So whatever Happened To This Girl?

[darrels joy]

So whatever Happened To This Girl?



No doubt almost everyone is familiar with this iconic photo from the Vietnam war. It was taken on June 8, 1972 by AP photographer Nick Ut who won the 1972 Pulitzer prize for it and the naked girl with her clothes burned off became a symbol of the war. Well her name is Phan Thị Kim Phúc and she is still alive today.


On that day South Vietnam forces were fighting with NVA troops who had occupied the village of Trang Bang. She and her family along with some South Vietnam soldiers were running towards South Vietnam lines when a pilot mistook them for NVA soldiers and dropped a napalm bomb on them.

Several of her cousins were killed and she was burned over 65% of her body with all of her clothes burned off. Contrary to widespread belief it was a South Vietnamese pilot and plane that dropped the napalm and Americans had nothing to do with it.

When she reached ARVN lines Nick Ut took his famous photo and soldiers gave her water and tried to wash her wounds. She remembers yelling "Nóng quá, nóng quá" ("too hot, too hot") as she was running. You can watch video of the scene

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[warning: it's graphic]. Soon after she was evacuated to Saigon where doctors gave her little chance of living.

However after 14 months and 17 surgeries and nearly dying several times she was finally able to return to her village although heavily scarred and with permanent pain due to nerve damage.

From her experience with the many doctors who treated her, she resolved to become a doctor herself. However by this time South Vietnam had fallen and communist authorities decided to use her as a propaganda symbol instead and she was forced to quit school. In 1982 she converted to Christianity and in 1986 she was finally allowed to resume her studies in Cuba. While there she met another Vietnamese student, Bui Huy Toan, who would be her future husband. They were married and on their honeymoon in 1992 during a refueling stop in Gander, Newfoundland she and her husband fled the plane and asked for political asylum. It was granted and she became Canadian citizen in 1997. She and her husband and two children now live in Ontario.






Today she is a UN Goodwill Ambassador, public speaker and runs a foundation, The Kim Foundation, dedicated to helping children burned and injured in wars. She gave a speech at the US Vietnam Veterans Memorial on Veterans Day in 1996 and had her biography published in 1999. Most recently she read an essay on NPR describing her journey from a peasant girl to an international advocate for burned children. You can listen to it in her own words http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...oryId=91964687 .

http://ace.mu.nu/