By Nick Ut

May 12, 2012: Horst Faas embraces colleague Nick Ut during a reunion party in Ho Chi Minh city, Thursday, April 28, 2005. Veteran journalists gathered from around the globe in Vietnam to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the end of the war and remember and honor colleagues who had died. (AP Photo/Richard Vogel)

The first time I worked with Mr. Horst Faas was in 1966. He was then AP’s chief photographer for Southeast Asia, based in Saigon. He accepted me as an AP photographer, replacing my brother, Huynh Thanh My, an AP photographer who had been killed while on assignment covering the war in Vietnam.

In 1972, when my “Napalm Girl” picture was being edited on the light table, a couple of AP photo editors rejected the picture because the girl was nude. When Faas and correspondent Peter Arnett came back from their lunch, and Faas saw my picture, he asked about it.

“Who got this photo?” he asked. The editor said it was taken by Nick Ut. Faas asked why hadn’t it been sent to New York yet. Why was it still here? He convinced the editors that the photo needed to be sent, just as it was. So the “Napalm Girl” picture was transmitted to AP New York headquarters and the rest of the world. It became the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo for News that year.

Horst Faas was the best boss I ever met. He was kind to everyone. After he retired, he always contacted me by email, always calling me “Son.” He asked me to come visit him in Munich and have a photo show with him. I last spoke to him a month ago, about me coming to visit him in Germany this September. That became my last conversation with him, and I will never see him there.

I am deeply thankful for Mr. Faas. He changed my life twice. He hired me to work for AP, and he selected my picture, and now it is well known. I will never forget this man.

He’s the only Horst Faas.

It’s been two years since I went to Vietnam, but I can’t forget her.

She walked with a slight limp, and smiled often. Her eyes told me what our language barrier could not: She wanted me to focus on her abilities as a productive artist – not her disabilities.

Inside a tourist-packed museum featuring sobering pictures of the Vietnam War, the young woman and several dozen other physically challenged people showed off their artwork, ranging from handcrafted paintings to bright bouquets of bead flowers. Some demonstrated how they make the flower arrangements and others worked on canvas. Nearby, two young boys who are blind played the piano.

Away from the steady hum of music and laughter, the woman with the pretty smile led me on a tour, showing me proudly what she had made with her own hands.

Through her quiet action, I began to see the story in Vietnam as having less to do with who or what was to blame for the problems caused by Agent Orange to a desire for change. The artists at the museum that day were so open to me, not just because they had to win my opinion, but because they wanted me, an American journalism professor, to see them as who they really are.

Never once did the woman ask me about my stance on the war, or whether the U.S. government should help financially support people who may still be suffering from the effects of Agent Orange. She never asked me whether my father fought in the Vietnam War. If she had, I would have told her that he did fight, and that he lives with the legacy of war each day.

***

My father, now in his 70s, told me at his home in Ohio about 10 years ago that the Vietnam War was not pretty. It was tough for the front-line soldiers, he said, because they could never be sure who was friend or foe. Often, the enemy was a frail man, he said, or a woman or child. It was hard, he said, to know whether he was ever going to get back home to his wife and three children – we were living off base in Japan at the time.

Nowadays, my father wonders if he too was affected by Agent Orange, which was sprayed heavily by American troops attempting to clear vegetation and enemy hideouts.

In my father’s case, he has filed no claim related to Agent Orange with the Department of Veteran Affairs, but many others have filed claims and received some sort of compensation. In Vietnam, a growing number of Vietnamese people, supported by some American philanthropists and activists, are also demanding compensation or assistance to help people they believe are still suffering from the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam. Some claim the damaging effects of the dioxin found in Agent Orange has been passed on from generation to generation.

Scientific data, however, remains unclear. Even organizers of the art exhibit in Vietnam were hesitant to pinpoint the causes of the artists’ disabilities and deformities.

What remains clear to me now, even two years later, is that the woman with the pretty smile taught me a valuable lesson. She reminded me through the simple act of kindness that even though we are from opposite sides of a painful war, we are not so different from one another. We both want to heal. We both want to move on. We both want our stories to be told with dignity.

The program begins with an international travel through the USA, Philippines, Vietnam, the deep blue of the Pacific Ocean, and with a universal message of hope and determination.

Among the films is “THE LEAVES KEEP FALLING,” winner of an ARTIVIST AWARD: BEST SHORT – ENVIRONMENT.  The film was shot by Ed Kashi and directed by Julie Winokur of Talking Eyes Media.

