspapers and magazines around the world and won a Pulitzer Prize. But like fellow Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal, who in World War II captured a flag-raising on Iwo Jima, which earned him a Pulitzer, the man behind the image disappeared to anyone outside the photographic community. After the war, Rosenthal settled into a 35-year career at the San Francisco Chronicle.

Nick Ut escaped Saigon as it fell to the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army 25 years ago, and with the help of Associated Press he made it to Tokyo for two years, then settled in Los Angeles, where he still lives. It took time for him to adjust not only to his new surroundings but to his new assignments for Associated Press. Covering war was one thing, but covering baseball--his first assignment in L.A.--was quite another.

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Harris: How did you become a photographer covering the war?

Ut: I started working for AP because of my brother, Huynh Thanh My. He was a very good photographer and had joined AP. He had been a Vietnamese actor . . . he was very handsome. In 1965, the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong overran an area in the Mekong Delta where he was and killed him. A lot of reporters and photographers, including Eddie Adams and Malcolm Browne, came to my house for the funeral. They said maybe I’d become a photographer someday. I was 17 years old. I didn’t know photography at all.

One year later I became a darkroom printer at AP. I loved the darkroom. I never took a class on photography. I learned by seeing the photographers’ work and what war looked like. I didn’t want to make the same photographs as they did. I wanted to take them from my own way of thinking.

After three or four months in the darkroom, AP needed a photographer to shoot something. Somebody said, “Nicky, why don’t you go?” Just for fun I did it. I brought them back and people said, “Nicky, it looks like you’re a good photographer, go out and keep shooting.”

At some point the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese rocketed Saigon. I had my Leica and shot photos of people who had been killed and injured, and AP said, “You did a very good job,” so I said, “OK, now I’m a photographer, no more darkroom.” My boss would never see me after that.

He’d ask, “Where’s Nicky?”

“The Mekong Delta.”

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Q: Could you just go out on your own?

A: I’d go out shooting by myself. During the war you would see black smoke everywhere, so you knew where the fighting and where the bombing were. I didn’t need a map . . . I just had my Honda motorbike and wore an army uniform with Bao Chi written on it. Bao Chi means news media.

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Q: What type of equipment did you bring with you?

A: I usually traveled with three or four cameras: a Leica and a couple of Nikon Fs. All the photographers had either Leica M2s or Nikon Fs. In the full-frame napalm photo (uncropped version of the photo that won the Pulitzer), you see my good friend David Burnett rewinding his Leica, which is too slow. It takes two minutes because it’s such a small camera; it’s not like today with motor rewinds. David said, “Nicky, you got all the photos.”

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Q: What were the events that led up to that photograph?

A: That was on June 8, 1972, in Trang Bang village in Tay Ninh Province, not too far from Cambodia on Route 1, 30 miles northwest of Saigon. I went there around 7:30 or 8 a.m. and passed hundreds of refugees on Route 1 who had fled the village. People were so tired, they’d go outside the village, cook, eat, sleep, and then when the fighting stopped, return. Bombs were dropping all morning. The little girl’s house was on the right corner behind the Caodai Temple. You see all the media people, ABC, NBC, CBS, UPI, BBC, standing outside the village because the fighting had been going on for almost three days. The South Vietnamese 25th Division was fighting with the Viet Cong. In the middle of the day I told my friend that I had a lot of good photos already, so I was getting ready to head back to Saigon.

But around 1 o’clock a South Vietnamese soldier dropped a yellow smoke bomb. I said, “That’s not a bomb, that’s a signal,” so I picked up a Nikon and shot an old A-37 dropping four bombs. A few seconds later a South Vietnamese Skyraider dropped four napalm bombs and I photographed the explosion. When the bomb exploded we didn’t know anybody had died or was injured . . . we had been there all morning and hadn’t seen any people running around.

Then as we came closer we saw the first people running from the village. I thought, “Oh, my God,” when I saw a woman with her left leg badly burned by napalm. Then came a woman carrying a baby who had died and then another woman carrying a child with his skin coming off. When I took a picture of them I heard a child screaming, “Nong qua! Nong qua!” Too hot! Too hot! I looked over and saw this young girl who had pulled her burning clothes off. Then she yelled to her brother on her right that she thought she was dying and wanted some water. Just before the napalm was dropped soldiers had yelled to the children to run, but there was not enough time.

