[Michael Holmes, World News:] It has been 25 years since the United States pulled its troops out of Vietnam. Today, vivid photographs bring the horrors and lessons of war to a new generation. Some who captured those images went back to Vietnam. CNN's senior international correspondent Richard Blystone has their story.
[Richard Blystone, Cnn Correspondent:] Heavy fighting on Highway 1, June 8, 1972, just the kind of day when accidents will happen. Frozen on Nik Ut's electronic contact sheet, a South Vietnamese skyraider. A napalm canister tumbles earthward. The rest is beyond words.
[Huynh Cong "nik" Ut, Photographer:] And I hear somebody say, "Too hot, too hot," and I look that way black smoke.
[Blystone:] This day, Nik Ut revisits Trang Bang. With him, a handful of legends of the Vietnam press corps combat photographer Dang Van Phuoc, who paid for his daring with an eye got a glass one, and went back to the field; two time Pulitzer Prize winner Horst Faas, then-AP photo chief in Saigon.
[Horst Faas, Ex-ap Saigon Photo Chief:] When I looked at the film for the first time, I knew that was one of the great pictures of the war.
[Richard Pyle, Ex-ap Saigon Bureau Chief:] Horst walked out of the darkroom at one point, and he held the film up like this, and said, "We have got another Pulitzer Prize."
[Blystone:] This was the picture. It continues to define the war for generations born after it ended.
[Faas:] The picture moved. We were lucky to get it across the shaky radio waves.
[Blystone:] It moved the world. And it won a Pulitzer prize for the 21-year-old who had stepped into the boots of his older brother, Huynh Thanh My, after he was killed covering the war. In 1972, the Fon children had been hiding in this Cowdhyde. A bomb scared them out just in time to be hit the napalm. It killed two of them. That's Fon Thanh Tung. He was 12. Today, just a small burn scar around one eye, he runs a roadside cafe a few yards from where the firebomb hit. His sister Kim Fuh was 9 and terribly burned.
[Ut:] Then after I took a picture of Kim running, I just left my camera on highway, so I don't want she die.
[Blystone:] He took her to a hospital and has looked after her ever since. Fan Thi Kim Fuh lives in Canada now. She's been made a United Nations goodwill ambassador and has children of her own. They all keep in touch with Uncle Nik. [on camera]: But there are thousands of other victims of the war's accidents, most of them condemned to live out their tragedies in obscurity. Duc is in tenth grade and does well. His separated Siamese twin Vyet does nothing. They come from an area sprayed from the air with agent orange to clear the jungle. Their mother was found to have the poison dioxin in her blood. It was wasn't intended to poison people, but study after study has linked it with birth defects, cancer, diabetes. U.S. quit using dioxin and has quit using napalm.
[Ut:] You know, napalm is a terrible, sort of burning, you know, the children. You could see the Vietnam War how many people died by napalm. A lot, many.
[Blystone:] Many people witnessed the blind brutality of war. Not many can think that they might have made a difference. Richard Blystone, CNN, Trang Bang, Vietnam.