As part of its herbicidal warfare program during the Vietnam War, the U.S. military sprayed some 12 million gallons of Agent Orange defoliant on Vietnam. Forty years later, the toxin from Agent Orange is still wreaking havoc on three generations of Vietnamese civilians. ‘The Leaves Keep Falling’ captures the day-to-day struggle of caring for these survivors of a war.

RESERVE YOUR TICKETS NOW! http://ARTIVIST-NYC1.eventbrite.com/
Follow Artivist Film Festival: www.facebook.com/ArtivistFilmFestivals

By De Tran

DANANG, Vietnam – The famed China Beach where war-weary GIs once went on R&R is now lined with luxury beachfront villas, five-star resorts, and even a golf course designed by the great Greg Norman.

Not far from this sun-drenched, white-sand stretch of paradise, I met a 57-year-old illiterate subsistence farmer and her 19-year-old severely deformed son, who share a one-room shack with a leaky roof and no running water. She was exposed to Agent Orange during the Vietnam War, and she believes the defoliant caused her son’s birth defect.

A few dozen klicks away, in another hamlet outside of Danang, another farmer and his family care for their 15-year-old son, a severely disabled boy who’s believed to be another casualty of Agent Orange. During the war, the farmer was an artilleryman for the South Vietnamese army, and was exposed to the defoliant in the battlefields.

These two families – from opposite sides of the Vietnam War – represent one of the final dark vestiges of the war: Agent Orange, a powerful defoliant used to clear jungles during the Vietnam War, is still leaving its pernicious effects on the people and the environment more than three decades after the guns went silent.

Every war leaves lasting scars that span generations. This year marks the 36th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, but the legacy of Agent Orange remains. Thousands of American GIs still receive disability payments for conditions related to dioxin. Millions of Vietnamese are believed to be effected by the traces of Agent Orange that remain in the numerous “hot spots” around Vietnam.

Some Vietnamese remember the spraying of Agent Orange like it was yesterday.

“The spray was white like the mist,” said one former soldier. “It felt a bit cool when it touched your skin… After an hour, all the trees in the jungle started to droop… Then there was nothing to eat.”

For the most part, Vietnam has moved on – most of its 89-million population were born after the war – yet, Agent Orange remains unresolved, an impasse made worse by the political differences of the three sides of that long-away conflict. Agent Orange is “the last thing for a full-circle normalization” between the two countries, said a former Vietnamese diplomat. “In Asia, you cannot go forward unless you address the past properly.”

***

The Dai Chanh hamlet, where Mrs. Trinh Thi Nam and her son live, is about 40 miles from Danang, a bustling modern city on Vietnam’s central coast. It’s a bucolic village with narrow dirt paths that weave their way through bamboo groves, palm trees and cassava plots. Banana, papaya and cashew trees, and tiny simple homes dot the verdant landscape. Water buffaloes graze by the lush rice paddies; here and there, a few white herons lull in the brilliant sunlight. But life is difficult here. The monsoon season brings devastating floods each year. (Flooding is so common here that the power outlets in homes are built 8 feet off the floor to avoid floodwater.)

During the war that tore apart both Vietnam and the United States, Mrs. Nam went into the mountains in the back of her home village to serve as a cook for the communist guerrillas there.

She had little choice in the matter, she said. Some villages were forced by the communists to follow them, while others were sympathetic to the American-backed forces. Such allegiance sometime depended on the location of the village. Such was the confusing nature of the war.

Her village, as with many in the region, was a Vietcong stronghold, so U.S. soldiers forced the villagers from their ancestral land under the Strategic Hamlet Program. They sprayed the village with Agent Orange to destroy the crops, making sure the villagers could not return. Sometime they had to destroy a village in order to save it. Many villagers headed for the mountains to fight against the Americans and the South Vietnamese Army.

While in the jungle, Mrs. Nam was exposed to Agent Orange, she said, as U.S. planes defoliated the tropical forest to deny the enemy of food sources and hiding places.

Shortly after she returned to her village, lesions broke out all over her body, a condition that continues to this day. Her chloracne is a definitive sign of poisoning from dioxin, a compound found in Agent Orange. She subsequently gave birth to a deformed boy, Luc, who’s been confined to his cot since birth with spina bifida. Luc, whose defect is believed to have been caused by Agent Orange. His father left after Luc was born, consigning mother and child to a life of extreme poverty.

