Happy Imperial Boomerang Friday. As Trump’s goons terrorize Minneapolis and St. Paul, the president spins his wheel of overseas aggression to decide who’s next: Iran? Cuba? An 800,000-square-mile sheet of ice? The ICE agent who straight-up murdered Renee Good learned to kill in Iraq. (Frantz Fanon remains undefeated.) The would-be puppet president of Venezuela is transparently trying to bribe him as you would a baby, by dangling something shiny that he desperately wants but can’t have. I’m already sick of 2026. It’s January 16.¹

Earlier this week, I published an essay about war, trauma, and prestige journalism in Flaming Hydra, a media cooperative that I’m part of. It’s both personal and on point for the news this week, so I’m sharing it here with you. Afterward, I’ll include some parting thoughts and extras for premium subscribers. Thanks as always for reading, sharing, and subscribing.

There’s a moment early in The Stringer, a new Netflix documentary, where photographer Gary Knight visits the village of Trảng Bàng in what was once South Vietnam. The town is famous as the setting of the 1972 photograph The Terror of War. The image is better known as “Napalm Girl” for its subject: nine-year-old Phan Thị Kim Phúc running burned, naked, and terrified down a highway after a napalm attack by U.S.-backed South Vietnamese forces. Knight stops at a tin-roofed bar in the village today; inside, faded copies of the photo hang on the walls.

The documentary aims to challenge the authorship of a photo that rocketed around the world, catalyzing the anti-Vietnam War movement and becoming an enduring symbol of the human toll of war. The shot also elevated the journalist credited with taking it—Associated Press staff photographer “Nick” Huỳnh Công Út, then only 21—to international fame, earning him the George Polk Award, an Overseas Press Club Award, the World Press Photo of the Year, and a Pulitzer Prize. Út went on to have a five-decade career with AP, mainly based in Los Angeles, capturing wildfires and celebrities. He retired in 2017, his place in photojournalism’s pantheon seemingly secure.

The film’s stunning claim is that Út’s career was built on a lie. It argues that he could not have taken the photo because he was too far down the highway when Kim Phúc and her cousins reached the spot immortalized in the photo. Knight and his team contend that a stringer, or freelance journalist and photographer, named Nguyễn Thành Nghệ took the shot and sold it to the AP in Saigon for $20, where photo editor Horst Faas deliberately miscredited it to Út, his staffer. (There are other circumstantial pieces of evidence as well, such as visual evidence suggesting that the camera that captured the image was most likely a Pentax, rather than the Leica M2 that Út has always claimed he used to take the shot.)

World Press Photo, the preeminent gatekeeper of prestige in photojournalism, took the incredible step of removing Út’s name from its 1973 prize, declaring he was “unlikely to be the photographer,” though they say the identity of the true photographer remains contested. The AP’s own investigations found “inconsistencies” in both Út and Nguyễn’s accounts, but said it could not find evidence definitive enough to withdraw Út’s credit.

The photo was taken eight years before I was born, in a country I’ve only visited on vacation, decades after the war, but the documentary described a world I know all too well. I spent years working for the Associated Press, in some of the hottest flashpoints of my generation. I have firsthand experience of the neocolonial fault lines between English-speaking journalists backed by major international agencies and our local subjects, and between staffers and stringers. I also know some of the main characters in the film, if not intimately, including Knight. 

Most of all, I fully inhabited the world shown in the film, whose totems—authorship, credit, and above all, the quest for recognition—were so central to our identities that they were worth risking our lives for, again and again. Sometimes I was in Út’s position, being feted at award banquets and at AP headquarters in New York. Other times, I was in a position closer to Nguyễn’s. Though that world is steadily dying, as the media institutions it fed and depended on morph and mutate into new forms, it still exists. Whether or not I am still in it depends on my mood each day.

I first worked for AP in 2003 as a graduate student intern in Jerusalem during the Second Palestinian Intifada. I knew right away that this was where I was meant to be: in the shit, witnessing history unfold—and, if I was truly committed and fortunate, perhaps even helping to shape it. I looked up to my older colleagues with awe and admiration, soaking up their stories of adventure and planning how I might follow in their footsteps.

When I returned to the United States, I hungrily applied for any AP gig I could find, regardless of how menial or brief. In 2005, I got a break: a reporter in the Washington bureau was going on maternity leave. Midway through that temporary job, I broke the story that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist had sold all his stock in his family’s mega-corporation just before a disappointing financial report caused share prices to plummet. My story triggered multiple federal investigations and ended Frist’s presidential aspirations. AP submitted my work for the Pulitzer. I didn’t win, but for the first time, I believed I could. I was 25.

