It's Been 50 Years. I Am Not 'Napalm Girl' Anymore.

[Nevilledog]

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New York Times Opinion
@nytopinion
“I grew up detesting that photo,” writes Kim Phuc Phan Thi, 50 years after she was depicted in the “Napalm Girl” photo from the Vietnam war. “I felt ugly and ashamed.”
The author at her home in Ontario.
nytimes.com
Opinion | It’s Been 50 Years. I Am Not ‘Napalm Girl’ Anymore.
The surviving people in war photographs, especially the children, must somehow go on. We are not symbols. We are human.
10:15 AM · Jun 6, 2022

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/06/opinion/kim-phuc-vietnam-napalm-girl-photograph.html

No paywall
https://archive.ph/Ycg2r

I grew up in the small village of Trang Bang in South Vietnam. My mother said I laughed a lot as a young girl. We led a simple life with an abundance of food, since my family had a farm and my mom ran the best restaurant in town. I remember loving school and playing with my cousins and the other children in our village, jumping rope, running and chasing one another joyfully.

All of that changed on June 8, 1972. I have only flashes of memories of that horrific day. I was playing with my cousins in the temple courtyard. The next moment, there was a plane swooping down close and a deafening noise. Then explosions and smoke and excruciating pain. I was 9 years old.

Napalm sticks to you, no matter how fast you run, causing horrific burns and pain that last a lifetime. I don’t remember running and screaming, “Nóng quá, nóng quá!” (“Too hot, too hot!”) But film footage and others’ memories show that I did.

You’ve probably seen the photograph of me taken that day, running away from the explosions with the others — a naked child with outstretched arms, screaming in pain. Taken by the South Vietnamese photographer Nick Ut, who was working for The Associated Press, it ran on the front pages of newspapers all over the world and won a Pulitzer Prize. In time, it became one of the most famous images from the Vietnam War.

*snip*

[bmbmd]

1. I knew immediately

from the tagline who this was. I wish her peace.

[FakeNoose]

2. She understandably hates the memories of those awful years

However Kim Phuc can be proud that her photo - more than any other - woke up most Americans to the horror of napalm and the horror of what we were doing to Vietnam.

I was among the teenagers who protested that war, but the adults weren't listening to us for the most part. Once Kim's photo appeared on Newsweek, Time and all the major newspapers, it was a different story. The adults started paying attention and feeling ashamed of our country.

To Kim Phuc Phan Thi - I'm so very sorry for the horrors my country brought to you and all the innocent, undeserving children of Vietnam.

[xocetaceans]

11. And despite all that...

we switched from the horrors of napalm to the horrors of drone attacks which frequently struck civilians or (sometimes) an unlucky wedding party, or even a child (of a US citizen who himself was intentionally killed by drone without due process), etc - i.e., "collateral damage".

Did the Pentagon of that era describe what happened to Kim Phuc Phan Thi as "collateral damage" or is that a new terminological development in this modern era?

[TomSlick]

3. I'm sure the publication of the picture has caused her much emotional pain in life.

I wish she could take comfort in knowing the photograph had a lot to do in causing the American public to demand the end of the war.

The other important photo was of the summary - nonjudicial - execution of a suspected Vietcong by a South Vietnamese officer.

[link:|

[ripcord]

7. The South Vietnamese officer who fired the shot immigrated to the U.S.

An investigation concluded he had committed a war crime and was to be returned to Vietnam but Jimmy Carter stopped it saying "such historical revisionism was folly".

[TomSlick]

17. That's news to me. Thanks for the information.

I would have expected better of Jimmy Carter.

I can understand not wanting to extradite to Vietnam at the time but the US should have attempted to prosecute for the war crime under universal jurisdiction. The US should have made a federal judge say there was no jurisdiction.

[ripcord]

18. I'm not prepared to bash Carter

I was thinking how times have changed, I believe Carter felt that the fact that since the man shot was an officer who infiltrated the area in civilian clothing and slit the throat of a South Vietnamese Lt. Colonel, his wife and their kids wasn't entitled to many protections.

[TomSlick]

19. I'm not bashing Carter. I just wish something had been done.

I expect the DoJ and DoD were unprepared to take the risk to attempt a trial based on universal jurisdiction.

It really doesn't matter that the guy had it coming. Extrajudicial execution was a war crime.

[ripcord]

20. I wonder about the judgement

It is my understanding that soldiers disguised in civilian clothing behind the lines during a war had committed a war crime and were subject to summary execution.

