Nick Ut's photo of a naked Phan Thi Kim Phuc screaming in pain as she runs from a napalm attack on her home.

Eddie Adams' shot of Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner in Saigon.

John Filo's picture of 14-year-old runaway Mary Vecchio kneeling over the body of Jeffrey Miller, a Kent State student gunned down by the National Guard.

These are images that, perhaps more than all the words written at the time, helped change the course of U.S. foreign policy by bringing home the truth.

We are at war again, and there is truth out there that needs to be captured and brought home.

It is this truth that my good buddy Jim MacMillan, a photo columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News, is uprooting his life to seek.

Next month, MacMillan, who has been at the DN for more than 12 years, begins a one-year leave of absence to photograph Iraq for The Associated Press.

"It's like being called up to pitch in the World Series for the Yankees," says Jimmy Mac, quickly adding, "no disrespect to the Phillies."

So says his boss, Zack Stalberg, whose call it was to allow MacMillan to go — on the condition that he come back after his AP gig is up.

"It was an easy decision," says Stalberg. "It was so clear he wanted to do this, he was desperate to do it. He is driven not by journalistic motives as [much as] by noble motives. He feels that he can affect the way Americans and people worldwide see the war. So when someone comes at you with ideas that are that big and important, it is very difficult to say no."

"Jim MacMillan is extremely important to the Daily News," says Stalberg. "He is a terrific street-level photographer and sees things that other people don't see."

The Daily News, adds Stalberg, is treating MacMillan's departure "as if he were offered a Nieman Fellowship or some other sort of journalistic equivalent that is impossible to turn down."

For MacMillan — who says he already has an apartment lined up for when he gets back to Philly in 2005 — a chance to chronicle the madness of Mesopotamia was indeed impossible to turn down.

"It is honestly a sense of duty," he tells me after my haranguing him for weeks to give me some quotes. "I'd rather be here, but this feels like something I have to do. Like a soldier who says, ÔMy country needs me,' I kind of feel like the truth needs me. Not that I know what that is. I'm really going over there with an open mind."

Having known MacMillan for about two decades, since we cubbed together at the same suburban Boston daily, I know that he is not merely spewing hokum.

At least 11 journalists and three assistants have been killed, at least 10 wounded and two are missing, according to press reports and Reporters Without Borders, which advocates for the safety and security of journalists worldwide. Many of the deaths and injuries are the result of U.S. fire.

The figures don't include Inky shooter David Swanson, who recently wrote a harrowing story about being grazed by a bullet in Iraq.

The government won't grant photographers access to coffins arriving back home. And some newspapers and many television networks opted to not to show the horrific pictures from the Fallujah bridge where the charred remains of four U.S. civilian contractors were hung as crowds cheered the carnage.

"There is no golden rule," says MacMillan when I ask him what his call would be on running gruesome shots.

He says that while he edits out material he deems too horrendous in Philadelphia, he will be less restrained in Iraq.

"Being a photographer allows you to shoot first and think later," he says. "You have to consider a number of variables É including the importance of the story. The importance of the bodies hanging from the bridge in Fallujah is almost incomparable to a local crime or tragedy."

MacMillan says that newspapers "should take more chances when the story is more important. They should extend the limit."

We are at war and, as MacMillan says, it is our duty as journalists to find and tell the truth, whatever that may be.

And if anyone can find it and bring it back with amazing images, it's MacMillan.

So, Jimmy Mac, as you get ready to jump off for who really knows what, good luck, Godspeed and get your ass back here in one piece.