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Q: Did you know when you took the picture that you had a strong image?

A: I was a very young Vietnamese photographer. I knew I had a good photo but I didn’t know what a historic photo was. I took a few more pictures of her, but when she passed and I heard her say “too hot” and “I think I’m going to die,” and I saw her skin coming off, I put my cameras down on the highway so I could help her. I didn’t want to take any more pictures because I thought if I did she was going to die. I had already photographed two kids dying that day. I took my canteen and poured water on her to cool her off. I didn’t know that when people get burned like that you’re not supposed to put water on them. Kim’s uncle asked me to take her to the hospital . . . her mother and father were still inside the temple. I had a van so I put all the kids in and brought them to the Cu Chi Hospital because Cu Chi is not far from Trang Bang, then I tried to get back to Saigon as quickly as I could but the traffic was so bad.

When I arrived, Ishizaki Jackson, who was the chief darkroom technician and a picture editor from Tokyo, was standing outside the AP office smoking a cigarette. He said, “Hey, Nicky, what do you have?” I said, “My pictures, very good today.” We went into the darkroom and loaded film together. Black and white is very easy film to develop--in 10 minutes you’re finished. When the film dried, Ishizaki started looking at every picture. He said, “What’s wrong, she has no clothes?” I told him the story. He chose eight pictures, starting with that one.

Carl Robinson, a picture editor, said he didn’t think we could use this photo because she was nude, but then Horst Faas, AP’s chief photo editor in Saigon, told one of the office workers, Nguyen Van Hung, to go to the post office and send the images right away.

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Q: What happened to the little girl?

A: Her name is Kim Phuc. She stayed in Cu Chi only a couple of days, then they transferred her to the children’s hospital in Saigon, then to a special burn ward. She lost two nephews in the napalm attack and a brother was wounded. In my photos you see her grandmother carrying Kim’s baby nephew and her aunt carrying her 3-year-old, who died.

After the fall of Saigon in 1975, I didn’t see Kim until I met her in Cuba in 1989. She was studying Spanish and pharmacology. She introduced me to her fiance, named Toan. He helped her a lot because her body was so badly burned she thought nobody would want to marry her. She told me that her parents didn’t want her to marry him because he was from the North. But he loved her so much.

They both wanted to defect, to get away from Communism. They eventually got out to Canada. I talked to her on the phone after she had arrived there. She cried and told me what happened. She had gotten married in Cuba. She had invited people from the Cuban government and the Vietnamese Embassy and all her friends. People asked, “Why don’t you go on a honeymoon?” She said, “I don’t have money.” So one of her friends, a North Korean, gave her money for a Moscow honeymoon. She was a very smart lady. She planned everything. When the plane stopped on the way back to Cuba in Gander, Newfoundland, for refueling, she and her husband left everything on the plane and went to customs, saying, “We defect.”

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Q: Where is Kim now?

A: She lives in Toronto with her husband and two kids and is now a goodwill ambassador for UNESCO. You know Kim and I are almost like family, she calls me “uncle.” I talk with her almost every week. She has books about the war but doesn’t want to see any war pictures, nothing to remind her of the nightmare there. She became a Catholic and goes to church every week.

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Q: Is she in any pain?

A: Outside she’s happy but inside there’s still a lot of physical pain.

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Q: What happened to Kim’s brother, who is seen crying on her right side in your photo?

A: Tam is fine. He never left Vietnam and is still in the same village.

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Q: Have you ever been wounded?

A: I was wounded three times; I still have shrapnel from a mortar in my left leg. When I was in the area of Trang Bang, I used to stop by and ask how Kim was doing. Four or five months after she was wounded, I went there but she was still in the hospital. I was outside her family’s house and got hit in the stomach. I was outside the temple, my Nikon F was around my neck. I wondered what was wrong with my camera . . . there were holes in it everywhere. I thought, “What happened?” It was shrapnel from a mortar. When you get hit you don’t feel anything. You hear the noise but that’s it. Then I saw my shirt and saw the blood then felt my stomach. A South Vietnamese soldier carried me into the temple.

