Hal Buell, a giant in the field of photojournalism who began his long career at Stars and Stripes before joining The Associated Press, died Jan. 29 in Sunnyvale, Calif. He was 92.

Buell led AP’s photo operations from the darkroom era into the age of digital photography over a four-decade career with the news organization that included 12 Pulitzer Prizes and some of the defining images of the Vietnam War.

Buell earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in journalism from Northwestern University in 1954 before he joined AP’s Tokyo bureau on a part-time basis. He was still in the Army at the time, working for Stars and Stripes.

Out of the Army in 1956, he joined AP’s Chicago bureau as a radio writer, and in 1957, was promoted to the photo desk in AP’s New York office.

Buell returned to Tokyo at the end of the decade to be supervisory photo editor for Asia and came back to New York in 1963 to be AP’s photo projects editor. He became executive news photo editor in 1968 and in 1977 he was named assistant general manager for news photos.

His record with Stars and Stripes is slim, but in 1960 his name appeared on its pages once more, this time as part of the story. A group of students in Seoul had ransacked the former home of South Korean Vice President-elect Ki Pong Lee, Syngman Rhee’s running mate and “a symbol of fraud at the polls.”

The students discovered an American flag and placed it on the ground, being careful not to step on it, Buell said in a brief AP report. “Then they saw me. One stood and rolled up the flag and gave it to me,” he said in the article published April 28, 1960.

As the editor in charge of AP’s photo operations from the late 1960s to the 1990s, he supervised a staff that won a dozen Pulitzers and included legendary AP photographers including Eddie Adams, Horst Faas and Nick Ut.

Buell made the crucial decision in 1972 to run Ut’s photo of a naked young girl fleeing her burning village after napalm was dropped on it by South Vietnamese air force aircraft. The image of Kim Phuc became one of the most haunting images of the Vietnam War and came to define for many all that was misguided about the war.

After the image was transmitted from Saigon to AP headquarters in New York, Buell examined it closely and discussed it with other editors for about 10 minutes before deciding to run it.

“We didn’t have any objection to the picture because it was not prurient. Yes, nudity but not prurient in any sense of the word,” Buell said in a 2016 interview. “It was the horror of war. It was innocence caught in the crossfire, and it went right out, and of course it became a lasting icon of that war, of any war, of all wars.”

Without Buell’s support, Ut said, the photo might never have become a symbol of the war. It won Ut the Pulitzer Prize.

Buell is survived by his daughter Barbara Buell and her husband, Thomas Radcliffe, as well as two grandchildren and a great-grandson.

Contributing: Stars and Stripes reporter Joseph Ditzler; The Associated Press.