Her day revolves around her son. The young man needs around-the-clock care, like a newborn. During my visit to the home, I watch as she feeds him, changes his soiled clothing and the straw mat on his bed. In the afternoon, she picks her son out of bed and cradles him while sitting on the floor to prevent him from getting bed sores. The picture of mother and child reminds one of Michelangelo’s Pieta.

In the still of the night, the future brings her nightmare. “I cannot sleep at night,” Mrs. Nam said, crying. “Tomorrow, when I’m old, when I’m sick, or if I die before him, who will feed him? Who will change him?”

***

Doan Lien, the artilleryman served with the South Vietnamese army. He lost his left leg during a shelling in 1974. He was still in the hospital when South Vietnam fell to the communist, setting off a mass migration that sent hundreds of thousands of refugees to the United States.

He believed he was exposed to Agent Orange by drinking the stream water in the jungle. His son, Doan Ngoc Tung, was born severely disabled. He can’t talk or understand words. He has no control of his bodily functions, much like a newborn baby. Lien feeds him by chewing the food first before spooning it to his son, like a bird feeding her chick. Tung is also susceptible to violent seizures.

“Ever since he was born, our lives have been an ocean of suffering,” said Lien’s brother, Le Thuyen.

Some families even blame themselves, seeing their children’s birth defects as karmic payback for the sins of their past.

***

During the height of the war, between 1962 and 1971, more than 20 million gallons of herbicide were sprayed over the rural areas and jungles of South Vietnam, according to the report “Addressing the Legacy of Agent Orange in Vietnam: Declaration and Plan of Action” published by the U.S.-Vietnam Dialogue Group on Agent Orange/Dioxin. Operation Ranch Hand, whose motto was “Only you can prevent a forest,” stripped bare 5 million acres of forest and destroyed crops in another 500,000 acres, an area the size of Massachusetts.

At least 4.5 million Vietnamese and the 2.8 million U.S. military personnel who served in Vietnam from 1962 to 1975 may have been exposed to Agent Orange or other contaminated herbicides, the report said. The Vietnam Red Cross estimates that up to 3 million Vietnamese adults and children —the best available estimates—have suffered adverse health effects, congenital and developmental defects.

Agent Orange and some of the other herbicides were contaminated with di¬oxin, a highly toxic and persistent organic pollutant that has been linked to cancers, diabetes, and nerve and heart disease among people directly and indirectly exposed, and to spina bifida among their offspring. It is toxic over many decades and does not degrade easily.

The Dialogue Group estimates that will take $300 million in the next 10 years to clean up the environment, help the families of the victims, and install prevention programs.

“If we don’t do something about it, we might get a fourth generation,” said a former Vietnamese diplomat.

***

I left Vietnam in 1975, at age 12, during the final days of the war. I have since returned many times. I know that you can’t go home again, that you can’t step into the same river of life twice. Yet, every time I returned to my native land, the past floods back in a stream of scenes, scents and senses… The plumeria trees in the old schoolyard remind me of absent friends and teachers. The Continental Hotel sends me back to my first visit to Saigon as a child in the early ‘70s. The sea breeze of my hometown brings back a more simple childhood… Yesterday and tomorrow collide inside me; I am a native son to Vietnam’s past and an expatriate to its future.

When I returned for the first time in 1993, the former Saigon was a forlorn and poverty-stricken place, mired under the paralysis of state-controlled economy, made worse by a U.S.-led trade embargo.

Saigon’s main drag, the cosmopolitan Dong Khoi Street, was barely lit at night to save electricity. This street reflects the changing of Vietnam over the decades. It used to be called Rue Catinat under the French colonialists, then under the South Vietnamese government, it was called Duong Tu Do – or Freedom Street. When the communist overran Saigon in 1975, it became Dong Khoi Street – or General Uprising Street.

Today, Louis Vuitton and Gucci stores grace Saigon’s main drag, where shiny new Mercedes Benzes and Lexuses zip by regularly. Portraits of Colonel Sanders are everywhere; KFC and Pizza Hut are making the kids of an emerging Vietnamese middle class fat. Vietnam is having a love affair with all things Western, especially things American. It is obsessed with erecting golf courses and staging beauty pageants – symbols of nouveau riche and capitalist kitsch… The iPhone is a prized object and Bill Gates is a role model.

Yet, despite its looking ahead to the future, Vietnam is still haunted by the ghost of the war. The past and the future tend to intermingle in a country with a 4,000-year-old history.

Vietnam today is racing to raise itself from the ashes of that war and the trade embargo that followed. It is a vibrant and young country. About 70 percent of its 85-million population is under the age of 30, and thus, has no recollection of the Vietnam War.

