Ex-Wire Service Friends Still Picturing the Shots

In December 1967, the month before the Viet Cong launched its Tet Offensive, Xay Lu was selling bowls of soup on the streets of Saigon and Nick Ut was mopping floors.

It just so happened both 19-year-old men were in the orbit of the Saigon bureau of the Associated Press. Lu’s soup stall was just around the corner and Ut’s brother had been the AP’s first native Vietnamese photographer, a handsome, man-of-the-world type who was killed snapping pictures of the war.

The AP was desperate for help covering the escalating conflict. Both Lu and Ut were eager to provide it.

Lu was given a job processing photographs. Ut was assigned to take them.

For the next eight years, the two compactly built men surrendered their lives to the American news machine. Lu spent 20 hours a day in the darkroom cracking open muddy film canisters, yanking out negatives, developing, fixing and washing prints and then racing to the radio station to transmit the images. He even scrambled into the bureau on his wedding day, April 9, 1969, after a Vietnamese protester lit himself on fire and AP needed to send the photos worldwide.

Ut waded in swirling rivers with a camera stretched over his head, tiptoed around land mines and watched sausage-shaped bombs tumble out of the sky. He shot one of the most famous war photographs ever taken, a girl running naked down a street, her clothes seared off by napalm, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973.

When Saigon fell and the Americans fled, Ut was whisked away to an AP job in Tokyo. He was a prize-winner that AP wasn’t going to let down. For Lu it was different; AP flew him to the States but then let him fend for himself.

“I always thought that when I got to America the AP was going to help me,” Lu said. “I didn’t realize that when I got here, they would drop me like a [lead] balloon.”

Today, both men are happily rooted to American soil, living a solid middle-class existence with their families--Lu in North Hollywood, Ut in Monterey Park.

They’re buddies, equally cherishing the thrill of the Saigon days and occasionally getting together to dust them off.

Their friendship is an arcing journey across time and place and way of life from war and displacement to an existence that they never envisioned for themselves. Though Ut has had it a bit easier than Lu, both spent years with their sleeves rolled up working as doggedly as only a penniless immigrant can.

Lu built a sturdy life midnight shift by midnight shift, holding two full-time jobs for 20 years straight. He isn’t an ounce bitter but somehow grateful for all the work he pulled at $6.25 an hour. His photo skills, honed under intense deadlines in a wartime darkroom, earned him a top job in Warner Bros.’ still photo lab in Burbank, where he continues to print publicity shots of movie stars by the thousands.

And Ut, after more than 30 years at the AP, is still shooting photos. He’s not an editor or a manager but a rank-and-file wire service photog. Rare are the 49-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winners who spend their days taking snaps of suburban news conferences and apartment fires.

“These guys did great when the war went on and deserved to be successful,” said Horst Faas, an AP photo chief during the Vietnam War who now works as a photo editor for the wire service in London.

“The war for Nick and Xay (pronounced “Sye”) was a situation they had to play on all fronts--getting along with their own people, doing good by the authorities, working for AP, making money, feeding their families. I felt so good when I saw them in L.A. and saw they had made it and had great families.”

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On a recent evening, the families who helped Lu get settled in America threw a dinner to honor him at the Burbank home of John Flynn, a retired NBC newsman who had been a war correspondent in Vietnam and sponsored Lu’s family.

The table was laid with a Vietnamese feast--spring rolls, shark fin soup, noodles, lettuce and huge bowls of fried rice rich with eggs and bits of tasty sausage.

Eddie Kafafian had been the one to help Lu get his foot in the door at Warner Bros. A former publicist at the studios, Kafafian was a friend of Flynn’s who picked up the phone at Flynn’s urging one day in 1978 and made a few calls to get Lu hired as a darkroom assistant.

But up until Jan. 9 of this year, Kafafian had never met Lu.

“Oh, my god, look at ‘cha,” Kafafian said as he swung an arm over Lu’s shoulder. “Look at what you’ve done, Xay. Look at your family. This is great.”

Lu was a little on the spot as he stood in Flynn’s TV room, his feet riveted to the beige shag carpet, his palm pressed in Kafafian’s palm, everybody waiting for him to emote. But Lu has a certain lounge-club cool to him, and kept it.

“Oh, Eddie, job turned out great,” said Lu, who favors Hawaiian-style shirts unbuttoned to his chest and wears his hair in a thick, puffy shock. “Thanks for everything. It helped so much.”

The first link in the chain that brought Lu to Warner Bros. and middle-class comfort was Flynn’s interest in helping Vietnamese refugees. Flynn had heard a rumor from a fellow war correspondent that there was one former AP staffer stuck in the refugee camp and decided to sponsor Lu and his wife.

He found the young couple and their two daughters an apartment, helped Lu get a job at a commercial photo lab and taught him how to take the bus to work.

“Here was a guy who had supervised the film of five Pulitzer Prize winners,” Flynn said, referring to the number of acclaimed photographers Lu had worked with in wartime Saigon. “I knew if I handed the ball to him he’d run with it.”

Lu took off. He was rapidly promoted at that photo lab and then landed the second job at Warner Bros. He ran off stills of movie stars from 6 a.m. to 3 p.m., punched out, got on a bus and clocked in at the commercial lab from 5 p.m. to 2 a.m. He did that for 16 years, he said, never getting more than three hours sleep.

“I knew my kids would be OK. I knew my wife would be OK,” said Lu, who is putting four children through college right now and owns a tidy home with a big-screen TV near the Burbank Airport. “So, psychologically I was able to do it.”

Meanwhile, Ut had been transferred from Tokyo to L.A., a place where he enjoyed the mix of assignments from celebrities to forest fires. Still, he found the sprawling metropolis a little disorienting.

“I don’t need map book in Vietnam,” he said. “I just look for black smoke.”

For years, Ut, who has two children of his own, rarely saw Lu.

“Xay work twice,” Ut said.

The pair’s greatest moment took place June 8, 1972. Ut was covering a bombing near Saigon when he saw a little girl with no clothes running down the road.

“I hear her screaming: ‘Too hot, too hot!’ ” he recalled.

Lu processed the picture, remembering: “When we laid it out on the table everybody was excited.”

The next day the bureau learned that countless American newspapers ran the photo on the front page.

Today, from the comfort of successful middle age, Lu and Ut, both 49, cherish their connection to one of the most disillusioning but dramatic chapters of modern history.

“It seems like we have done a lot in life,” Lu said. “We saw all the real stuff happening.”

None of this is lost on Flynn, who said there really wasn’t a good reason why it had taken so long for all the families to get together.

“What these people have done in one generation is so impressive,” Flynn said. “It just shows you the caliber of people they are.”