Vietnam War Image Brought To Life Napalm Victim Overcomes Physical, Emotional Scars
Nearly a quarter-century after a photo of her running naked and terrified from a napalm attack was seared into Americans’ consciousness, a grown-up Phan Thi Kim Phuc placed a wreath Monday at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
“I have suffered a lot from my physical and emotional pain,” she told a hushed crowd of veterans and their families. “Sometimes I thought I could not live, but God saved my life and gave me faith and hope.”
Kim Phuc was 9 years old when she was photographed fleeing a napalm attack in Vietnam. Associated Press photographer Nick Ut, who took the picture, won the Pulitzer Prize. Ut now works for the AP in Los Angeles.
On June 8, 1972, Kim Phuc’s village of Trang Bang came under a fierce aerial attack from South Vietnamese bombers. The village, 25 miles west of Saigon, had been infiltrated by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese.
Her family had taken refuge in a Buddhist pagoda, which took a direct hit. Two of her brothers died instantly. The jellied gasoline burned the clothes off her body and she ran out of the pagoda with her brother, Phan The Negoc, screaming with pain and fright. He is the one in the left foreground of the picture.
“If I could talk face to face with the pilot who dropped the bomb, I would tell him we cannot change history but we should try to do things for the present and for the future to promote peace,” Kim Phuc said Monday.
Jan Scruggs, who started the fund to erect the Vietnam memorial, introduced the young woman, who now is married, has a child and lives in Toronto. His voice broke as he described how Kim’s suffering began “when an American commander ordered South Vietnamese planes” to drop the napalm.
Napalm is a very terrible weapon,” Scruggs said. “It burns through the skin down to the bone.” She has had years of skin grafts and still suffers other aftereffects of her injuries.
The Vietnamese summoned her in 1984 to Ho Chi Minh City to be used in propaganda films. She went to Cuba in 1986, to study pharmacology, Scruggs said. There she met her husband, Huy Toan, and Moscow summoned them there for their honeymoon. On the way back, their jet stopped for fuel in Canada and they ran from the airport and sought asylum.
According to Scruggs, the first person she telephoned was Ut, the photographer who had taken her picture.
Kim told the audience that she never thought she could marry or have children because of her burns, “but now I have wonderful husband, a lovely child and a happy family, thank God.”