Vietnam War: Associated Press photographer Nick Ut took a Pulitzer Prize–winning photograph of a naked nine-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc fleeing after being burned by napalm.

The Vietnam War was an armed conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia fought between North Vietnam and South Vietnam and their allies. North Vietnam was supported by the Soviet Union and China, while South Vietnam was supported by the United States and other anti-communist nations. The conflict was the second of the Indochina wars and a proxy war of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and US. The Vietnam War was one of the postcolonial wars of national liberation, a theater in the Cold War, and a civil war, with civil warfare a defining feature from the outset. Direct US military involvement escalated from 1965 until its withdrawal in 1973. The fighting spilled into the Laotian and Cambodian Civil Wars, which ended with all three countries becoming communist in 1975.

The Associated Press (AP) is an American not-for-profit news agency headquartered in New York City. Founded in 1846, it operates as a cooperative, unincorporated association, and produces news reports that are distributed to its members, major U.S. daily newspapers and radio and television broadcasters. Since the Pulitzer Prize was established in 1917, the AP has earned 59 of them, including 36 for photography. The AP distributes its widely used AP Stylebook, its AP polls tracking NCAA sports, and its election polls and results during US elections. It sponsors the National Football League's annual awards

Huỳnh Công Út, known professionally as Nick Ut, is a Vietnamese-American photographer who worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles. He won both the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography and the 1973 World Press Photo of the Year for the 1972 photograph The Terror of War, depicting children running away from a napalm bombing attack during the Vietnam War. Since the release of the documentary The Stringer in 2025, the authorship of the photograph has been disputed; the documentary identified Nguyễn Thành Nghệ as the author, AP stood with the attribution to Ut, and World Press Photo suspended the authorship attribution until more evidence is available. In 2017, he retired. Examples of his work may be found in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.