She Captured Horror of Past War
By Stephen Magagnini, The Sacramento Bee, Calif.
Feb. 4–Phan Thi Kim Phuc used to come home from school smiling like a princess — indeed, she felt like one — until she became an indelible international symbol of the unforgiving horror of the war.
The 9-year-old Vietnamese girl was burned over 65 percent of her body on June 8, 1972, when a U.S. commander ordered South Vietnamese planes to drop four napalm bombs on her village 30 minutes north of Saigon.
Kim Phuc ripped off her clothes in agony and ran screaming down the road, when a young Associated Press photographer named Nick Ut took her picture.
Ut doused her with water and took her to the town hospital. Two days later, she was declared dead.
At first, the AP balked at publishing the photo because it showed frontal nudity, but ultimately the news service made an exception, and Kim Phuc became “The Girl in the Picture.”
That photograph galvanized the peace movement in the United States and hastened the end of the Vietnam War.
The photo lives on to deliver its powerful anti-war message, and so does Kim Phuc, who came back from the dead to devote her life to healing war-torn children and hearts fractured by pain and hate.
On Monday, “The Girl in the Picture” comes to UC Davis to speak about “Can an Image Change the World?” in Jackson Hall at 4 p.m., and “Learning to Forgive” at 8 p.m. at the Mondavi Center.
Kim Phuc, whose name in Vietnamese means “Golden Happiness” and who was known for her smile, said in an interview that her back still burns with pain. “When I look at the picture, I can smell that smoke, feel that fire. I can see how terribly afraid I was.”
Now, however, she uses the photo to promote peace. “I think about all those who look at it and think, ‘How would you feel if that little girl was your child?’ It shows how horrible war can be, especially for innocent children — why should they have to suffer like that?”
Kim Phuc has two sons — two more miracles. “Now I’m so happy — I’ve learned that hatred and anger are my real enemies.”
Speaking by phone from her home outside Toronto, where she administers the nonprofit Kim Phuc Foundation International to help child victims of war, she shared her remarkable odyssey.
When the war came to Bang Trang, a village of 400, Kim Phuc and her parents and 10 siblings hid in a Cao Dai temple. Cao Dai is a local religion that blends Buddhism and other faiths. But the napalm penetrated the pagoda, and Kim Phuc fled screaming in Vietnamese, “I want some water, I’m hot, too hot,” Ut told the BBC. He gave her a drink and took her to the village hospital, but it wasn’t equipped to treat burn victims.
After lying comatose for two days, she was moved to the morgue at a children’s hospital in Saigon. “They thought I was dead, so they just left me in the death room,” she said.
Her parents found her three days later. They were told to take the body back to their village for burial. Then, Kim Phuc said, “my mom discovered my heart was still beating lightly.”
Her father ran into an old friend who was a doctor and begged him to help. She was taken to a burn clinic, where she had skin grafts over a third of her body. She spent 14 months in the hospital and has undergone 17 operations over the years.
After returning to her village, Kim Phuc decided she wanted to be a doctor. She entered medical school in Saigon but her dream was cut short when — a decade after the photo was taken — the Vietnamese government pulled her out to make her available to the international media. By then, the world had learned that “The Girl in the Picture” had lived. “I had no choice — I was like a bird in a cage,” she said. “I didn’t have any dreams, any hope — I asked why I didn’t die at 9, why I had to keep suffering. I hated everyone who was normal.”
Embarking on a quest for the truth, Kim Phuc sneaked into the Saigon library, where she spent five months immersing herself in Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam and other faiths.
“I was living with the question ‘why me?’ for 20 years,” she said. When she found the New Testament, she learned “God loves people, especially those who are suffering. My life turned around, I didn’t have hatred or bitterness and learned to love and forgive my enemies.”
Eventually, the Vietnamese government allowed Kim Phuc to study at the University of Havana in Cuba in 1986. She met her husband, Bui Huy Toan, now a social worker helping people with disabilities.
They married in 1992 and honeymooned in Moscow. When their return flight stopped to refuel in Newfoundland, they defected to Canada so they could raise a family in a free country.
At the Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C., in 1996, Kim Phuc said she happened to meet the American adviser who coordinated the napalm bombing of her village.
“He cried like a child, and I cried, too,” she said. “He asked, ‘Do you forgive me?’ and I said, ‘Yes, I forgive you, that’s why I’m here.’ ” In 1997, she helped launch the foundation, funded by her speaking engagements and donations. Last year, the organization paid for 107 operations in Kenya for children injured in Somalia and Sudan. It is helping 750 Ugandan children orphaned by war or AIDS by providing them with fresh water, chickens and a health clinic.
Kim Phuc hasn’t forgotten “Uncle Ut,” the AP photographer who saved her life and still calls her weekly from Los Angeles. “Before, that picture cost me my private life,” she said. But today, the notoriety that came with publication of the photograph worldwide helps her do her part as a healer.
“If everyone can learn how to live with true love, hope and forgiveness, we don’t need war at all,” she said. “If that little girl in the picture can do it, ask yourself, can you?”
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