***

Vietnam sits at a strategic corner of Southeast Asia, its geopolitical importance has invited repeated foreign invasions over the centuries. First the Chinese, then the Mongolians, then the French. After the defeat of the French colonialists at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, Vietnam was divided in two – the communist North and the American-backed Republic of South Vietnam.

The geopolitical landscape has changed since Saigon fell in April of 1975. The United States has become Vietnam’s most important trading partners. And the two former enemies increasingly have cooperated militarily to stem the growing Chinese influence in the region. The 1.2 million Vietnamese refugees living in the United States add to the inextricability between the two countries.

Yet, for all their shared history, the three factions of the war now approach the Agent Orange issue in three different courses.

In a way, it embodies the division, the disconnect and the confusion that was the Vietnam War.

Washington’s policy is hypocritical and cynical. While the Veterans Administration has long recognized Agent Orange as a cause of a whole host of illnesses among U.S. veterans, it denies the defoliants as the cause of birth defects and other illnesses among the Vietnamese.

The United States has helped Vietnam clean up the hot spots around the country, but it has agreed to provide humanitarian aid without admitting the effects of Agent Orange.

Furthermore, the United States has been using Agent Orange aid as a bargaining tool with Vietnam.

Vietnam, on the other hand, is using Agent Orange as propaganda. U.S. officials often complain that the Vietnamese government links too many illnesses to Agent Orange without evidence. “They made it sound as though Vietnam would be a Garden of Eden without Agent Orange, that there’d be no diseases,” one American diplomat said.

The one faction often neglected in the Agent Orange discussion is the South Vietnamese.

The current government places priority on helping those who served the communist side during the war. South Vietnamese veterans and their families are an afterthought. (An official in the Quang Nam province showed me a list of Agent Orange-related cases in his area. Ex-South Vietnamese soldiers are put in a category marked “Other.”)

This view doesn’t help mobilize support from the Vietnamese emigres overseas, especially in the United States.

The Vietnamese overseas community is divided – there are those who don’t want anything to do with the community government in their homeland, and there are those who would like to engage Hanoi to bring about changes to Vietnam.

Some Vietnamese in the United States deny linkage between Agent Orange and illnesses and birth defects. Some think of it as communist government propaganda. Most Vietnamese media outlets in the United States decline to run stories about Agent Orange. Even South Vietnamese veterans who were exposed to Agent Orange are reluctant to come forward.

“The Communist Party is stuck in a dead end economically, socially and politically,” Nguyen Tuong Tam, a San Jose journalist, wrote in a commentary. “To ease political and social pressure, the party came up with the issue of victims of defoliant – with an emotional name ‘Victims of Orange Dioxin’ – to throw off public opinions from inside and outside the country.

“In the many years since, the party had succeeded in mobilizing world opinion to support the call for victim reparation from the U.S. government. It has also succeeded in persuading many patriotic Vietnamese from inside and outside the country – regardless of political views – to help the people with birth defects, all of whom the party labels as victims of ‘dioxin orange.’”

***

During my trip to Vietnam for this story, I met many families with deformed children; some had more than one child with birth defects. The coincidences give plausibility that Agent Orange is the cause of these birth defects.

Despite their dire conditions, there is unconditional love the parents show toward their children. Despite their poverty and burden, there is uncommon grace.

Through their sufferings, they develop a fierce serenity that enables them to endure unspeakbable hardship and cruelty. Despite their sufferings, they see poetry in sunlight and raindrops, they see honor and dignity in their daily struggle. What I had thought would be a depressing story turned out to be life-reaffirming.

Agent Orange reconnects me to the pains of the war, a past I had sought to put behind in America. It revives long-suppressed memories of the Tet Offensive, of the deluge after the fall of Saigon, of the subsequent exodus. Agent Orange is a painful reiteration that wars are messy and their legacies long lasting, and that the victims are often the poor and the voiceless.

The world lately has been full of misery, from Katrina to the Haitian earthquake, from the Japanese tsunami to the massacre in Darfur… It’s understandable that the world has a severe case of sympathy fatigue, but the true measure of ourselves as Americans does not depend solely on our GDP and our great institutions, it also depends on how we resolve our past mistakes, on how we absolve our sins.

Correcting a wrong sometimes takes years to realize. Thirty-six years after the end of the Vietnam War seems like the right time to start.

