TRANG BANG, Vietnam
(AP) — In the picture, the girl will always be 9 years old and wailing
"Too hot! Too hot!" as she runs down the road away from her burning
Vietnamese village.
She will always be naked after blobs of sticky napalm melted through her clothes and layers of skin like jellied lava.
She will always be a victim without a name.
It only took a second for
Associated Press photographer Huynh Cong "Nick" Ut to snap the iconic
black-and-white image 40 years ago. It communicated the horrors of the
Vietnam War in a way words could never describe, helping to end one of
the most divisive wars in American history.
But beneath the photo lies a
lesser-known story. It's the tale of a dying child brought together by
chance with a young photographer. A moment captured in the chaos of war
that would be both her savior and her curse on a journey to understand
life's plan for her.
"I really wanted to escape from
that little girl," says Kim Phuc, now 49. "But it seems to me that the
picture didn't let me go."
____
It was June 8, 1972, when Phuc heard the soldier's scream: "We have
to run out of this place! They will bomb here, and we will be dead!"
Seconds later, she saw the tails of yellow and purple smoke bombs
curling around the Cao Dai temple where her family had sheltered for
three days, as north and south Vietnamese forces fought for control of
their village.
The little girl heard a roar overhead and twisted her neck to look
up. As the South Vietnamese Skyraider plane grew fatter and louder, it
swooped down toward her, dropping canisters like tumbling eggs flipping
end over end.
"Ba-boom! Ba-boom!"
The ground rocked. Then the heat of a hundred furnaces exploded as orange flames spit in all directions.
Fire danced up Phuc's left arm.
The threads of her cotton clothes evaporated on contact. Trees became
angry torches. Searing pain bit through skin and muscle.
"I will be ugly, and I'm not normal anymore," she thought, as her
right hand brushed furiously across her blistering arm. "People will see
me in a different way."
In shock, she sprinted down Highway 1 behind her older brother. She
didn't see the foreign journalists gathered as she ran toward them,
screaming.
Then, she lost consciousness.
___
Ut, the 21-year-old Vietnamese photographer who took the picture,
drove Phuc to a small hospital. There, he was told the child was too far
gone to help. But he flashed his American press badge, demanded that
doctors treat the girl and left assured that she would not be forgotten.
"I cried when I saw her running,"
said Ut, whose older brother was killed on assignment with the AP in
the southern Mekong Delta. "If I don't help her — if something happened
and she died — I think I'd kill myself after that."
Back at the office in what was
then U.S.-backed Saigon, he developed his film. When the
image of the
naked little girl emerged, everyone feared it would be rejected because
of the news agency's strict policy against nudity.
But veteran Vietnam photo editor
Horst Faas took one look and knew it was a shot made to break the rules.
He argued the photo's news value far outweighed any other concerns, and
he won.
A couple of days after the image shocked the world, another
journalist found out the little girl had somehow survived the attack.
Christopher Wain, a correspondent for the British Independent Television
Network who had given Phuc water from his canteen and drizzled it down
her burning back at the scene, fought to have her transferred to the
American-run Barsky unit. It was the only facility in Saigon equipped to
deal with her severe injuries.
"I had no idea where I was or what happened to me," she said. "I woke
up and I was in the hospital with so much pain, and then the nurses
were around me. I woke up with a terrible fear."
Thirty percent of Phuc's tiny body was scorched raw by third-degree
burns, though her face somehow remained untouched. Over time, her melted
flesh began to heal.
"Every morning at 8 o'clock, the nurses put me in the burn bath to
cut all my dead skin off," she said. "I just cried and when I could not
stand it any longer, I just passed out."
After multiple skin grafts and
surgeries, Phuc was finally allowed to leave, 13 months after the
bombing. She had seen Ut's photo, which by then had won the Pulitzer
Prize, but she was still unaware of its reach and power.
She just wanted to go home and be a child again.
___
For a while, life did go somewhat
back to normal. The photo was famous, but Phuc largely remained unknown
except to those living in her tiny village near the Cambodian border.
Ut and a few other journalists sometimes visited her, but that stopped
after northern communist forces seized control of South Vietnam on April
30, 1975, ending the war.
Life under the new regime became tough. Medical treatment and
painkillers were expensive and hard to find for the teenager, who still
suffered extreme headaches and pain.
She worked hard and was accepted
into medical school to pursue her dream of becoming a doctor. But all
that ended once the new communist leaders realized the propaganda value
of the 'napalm girl' in the photo.
She was forced to quit college
and return to her home province, where she was trotted out to meet
foreign journalists. The visits were monitored and controlled, her words
scripted. She smiled and played her role, but the rage inside began to
build and consume her.
"I wanted to escape that
picture," she said. "I got burned by napalm, and I became a victim of
war ... but growing up then, I became another kind of victim."
She turned to Cao Dai, her Vietnamese religion, for answers. But they didn't come.
"My heart was exactly like a black coffee cup," she said. "I wished I
died in that attack with my cousin, with my south Vietnamese soldiers. I
wish I died at that time so I won't suffer like that anymore ... it was
so hard for me to carry all that burden with that hatred, with that
anger and bitterness."
One day, while visiting a library, Phuc found a Bible. For the first time, she started believing her life had a plan.
Then suddenly, once again, the photo that had given her unwanted fame brought opportunity.
She traveled to West Germany in
1982 for medical care with the help of a foreign journalist. Later,
Vietnam's prime minister, also touched by her story, made arrangements
for her to study in Cuba.
She was finally free from the
minders and reporters hounding her at home, but her life was far from
normal. Ut, then working at the AP in Los Angeles, traveled to meet her
in 1989, but they never had a moment alone. There was no way for him to
know she desperately wanted his help again.
"I knew in my dream that one day Uncle Ut could help me to have
freedom," said Phuc, referring to him by an affectionate Vietnamese
term. "But I was in Cuba. I was really disappointed because I couldn't
contact with him. I couldn't do anything."
___
While at school, Phuc met a young Vietnamese man. She had never
believed anyone would ever want her because of the ugly patchwork of
scars that banded across her back and pitted her arm, but Bui Huy Toan
seemed to love her more because of them.
The two decided to marry in 1992 and honeymoon in Moscow. On the
flight back to Cuba, the newlyweds defected during a refueling stop in
Canada. She was free.
Phuc contacted Ut to share the news, and he encouraged her to tell
her story to the world. But she was done giving interviews and posing
for photos.
"I have a husband and a new life and want to be normal like everyone else," she said.
The media eventually found Phuc living near Toronto, and she decided
she needed to take control of her story. A book was written in 1999 and a
documentary came out, at last the way she wanted it told. She was asked
to become a U.N. Goodwill Ambassador to help victims of war. She and Ut
have since reunited many times to tell their story, even traveling to
London to meet the Queen.
"Today, I'm so happy I helped Kim," said Ut, who still works for AP
and recently returned to Trang Bang village. "I call her my daughter."
After four decades, Phuc, now a mother of two sons, can finally look
at the picture of herself running naked and understand why it remains so
powerful. It had saved her, tested her and ultimately freed her.
"Most of the people, they know my
picture but there's very few that know about my life," she said. "I'm
so thankful that ... I can accept the picture as a powerful gift. Then
it is my choice. Then I can work with it for peace."
___
Online:
http://www.kimfoundation.com
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