I could have stayed in Washington, but my dream was to return abroad. I spent two years in the Dominican Republic, then two more across the island in Port-au-Prince—both times as a “local hire,” the same disposable bureaucratic status as Carl Robinson, the ex-AP photo editor and main whistleblower in The Stringer. By late 2009, I was making plans for a “bigger story”: Afghanistan.

Then, on January 12, 2010, I found myself sitting atop the biggest story in the world, quite literally. A 7.0-magnitude earthquake destroyed most of Haiti’s capital, including the AP house I was in, which galloped and buckled around me. With the help of my friend and Haitian fixer Evens Sanon—like Nguyễn, one of the global army of stringers and local hires who have both supported and conducted international newsgathering for generations—I survived and immediately went to work.

It is perverse to think about now, but what kept me going in Haiti, especially amid the horror of those first weeks, was the thought of joining the elect company of journalism’s greats. I vividly remember standing in the flattened core of Carrefour, beside a building where uncounted bodies were trapped, listening to my boss’s boss tell me to keep extra careful notes, because they were surely submitting my work for “prizes.”

I knew what prizes he meant. The Polk. The Overseas Press Club. And the one that goes in front of your name in your obituary: the Pulitzer. In that world, the world of The Stringer, those prizes open doors. They grant and signal worth. They are the difference between being just another schmuck who lives and dies, and having a chance—not the guarantee, but the chance—of being someone whose work is remembered. Of becoming Nick Út.

That promise, and the terror of losing my chance at it, kept me going for a year, through 12-to-18-hour days, usually seven days a week. I was the first international reporter to reach the town closest to the epicenter. When scientists recalculated and found another city even closer, and more horrifically damaged, I went there too. So wracked was I with what would later be diagnosed as PTSD that for three months I refused to sleep inside a building, lying on bare bricks beside a cracked hotel pool until someone brought me a tent. But I was going to cover this story better than anyone. I was going to change things. I was going to win.

Once that summer, the New York Times beat me on a big story. The United Nations had given one of my main rivals a scoop about guards killing prisoners in a quake-damaged prison in southern Haiti. I dutifully called my sources to match it. Then I went outside and vomited in the bushes.

A few months later, I got mine. A major cholera epidemic broke out. Rumors circulated that the disease had been introduced by U.N. peacekeepers stationed in rural Haiti. I went to the suspected base and, with Evens’s help, produced the first story showing that the allegations were plausible. Then I kept investigating until the case was made. When I put out my big article laying out the case in detail—along with an exclusive admission from a peacekeeping chief that the United Nations was, after weeks of denial, taking the allegations seriously—my boss called to say, “Congrats on your Pulitzer.”

But I didn’t get a Pulitzer. I got some nice hardware and, after another year of struggle, a modest deal for my first book. A judge for one of the major awards later told me, cryptically, that the jury he was on had been on the verge of giving me the nod—but decided that a rival’s work and mine had “canceled each other out,” and gave it to neither of us. For that chapter of my life, the grand tier had passed me by.

The Stringer highlights the stark differences between Út and Nguyễn’s lives —differences, it implies, caused by a single credit and recognition from journalism’s gatekeepers. Both men ended up in California. But Nguyễn was a refugee fleeing the fall of Saigon to the metropole of the empire that failed him. Út arrived an international celebrity. A series of images flickers across the screen: Young Nick Út surrounded by fashionable, mostly white men and women, toasting him with champagne. An older Nick Út soaking in applause at a democracy forum. Út with Queen Elizabeth. Út and Kim Phúc presenting a copy of the photo to Pope Francis. Út at the White House with Donald Trump. In the background, an audio montage of news presenters calling out his name plays. “How do you reconcile something so tragic, yet something that has brought fame?” a questioner asks at the democracy forum. The moderator chuckles knowingly, as if to say: A nice problem to have.

Út had not had an easy life. Born in French-occupied Vietnam, he started working for AP at 15, after his older brother was killed taking photos for AP in the Mekong Delta. If the allegations of Carl Robinson and the documentary are true, then Horst Faast, the also legendary—and apparently dictatorial—AP photo editor in Vietnam switched the credit as an homage to Út’s family, a kind of atonement for having sent his older brother on a fatal assignment. No one disputes that Út was at the scene in Trảng Bàng that day in 1972, or that he, at the very least, saw—and likely took some photos of—the badly burned Kim Phúc. He breathed in the same napalm smoke as everyone else on that road that day. He lived the same trauma.

