The most striking aspect of the career of Horst Faas, the A.P. combat photographer and editor who died last week, is the way he both took pictures and handed out cameras. In Vietnam, in the early years, he would disappear into the jungle with troops, or hop on a plane to Laos, looking for the war. According to a story William Prochnau tells in “Once Upon a Distant War,” there was a rumor that he’d actually led soldiers through a minefield—but really he’d just suggested that it might be better to go around the field, and then followed after them. More often, though, he led; “Horst’s army” included young Vietnamese photographers and American soldiers who carried the cameras he gave them and trained them to use, and other A.P. photographers whose work he fought to send out into the world. One wonders, looking at the images that have come from our recent wars, what the iconography of Vietnam or earlier conflicts might have been like if everyone, on both sides, was carrying a camera phone. Faas, in his own way and with more basic tools, was trying to find out.

Faas’s photographs, like the ones that got him the Pulitzer, in 1965, make it clear that he has a sense of what war looks like, and that it’s not just explosions and generals. It’s men with guns next to people who don’t have any; a soldier who stands with a scarf covering his mouth and nose, his expression contorted, surrounded by litters holding decaying dead bodies. It’s also the light that falls on soldiers between the shootings. As an editor, Faas made sure that Eddie Adams’s photograph, from 1968, of a South Vietnamese general executing a prisoner was seen, as well as a 1972 photograph of children after a napalm attack, including a little girl whose clothes have been burned off.

That last picture is remarkable for its frantic, etched desperation and also for the number of lives that went into it, both symbolically—it came to sum up American and Vietnamese despair and disgust with the war—and in a practical sense. Seven years earlier, Huynh Thanh My, whom the Los Angeles Times described as Faas’s protégé, died taking photos for the A.P. in combat. His younger brother, Nick Ut, signed on with Faas, and was on the road when the children came running. Afterward, Nick Ut helped the girl get medical care. And Faas put it on the A.P. wire, even though not everyone was sure that was a good idea. There was an excuse not to—she was a girl, and naked, and the A.P., as the Times noted in its obiutary, had rules about that—but he seems to have known what it meant to do his job. (In this sense, there is a parallel between Faas and Nicholas Katzenbach, who also died last week, who worked for Kennedy and Johnson and, in 1963, became something of a hero for explaining the law to the governor of Alabama and getting two black students registered at the state university.)

By the time the Adams and Nick Ut photographs were taken, earning both of them the Pulitzer prize, Faas’s legs had been almost shattered in a rocket attack, meaning that he spent more time in the A.P. bureau—though not only there. This wasn’t his first war, and it wouldn’t be his last. He was an eleven-year-old in Berlin in 1945. The A.P. hired him when he was in his early twenties, and before Vietnam he had covered fighting in Africa, and afterward, in Bangladesh, where he won a second Pulitzer. He worked for years more as an A.P. editor, with more stories to tell.

Above: Faas in Vietnam, in 1967.