[Photos That Shaped History] Vietnamese War (1972)

The most powerful images of war focus, not on the battlefield itself, but on the civilians affected by conflict. Perhaps the most well-known image of this is Nick Ut’s 1972 photograph The Terror of War. In it, Ut documents a group of people running away from a napalm strike. In the centre, a naked 9-year-old girl stands screaming from the pain of the burns. This image was incredibly shocking, a young girl, who had no relation to the conflict, was being murdered by it. More shocking, was that Ut’s photograph was documenting an event caused by the US. It struck and confronted North American audiences, causing many to rethink their perceptions of the United States foreign policy, and highlighting the extremes of the catastrophe at hand. This photo sparked the anti-war in the US and led the withdrawal in the Vietnamese War.