HANOI, Vietnam - I met Nick Ut for the first time after emerging from Customs at the Hanoi Airport. Nick had arrived a couple of hours earlier from Los Angeles and stuck around with our driver Minh from the Vietnam Veterans Association Foundation, until I arrived.

Nick Ut, a long-time Associated Press photographer, has teamed up with Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Connie Schultz of the Cleveland Plain Dealer to work on a series of Agent Orange stories for the Vietnam Reporting Project for the next 10 days. I planned to capture video and audio for the story.

This is my first trip to Vietnam. Nick travels to Vietnam regularly to speak and teach photography workshops.

I was astonished by the Hanoi traffic, which is best described as controlled chaos bordering on mayhem. Motor scooters flowed around and across our large Land Cruiser like schools of sardines. Marked lanes and traffic lights barely matter.  Nor are sidewalks off limits. Horns blared constantly. I kept expecting to see bodies flying at every intersection.

I was exhausted from my 19 hours of flying and nine-hour overnight layover in Singapore. We had barely dropped our bags in the hotel lobby, when Nick was on the phone arranging his first meeting. “Let’s meet back in the lobby in 10 minutes,” he said to me.

Nick likes to hit the ground running. A quick cab ride through the Old Quarter and we were at a café meeting with four members of the VN Photography Club. Nick had never met them before but became friends with them through Facebook. They asked Nick to call them the next time he was in Vietnam, and he did.

I am learning that this is what Nick does. He embraces strangers with kindness and curiosity. He is generous with his time, and his baseball caps. As we said our goodbyes to the amateur photographers, Nick handed his Nikon cap to one of the men to keep. Nick said he travels with lots of caps so that he can give them away to new friends.

This is the photographer who won the Pulitzer Prize at age 19 for his photograph of the badly burned then nine-year-old Kim Phuc, who was running from Trang Bang after a napalm attack by the Vietnamese Air Force in 1972. Nick began shooting for the Associated Press when he was 16, just after his older brother Huynh Thanh My, another AP photographer, was killed in Vietnam. Ut himself was wounded three times in the war.

Thirty-eight years after winning the Pulitzer, Nick hasn’t lost his passion for his profession. He is still hungry - always looking for the next great moment to capture on film, or in this case, a disk. After our meeting with the photo club, Nick and I headed over to Hoan Kiem Lake to shoot pictures the rest of the afternoon. I got to see the master at work. I watched Nick patiently observing, shooting and talking to people, listening to their stories.

As I watched Nick interacting with people around Hoan Kiem Lake, it became clear that many Vietnamese – especially those old enough to remember the war – view Nick as a “national hero.”  I first sensed this when I talked to the four guys from the photo club. They were almost giddy that Nick had agreed to meet with them. 

For many here, Nick Ut’s “napalm girl” photograph was the turning point in the “American War.” With that photograph, they believe, he had helped bring an end to the war.

"People come up to me and ask me, 'Nicky, can you take another picture that will stop the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq?" said Nick. "I tell them I would like to. War is a terrible thing."

• Nick Ut: From Hell to Hollywood (AP slideshow)