VietNamNet Bridge – Besides the Pulitzer and other awards over the years, Associated Press photographer Nick Ut, a Vietnamese American, will receive a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Asian American Journalist Association (AAJA), the Vietnam Reporting Project said.

The Project, being conducted by the Renaissance Journalism Center of the US’s San Francisco State University’s Journalism Department, is a groundbreaking journalism fellowship program that produced award-winning multimedia news coverage on the enduring environmental and health consequences of Agent Orange contamination in Vietnam.

The award will be presented on Saturday, August 13, 2011 at its 22nd Annual National Convention Gala Scholarship and Awards Banquet in the Detroit Marriott at the Renaissance Center, the AAJA said.

It is the highest award AAJA can give to an individual who has demonstrated courage and commitment to the principles of journalism over the course of a life’s work.

In 1972, Ut won the Pulitzer Prize for his image of 9-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc as she ran naked and screaming toward his camera, her skin badly burned from a napalm attack on her village during the Vietnam War.

After taking a photo of the girl, Nick rushed the girl to the hospital, saving her life.

Nick’s powerful image has been well known around the world and remains one of the most iconic images of the Vietnam War until now.

Besides the Pulitzer Prize, Nick received every major photographic award for this singular image, including the World Press Photo, Sigma Delta Chi, Overseas Press Club, National Press Club, and the George Polk Memorial Award, according to the Vietnam Reporting Project.

Born March 29, 1951 in Long An Province in Southern Vietnam, Nick joined the Associated Press in 1966, following the death of his older brother, Huynh Thanh My, an AP photographer who was killed in combat a year before.

During his coverage of the war, Nick himself was wounded three times. Since 1975, when the war ended, Nick has worked for the Associated Press in Tokyo, South Korea, Hanoi, and Los Angeles, where he currently resides with his family.

In October 2010, as a Vietnam Reporting Project fellow, Ut traveled to Vietnam with The Plain Dealer’s Pulitzer-Prize winning columnist Connie Schultz. Ut’s photographs are part of a Plain Dealer six-part special report called “Unfinished Business: Suffering and sickness in the endless wake of Agent Orange,” which was published in January.

Established in 1989, the Lifetime Achievement Award recognizes those who have demonstrated dedication to issues important to the Asian American and Pacific Islander community, as well as courage and commitment to the principles of journalism over the course of a life’s work, according to AAJA.

VietNamNet/Tuoi Tre