Charles Bailey (Photo courtesy of the Aspen Institute)

Charles Bailey has received the Huân chương Hữu nghị Việt Nam, the highest honor accorded by the Government of Vietnam to non-citizens in recognition of his work as the Ford Foundation’s representative in Vietnam for more than a decade.

The citation from the president of Vietnam reads:  ”[presented] to Dr. Charles R. Bailey, an American citizen, Director, Program on Agent Orange/Dioxin, Ford Foundation, who has made many contributions to cooperation in Vietnam’s education, training and humanitarian areas, contributing to strengthening the friendly cooperative relations between the Socialist Republic of Vietnam and international organizations.”

Bailey, now director of the Aspen Institute Agent Orange in Vietnam Program, has worked on solving the lingering problems related to dioxin contamination in Vietnam for over a decade. In 2007, he helped to establish the Ford Foundation’s Special Initiative on Agent Orange/Dioxin.

According to Bailey, Ford’s approach has been two-fold:

To respond to Government of Vietnam’s requests to fund remediation work, as an exercise in confidence building between the governments of Vietnam and United States and to fund local governments, and local and international NGOs in a variety of partnership projects for children and young adults with Agent Orange-related disabilities and their families.

While at the Ford Foundation, he also spearheaded the “Make Agent Orange History” campaign in the United States, which included funding the Vietnam Reporting Project, among other non-profit organizations. Bailey joined the Aspen Institute in May 2011.

Bailey has a Ph.D. in agricultural economics from Cornell University and a master’s degree in public policy from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. He received a bachelor’s degree from Swarthmore College and then joined the Peace Corps in Nepal where he taught high school.

American forces sprayed 19 million gallons of Agent Orange and other herbicides during the Vietnam War between 1961 and 1971, mostly in South Vietnam, to deny North Vietnamese soldiers cover in the country’s dense forests and jungles. Agent Orange was contaminated with dioxin, a highly toxic chemical that is persistent in human tissues and the environment.

Nguyen’s father, a former naval officer in the South Vietnamese Army, developed liver cancer a few years ago. The diagnosis followed decades of struggle with Hepatitis C, a viral infection he contracted through a blood transfusion during the war. A liver transplant saved his life.

Numerous studies and research on American veterans has led to the The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences linking Agent Orange/dioxin exposure to a slew of health conditions, including prostate, lung and other cancers, Parkinson’s disease and leukemia, and birth defects in the children of veterans, such as spina bifida.

However, this stands “in stark contrast to what little is known about the health effects of dioxin in Vietnamese living in the United States – whether they were born here or are former residents of South Vietnam,” writes Nguyen.

According to a study published in the journal Nature by Columbia University professor emeritus Jeanne Stellman:

…as many as 4.8 million Vietnamese civilians were exposed to the chemicals during the war. The collapse of the government of South Vietnam brought an exodus of Vietnamese to the United States, with more than 125,000 refugees resettling here after 1975. The country’s Vietnamese population now stands at more than 1.6 million, according to the last census count.

According to Arnold Schecter, a professor of environmental sciences at the Univ. of Texas School of Public Health in Dallas and a leading researcher on dioxin exposure in the Vietnamese American community, no one has conducted measures of dioxin exposure levels in the population.

Complicating matters is the fact that most Vietnamese immigrants in the United States are largely from South Vietnam, which fell to the communists in 1975. Nguyen notes:

As such, many here do not want to do or say anything that gives credence to Hanoi’s claims about the health effects of Agent Orange, part of a massive campaign to win compensation for victims of the defoliant. [A lawsuit brought by Vietnam against the chemical makers in federal court in New York was dismissed in 2005, and subsequent appeals have failed.]

Yet the lack of health studies for this group comes at a time when the symptoms of wartime exposure to Agent Orange/dioxin could be surfacing.

Read Ngoc Nguyen’s “Agent Orange Studies Overlook Vietnamese Americans.”

RELATED: The Forgotten Ones: Speaking Out After Decades of Silence (audio/K. Oanh Ha)

"Agent Orange: Personal Requiem" will be screened at 7PM, Oct. 28 at the David Brower Center in Berkeley, Calif. (Photo courtesy of Masako Sakata)

Representatives of the Vietnam Reporting Project will discuss its award-winning coverage of the consequences of Agent Orange contamination in Vietnam at the upcoming conference “Agent Orange and Addressing the Legacy of the War in Vietnam.”

VRP Director Jon Funabiki,  editor De Tran and photographer Catherine Karnow will participate in the “Vietnam Reporting Project: The Power of the Media” panel as part of the two-day Rotary Peace conference, to be held Oct. 27-28 at the University of California, Berkeley.

