The above photo, taken in June 1972 in rural Vietnam, won a Pulitzer Prize for Associated Press photojournalist Nick Ut.

Probably the greater thing he accomplished that day was saving the life of nine-year-old Kim Phuc, the naked young girl in the centre of the photo.

Her flesh had been burned by the jellied, sticky gasoline bombs dropped on the village of Trang Bang that day. Two of her infant cousins died in the attack.

An excerpt from the BBC story:

I picked up Kim and took her to my car. I ran up about 10 miles to Cu Chi hospital, to try to save her life.

At the hospital, there were so many Vietnamese people - soldiers were dying there. They didn't care about the children.

Then I told them: "I am a media reporter, please help her, I don't want her to die."

And the people helped her right away. ...

After I took the picture of Kim, I took to her very well - I always went to visit, to see her family, and she called me Uncle Nick.

Even now I call her once a week - she lives in Toronto, Canada. We are like a family now.

To learn more, you can visit the Kim Foundation International.

In a Wikipedia article on napalm, Kim Phuc was quoted as saying: “Napalm is the most terrible pain you can imagine. Water boils at 100 degrees Celsius. Napalm generates temperatures of 800 to 1,200 degrees Celsius.”

She suffered third-degree burns to half her body and wound up spending 14 months in hospital.

The BBC story is one of a series called Powerful Pictures. Click through to link to other stories of famous photographs.