[TomSlick]

22. Summary execution of a captured enemy combatant is always a war crime.

A enemy soldier captured in civilian clothes can be tried as a spy and for any other offenses committed. For example, see the trial (and ultimate hanging) of the British officer, MAJ John Andre', during the American revolution.

At least that's my opinion based on 28 years as an Army Judge Advocate.

[Doc Sportello]

4. What the U.S. did to Vietnam and its people was unconsciounable

It was from the start but by 1972 when Nixon escalated everyone knew it was over. Destroy villages, burn, maim and kill women and children all in the name of "I'm not going to be the ifrst president to lose a war", war criminals like Nixon and Kissinger didn't care. That picture of her as a little girl in horrendous pain and the picture of the captured Viet Cong being shot in the head were two of the most iconic images of atrocities perpetrated by us and our allies over there.

[G_j]

6. and My Lai of course

https://www.google.com/search?q=my+lai&client=safari&channel=iphone_bm&prmd=ibvn&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi1geKikJr4AhVjZTABHZMgA50Q_AUoAXoECAIQAQ&biw=375&bih=545&dpr=3

[Doc Sportello]

13. Yes, another criminal that avoided justice

Some vets were just as disgusted by Calley as we in the antiwar movement were.

[Celerity]

5. Banksy - Napalm (2004)

https://banksyexplained.com/napalm-2004/

Link to the pic

[Kali]

8. OMG I am so shallow

look at that sansevieria plant

[Ziggysmom]

14. I noticed that, too, after I read the story and other posts. Not shallow, just a plant lover 🪴

[spike jones]

9. Kill Anything That Moves-book by Nick Turse

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12292260-kill-anything-that-moves

Americans have long been taught that events such as the notorious My Lai massacre were isolated incidents in the Vietnam War, carried out by just a few "bad apples." But as award-winning journalist and historian Nick Turse demonstrates in this groundbreaking investigation, violence against Vietnamese noncombatants was not at all exceptional during the conflict. Rather, it was pervasive and systematic, the predictable consequence of official orders to "kill anything that moves."

www.startribune.com/book-review-kill-anything-that-moves-by-nick-turse/187487411/

In his new book, "Kill Anything That Moves," reporter Nick Turse has proven, after a decade of mind-boggling research, that U.S. air and ground troops killed civilians in North Vietnam and South Vietnam as a matter of policy -- over and over, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year.

The massacre of civilians by U.S. troops at the Vietnam village of My Lai has received lots of publicity, thanks in large part to investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. Many readers educated about the Vietnam War have come to believe that My Lai was an isolated incident, perpetrated primarily by a young officer named William Calley. Not so, Turse demonstrates. My Lai was representative of many such slaughters, some of them involving infants and the elderly, unarmed civilians. Before the killings, rape and other forms of torture occurred, without any U.S. military personnel being punished.

[Doc Sportello]

15. Here's Bill Moyers interview with him

Many of those vets interviewed wanted to tell their story because they felt guilty about what they did, but America went into the "thank you for your service and don't blame the individual soldier" mode so the truth was suppressed.


https://billmoyers.com/segment/nick-turse-describes-the-real-vietnam-war/

[spike jones]

10. The Vietnam Memorial Wall in DC is triangular wall 10 feet high and 494 feet long.

A wall for the Vietnamese deaths would be 100 feet high and 2,412 feet long.

[The Unmitigated Gall]

12. Powerful. Thank you.

[Hekate]

16. ...School "attacks are the domestic equivalent of war"...

They are, in a different way, also the horrific images coming from school shootings. We may not see the bodies, as we do with foreign wars, but these attacks are the domestic equivalent of war. The thought of sharing the images of the carnage, especially of children, may seem unbearable — but we should confront them. It is easier to hide from the realities of war if we don’t see the consequences.

🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻

[Hortensis]

21. "Behind that picture of me, thousands and thousands of people,

they suffered - more than me. They died. They lost parts of their bodies. Their whole lives were destroyed, and nobody took that picture."

"People ask me a lot, 'How can you smile all the time?' I tell them, 'I was never angry. God created me this way. He created me laughing and smiling.'"

Of course seeing herself in that picture is very unpleasant. Everything about it is ugly, an atrocity. Her own years of great emotional and physical suffering were just beginning. It's hard to imagine that any amount of the blessings that transformed her life, and her, to what they are today, would make that possible.