Slava Veder took his Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph Burst of Joy, which came to symbolize the end of United States involvement in the Vietnam War.

The Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography is one of the American Pulitzer Prizes annually awarded for journalism. It recognizes a distinguished example of feature photography in black and white or color, which may consist of a photograph or photographs, a sequence or an album.

Burst of Joy is a Pulitzer Prize–winning photograph showing Robert L. Stirm, a lieutenant colonel in the United States Air Force, meeting his family after five years as a POW in North Vietnam due to the Vietnam War. The photograph was taken by Slava "Sal" Veder, an Associated Press photographer, on March 17, 1973, at Travis Air Force Base in Solano County, California.

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.