The Stringer Controversy

History so often belongs to those with the largest bullhorns, at least for a time, until someone comes along to challenge the accepted narratives.

(Carl Robinson, photo by Robin Hemley)

In February of 2016, I met the man now at the center of a journalism scandal triggered by the premiere at Sundance this January of the documentary, “The Stringer.” My introduction to Carl Robinson was happenstance as I had been invited by my friend, the novelist and journalist, Tony Maniaty, to tag along with him to a monthly meet up of former foreign correspondents at Captain Torres, a Spanish restaurant near Sydney, Australia’s Chinatown. Seated by Carl, I soon learned that he had worked for the Associated Press in Saigon during the war in Vietnam, so I asked him if he had known the late John Nance, another AP photographer of that era who had worked for the AP the Saigon bureau. I had known John because he had been embroiled (his career ruined, in fact) in an anthropological hoax controversy about which I had researched and published a book in the early 2000s. They had overlapped for a week, John leaving the bureau for the Philippines soon after the bloody turning point of the war known as the Tet Offensive, and Carl hired around the same time. I recalled a couple of anecdotes that John had told me, one involving Nick Ut.

“You mean, Fxxxing Nick Ut,” Carl said.

I questioned him about that, and he said it was “a long story,” but eventually, I got it out of him. He told me that the famous photo nicknamed “Napalm Girl,” one of the most famous photos ever shot, was falsely credited to Nick Ut, who received world-wide fame for the image. The photo depicts 9-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc running naked towards the camera after a napalm strike. The image, Carl claimed, was actually taken by a driver for NBC who also worked as a freelancer.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“Because I attributed it to him under the orders of [Saigon Bureau Director of Photography] Horst Faas. I was putting the caption under it, and I asked Faas what I should say. He said, ‘Nick Ut. Make it Nick Ut.’”

Nick’s brother had worked for the AP but had been killed on assignment in 1965, and Carl thought that Faas felt guilty for his death in the way that commanders might feel guilt over the deaths of soldiers. Carl told me, too, that he had been the one to track down the young girl in the hospital and that there they had staged “a reunion” with Nick, again on Faas’ orders.

Not originally intending to be a journalist, Carl had arrived in Vietnam first as student and later for USAID. Stationed in the Mekong Delta, he felt frustrated because his superiors didn’t appreciate his honesty. They wanted him to “water down my reports, to get with the program.” When the Tet Offensive exposed the lie that the U.S. was winning the war (or even that it was winnable), Robinson resigned from USAID with the cold comfort that he had been right. In Saigon, freshly unemployed, he renewed an acquaintance with the legendary war photographer, Horst Faas, whom he had met when he was a student. Not long afterward, Faas offered him a job as a photo editor in the AP bureau.

When Carl spoke, it was with an American accent; he’s been a dual U.S./Australian citizen for years. He and his wife, Kim Dung, spent two years with AP in New York City after the war, after which he was transferred to Sydney and then terminated after a year, though he says he never learned why. Subsequently, he worked as a Newsweek correspondent through the 80s until opening a Vietnamese restaurant with his wife, which the couple ran through the 90s. For the past decade or so, Carl had organized reunions of “old hacks” to Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City, and once to Cambodia, where they reconnected, reminisced, and were feted by the Vietnamese press and government.

Carl was reticent about the story, and he asked me not to write about it as nonfiction. He offered little proof at the time of his claims anyway, many of the people involved in the story were dead, and while he knew the name of the real photographer, Nghe, a rare name in Vietnam, he had no idea if the man was alive or in what country he was living. For him, the story was painful, something that had bothered his conscience for many years, and on occasion, he had brought it up with his former coworkers. The famous war correspondent, Peter Arnett had threatened a lawsuit. Carl heard from others that Nick Ut called Carl “crazy.” Obviously, if this story broke, it would cause an enormous scandal.

When I returned to my lodgings after my lunch with Carl Robinson in 2016, I wrote in my diary in enthusiastic delirium, “Can I write this as a novel in two months? Ha!” That “Ha!” was well-warranted as I didn’t begin the novel in earnest until 2020. Two years later, Carl and the producers of “The Stringer” began their collaboration (though I did not know of this collaboration at the time). My book is set in 2015 at a gathering of the old journalists in Ho Chi Minh City. While my novel borrows from the scandal, the photo in my book is not the photo of Kim Phuc, but an unnamed and undescribed photo (the choice was made for artistic, not legal reasons). Still, I was fascinated by Nick Ut as someone who was both the inventor of himself in true American fashion and someone “invented” by someone else (Horst Faas), if the allegations were true. Another self-inventor co-invented by America and its obsession with fame, Donald Trump, had bestowed the National Medal of the Arts upon Ut in 2021. As a paparazzo in L.A., Ut had made a career out of photographing stars such as Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton, and briefly brushed up against another case of mistaken photographic provenance when, in 2009, ABC’s 2020 credited Ut with a photo of Hilton taken by Karl Larsen, who promptly sued. Ut didn’t argue with Larsen, acknowledging, “My flash didn’t fire. His picture was better.”