Another time I thought I was going to get killed. One day in 1973, before the fall of Saigon but after the cease-fire, an AP reporter said, “Nicky, come with me.” I didn’t know where he was going. Later I found out we were in a Viet Cong-controlled village. I thought, “Oh no, I’m going to be dead.” But the Viet Cong knew who I was. They said, “Oh, you’re that famous guy” because of my photo of Kim Phuc. I was shaking. After that I felt better because they were being so friendly to me.

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Q: Where did the name Nick come from?

A: I was called Nick by Henri Huet, whose father was French and mother Vietnamese. When I joined AP, I was young. My name is Huynh Cong Ut, but Henri thought I was a baby and nicknamed me Nicky, so everybody started calling me Nick when I became a photographer. Henri became my good friend. In 1971, me, Henri and Larry Burrows went to cover a story in the DMZ about the first Americans being dropped into Laos. We spent almost two weeks in Dong Ha in the DMZ. Because it was raining and the fog was so heavy we couldn’t take the helicopter from there to Laos. One day someone from the American MACV (Military Assistance Command Vietnam) said, “Tomorrow four cameramen can go with us into Laos.” Then Henri asked me, “Hey, Nicky, I’m so tired, I want to have a vacation soon, can I go first?” He wanted a vacation to Hong Kong. So the next day Larry, Henri, Kent Potter from UPI and Keisaburo Shimamoto, who freelanced for Newsweek, got ready to go to Laos. I took a C-130 back to Saigon. When I got back, Horst Faas asked me, “Did you see Henri?”

“Yes, he told me he wanted to go to Laos with Larry Burrows and everybody. . . .”

I saw the look on his face.

“What happened?”

Then Horst told me that the photographers got shot down. All died. I started crying. I said, “It was supposed to be me who died, not Henri.”

I don’t know why Henri came up with Nick, but when he died I told myself that I would take the name Nick forever because Henri was my good friend.

The last photographer to die was my good friend Michel Laurent, two days before the fall of Saigon. Michel had stopped by to see me. He said, “Nicky, we work good together, let’s go.” I said, “Michel, please, this war now is very dangerous--because there are no more Americans, only Vietnamese.” Then Michel said, “Don’t worry, Nicky, I’ll take care of myself.”I left Vietnam and in the Philippines heard on the radio that Michel had been killed.

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Q: What type of assignments do you do these days?

A: Everything. I’m a staff photographer for Associated Press. They’re like my family. They helped my brother first, then me. At big stories you can see me right there. Earthquakes, fires, plane crashes. . . .

In Vietnam I was only a war photographer. I came here and they told me to cover an Angels baseball game. So I went there with some long lenses and I heard all the other photographers clicking and saw all these people running. I hardly shot anything. I asked my friend, “Why are all these guys running?” It was like a Viet Cong overrun.

I went back to AP and they asked “Nicky, what do you have?” I told them I had nothing. I didn’t understand the game. So I bought the paper and magazines and studied the game and how it was photographed.

Lately, I covered the Lakers victory, which almost turned into a riot. Outside Staples Center I was hit in the back by a policeman and a guy broke my plastic lens hood when I was trying to photograph him.

I covered the Alaska Airlines crash off Port Hueneme. I covered the L.A. riots, which was very dangerous to cover . . . people carrying guns. I shot from my car using long lenses. People were stealing everything. I cover a lot of court trials: Robert Downey Jr., the Menendez trial, the O.J. Simpson trial. I’ve also covered football, baseball, basketball, boxing, all kinds of sports.

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Q: One of your most widely published photos taken in a Los Angeles cemetery shows that for many, the Vietnam War is not over.

A: I photographed a woman crying over her son at his grave on Veterans Day two years ago. It ran on the front pages of many newspapers afterward. I didn’t come right away to ask her questions. After a few minutes, I asked, “Where’s he from? Where did he die?” One of the captions that ran was: “Carmen Hernandez cries at her son’s grave at Los Angeles National Cemetery. Hernandez died in Vietnam.”