The Associated Press (AP)—an independent, not-for-profit news cooperative headquartered in New York City—made a profound commitment to reporting this conflict. It gathered an extraordinary group of photojournalists in its Saigon bureau who created one of the great photographic legacies of the 20th century. The AP’s images tell the human story of the Vietnam War, chronicling the American presence in the War as it swelled from a trickle of military advisers in the late 1950s through dramatic operations involving thousands of soldiers in the 1960s to the fall of Saigon in 1975.

The AP won an unprecedented six Pulitzer Prizes for its coverage of the War, including many images now considered iconic: Malcolm Browne’s photograph of a burning monk, Nick Ut’s picture of a nine year old running from a napalm attack, Eddie Adams’s photograph of the execution of a Viet Cong prisoner. Vietnam: The Real War contains such images that both chronicled and changed history, taken by superb and unbelievably courageous photojournalists.