Huỳnh Công Út, known professionally as Nick Ut (born March 29, 1951),[2] is a Vietnamese-American photographer who worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles.

[9] His closest friend in the Saigon bureau, Henri Huet, also died in 1971 after volunteering to take the weary Ut's place on an assignment.

[11] The Terror of War, also colloquially called Napalm Girl,[12][13] is Ut's best-known photograph and features a naked 9-year-old girl, Phan Thị Kim Phúc, running toward the camera from a South Vietnamese napalm strike that mistakenly hit Trảng Bàng village instead of nearby North Vietnamese troops on June 8, 1972.

[14] Before delivering his film with the photograph, Ut set his camera aside to rush 9-year-old Kim Phuc to a hospital, where doctors saved her life.

Pictures of nudes of all ages and sexes, and especially frontal views were an absolute no-no at the Associated Press in 1972 ... Horst argued by telex with the New York head-office that an exception must be made, with the compromise that no close-up of the girl Kim Phuc alone would be transmitted.

[24][25] A 2025 documentary, The Stringer investigates the authorship of the photo and claims that it was not taken by Ut but by a Vietnamese photographer named Nguyễn Thành Nghệ.

[32] On the eve of receiving the award, Ut published an essay in Newsweek explaining why he decided to accept the medal from President Donald Trump despite political concerns surrounding the January 6 attack on the U.S.

On the 40th anniversary of that Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph in September 2012, Ut became only the third person inducted into the Leica Hall of Fame for his contributions to photojournalism.