What ranks people like these in the eyes of the industry, what sends torrents of money, gifts, and adulation—decades of full bellies and mind-shaping dopamine—to this one instead of that, is expressed as a matter of perceived and exceptional talent. “He is a natural in his ability to get himself in position to take that shot,” the voice of an unidentified but confident man explains in a clip from a more laudatory recent documentary about Út, From Hell to Hollywood. 

Nguyễn’s lack of credit and awards, meanwhile, is cited as evidence of a lack of talent—of less worth—that, tautologically, makes his claim to have taken the immortal photo inherently suspect. “Nguyen’s story would require several leaps of faith, including believing that the only time he ever sold a photo to a Western news agency it turned out to be one of the most famous images of the century,” the AP intoned. (Út took other well-regarded photographs, but none that achieved anywhere near the acclaim of the picture from Trảng Bàng.) 

I am neither man. I was born privileged in the heart of the empire. I had to fight for professional opportunities, but not for basic survival. I chose the hard situations I found myself in. I turned that modest book deal into a well-received book. I added to my list of awards, including one from the Overseas Press Club of America, which I accepted in a rented tux. I wrote another book after, for a far healthier advance, and am now working on a third. I’m living a great life with a wonderful wife and two miraculous little girls who would not exist but for the exact turns that life took in creating them. 

I can’t help but wonder how that sliding-door moment might have changed my life; what opportunities Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jonathan M. Katz is basking in on Earth 2 that never came my way. But there were darker and equally probable outcomes as well, including the ones in which I never made it out of that house in the hills above Port-au-Prince fifteen years ago.

Which brings me back to The Stringer. In the Trảng Bàng bar, the camera pans down the wall from a faded copy of The Terror of War to the bar floor, where Gary Knight examines a different framed print. He pauses to snap a picture of it: a film camera recording a still camera recording a photograph of an event that took place fifty years ago. But there is something that goes unmentioned in the film:  There is no indication of any credits anywhere in the bar. The closest thing to a caption is on the print hanging from the rafters on the roof, a single English word for unknown reasons: “Hollywood.”

All that is there in that memorial are the photograph and the people in it: Kim Phúc, her brothers Phan Thanh Tam and Phan Thanh Phouc, cousins Ho Van Bon and Ho Thi Ting, the South Vietnamese soldiers behind them, and a United Press International photographer reloading his camera. Van Bon and Thi Ting are interviewed in the documentary as eyewitnesses whose testimony can help establish the photo's authorship. But the photo belongs to the person who took it only partly. It also, in more meaningful ways, belongs to them. It is their lives and traumas that were captured, packaged, and sold.

The power of a photograph lies in its ability to compress reality into a single moment—to capture the scattered attention of billions of viewers and concentrate it onto a single point, a laser beam cutting through time. This power doesn't belong to anyone, but the demands of the world we live in mean it has value. The purpose of credit is to channel that value to an individual. The purpose of prizes is to formalize it, while ensuring that nearly all of the monetary value stays with institutions. 

“It makes no difference to us if we changed the credit,” Derl McCrudden, an AP vice president who heads global news production, told his underlings. And that’s right, it doesn’t. The AP cares about Nick Út, about any of their employees or contributors, in fact, in much the same way that the U.S. government cared about any of the Vietnamese people; useful, until they are not.

You can trace concentric circles of power from the focal point—chosen by the photographer, whoever it was—on the naked Kim Phúc. Then come the other children (Thanh Tam, far less famous than his sister, screaming from an injury that will cause him to lose an eye), then the soldiers in their American-style uniforms, then the UPI photographer, cropped out of many versions, immortalized missing the moment. Then, beyond the frame: the other victims of the accidental strike on Trảng Bàng; the millions of other Vietnamese civilians maimed or killed in the war; the millions more who died that decade in wars less remembered because they are farther from American consciousness. And so on until you expand the frame to include all of creation.

The war ended, the earthquake is behind us, and soon enough, all of us who captured, framed, and sold moments from them will be gone, too. It is up to those of us who lived those moments to do what we want with our memories in the time we have. We can celebrate, quarrel, imagine what might have been. Or we can do as Ho Thi Hien says in the film, after reflecting on the most famous artifact of her life: “The past is the past. Just let it go.”