Charles Bailey, Director of the Special Initiative on Agent Orange at the Aspen Institute, is scheduled to present the keynote address on Saturday morning. Other conference speakers include physicians, organizers, students and government officials involved in addressing the legacy of Agent Orange.

“We hope the conference will help raise awareness around the issues of Agent Orange and offer individuals ways to get involved in the campaign to eradicate Agent Orange in Vietnam and help those affected by the defoliant,” said to Phuong Quach, one of the conference organizers.

The conference begins with a Friday night film screening of “Agent Orange: A Personal Requiem.” The documentary follows filmmaker Masako Sakata as she travels to Vietnam to better understand Agent Orange, after her husband died from cancer believed to have been caused by his exposure to it. Following the screening, Sakata will speak about her experience making the film.

The conference is co-sponsored by the Ford Foundation, Rotary Club of Berkeley, Rotary Club of Oakland, Rotary Club of San Francisco, Rotary Club of Sebastopol Sunrise, Rotary Peace Center and Active Voice. For additional information, please visit MakeAgentOrangeHistory.org.

Registration:
$30 for the public and $7 for students. Registration includes lunch.

• Public Registration
• Student Registration*

*Please be prepared to show a valid student ID.

Videographer/photographer Ed Kashi and photographer Catherine Karnow traveled to Da Nang, Vietnam as Vietnam Reporting Project fellows in the summer of 2010 to shoot the video and still photographs seen in “The Leaves Keep Falling.”

The festival world premiere will be held at SVA Theatre, 333 West 23 Street, New York. A day of panels and workshops will be held on Oct. 28 at SOCDOC (School of Visual Arts MFA Social Documentary Film program), 136 West 21st St., 1st Floor, New York. As one of the 12 winning selections, the film also will be included in other screenings around the country.

Media That Matters showcases short films on the most important topics of the day, and seeks to connect filmmakers and their organizations with a global audience — including educators, activists, and nonprofits — to inspire them to take action.

Nick Ut receiving AAJA's Lifetime Achievement Award at the AAJA Gala Awards Banquet in Detroit on Aug. 13, 2011. (Photo by Paul Sakuma)

Three Vietnam Reporting Project Fellows received journalism awards from the Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) at its 2011 convention in Detroit, Michigan on Saturday, August 13.

AP Photographer Nick Ut received AAJA’s Lifetime Achievement Award, its highest honor, given to an individual “who has demonstrated courage and commitment to the principles of journalism over the course of a life’s work. “

In presenting the award to Ut, banquet co-emcee Ti-Hua Chang, a reporter with WNYW FOX 5/New York, said Ut’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photo, Napalm Girl, “not only symbolized the devastation of the Vietnam War, but of war itself.”

Ut received a standing ovation from the large crowd at AAJA’s gala scholarship and awards banquet. “I’m very honored to receive this award for doing what I’ve loved for 45 years,” Ut said. He recalled that dreadful day in 1972 when he took the iconic photograph of 9-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc running naked and badly burned from a napalm attack on her village. After snapping the photo, Ut dropped his camera and poured water from his water bottle over the girl’s burned back as she screamed in pain and fear. He then rushed her to the hospital for life-saving care. “I didn’t want her to die,” Ut said.

Ut acknowledged and thanked the Vietnam Reporting Project, urging the audience to show compassion for the many children in Vietnam who are suffering from the adverse effects of Agent Orange. “These children need your help,” he said.

Thuy Vu

K. Oanh Ha

“Unfinished Business” touched a nerve with the Associated Press Managing Editors association judges. They described the project as a moving exploration of the lingering and devastating effects of Agent Orange on Vietnam War veterans and their families in the United States and on survivors in Vietnam.

Plain Dealer columnist and Vietnam Reporting Project fellow Connie Schultz spent more than a year researching and reporting the long-term effects that Agent Orange has on the lives of the Vietnamese, U.S. war veterans and their families, including a reporting trip to Vietnam in October 2010.

The APME award winners will be honored at APME’s annual conference, Sept. 14-16 in Denver. The awards luncheon will be held Thursday, Sept. 15, at the new Embassy Suites – Denver Downtown Convention Center.

The Vietnam Reporting Project — coordinated by the Renaissance Journalism Center and funded by the Ford Foundation — paid for the fellows’ travel to Vietnam, along with hotel rooms and food, and provided training and logistics support.