In 2023, Carl’s version of events was still uncorroborated by anyone else. But then, something changed. In April of that year, the filmmakers found Nguyen Thanh Nghe, a former driver for NBC, just as Carl told me in 2016, who claims to have taken the photo. He and Nick Ut had both been present that day in Trang Bang when South Vietnamese jets had mistakenly napalmed their own lines and the villagers who lived there. Among the burned children who emerged from the smoke and fire was Kim Phuc. The big question remains, who took that fateful photo, Nghe or Nick? The film presents a strong case in support of Nghe, and doesn’t depend solely on Robinson’s testimony at all. Still, his detractors have focused largely on Robinson as though the film’s argument rests on Robinson’s shoulders alone. The inevitable attacks on his credibility paint him as a “disgruntled former employee” of AP. And why, his detractors ask, was he silent for so many years?

For the answer to that, you must put yourself in Carl’s shoes (which is exactly what I tried to do in my novel). When you have a job that you want to keep because you have a family to feed, and a person with power over you tells you to do something, even though you know it’s wrong, the odds of you refusing to do so when it might mean your job, are slim. That’s human nature. And the scenario becomes more complicated if this is a person you otherwise admire. Carl admired Horst Faas. He didn’t want to lose his job, but over time, the truth corroded his conscience.

When I met Carl in 2016, he seemed reluctant to pursue his claims at all. His 2020 Vietnam memoir, The Bite of the Lotus: An Intimate Vietnam Memoir left out the incident, though by this time Faas had died. Carl’s critics point to this omission as a further indication that he knew his claims were false. I see it differently.

For the Sundance premiere of the film, both Carl and Nghe were flown to the festival. Joining the filmmakers for a Q&A after the screening, according to NBC, Nghe told the audience through a translator, “‘I took the photo.’ The audience cheered enthusiastically. He did not say why he waited so long to make the claim.”

That last line keeps echoing in my mind and echoes with the critics of Carl Robinson who wonder why it took so long for him to make his claim. Intentional or not on the part of the journalist who wrote the piece, does that simple sentence not cast doubt? Why didn’t you just speak up if you knew this all along?

But in what world would a Vietnamese stringer, a driver for NBC with no real connections or allies in the media be believed over the Chief of Photography at the Associated Press? And where would he publicize his claims?

In one AP news story, the news organization protests that they were not allowed to see the film, speak with the film’s sources (who signed NDAs) or review the evidence before the film premiered. The AP claims an impartial interest in the truth, and having concluded their own six-month investigation, they stand behind Nick Ut. If that doesn’t make one doubt the film’s veracity, they bring in their big guns:

A variety of witnesses interviewed by AP, including renowned correspondents such as Fox Butterfield and Peter Arnett and the photo’s subject herself, Phuc, say they are certain Ut took the photo.

Of the three, only Fox Butterfield can be considered a reliable witness. Arnett wasn’t present and Kim Phuc was a nine-yar-old in agony who on other occasions stated she didn’t remember who brought her to the hospital that day. Fox Butterfield was indeed there and remembers Nick Ut taking photos and Horst Faas congratulating him on the shot later in the day at AP Headquarters. From this evidence, counter to Carl’s claims and Nghe’s, you can draw your own conclusions. But the documentary film presents forensic evidence that pieces together film footage of that day, and even satellite imagery, in a way that convincingly concludes that Nick Ut wasn’t in a position to take the famous photo. An unidentified photographer, on the other hand, seems to be in the correct position, and the filmmakers claim that this photographer was most likely Nghe.

When Robinson told me about Nghe in 2016 only a handful of people knew of this claim, and Robinson knew nothing of his whereabouts. That changed when the documentary makers found Nghe and everything seemed to align with Carl’s story: Nghe was clearly there taking photos on that day and that Carl was the person with the job of crediting the photo. What kind of weird conspiracy would make someone invent an alternate photographer and then have him magically manifested years later?

History is rarely settled. Some disturbance inevitably pops up, changing not the events themselves but our interpretations of them. I have always been one to take history personally, to obsess over histories that previously have been erased, ignored, forgotten, or suppressed. I believe that to change history, you must first take it personally, even and especially when such histories demand of you a willingness to fight an uphill battle.