Kim Phuc was doing as well as could be expected. After suffering third degree burns due to a napalm attack on her rural Vietnamese village. She remembers the clothes having disintegrated of her body. She remembers running after her brother. She really doesn’t remember too much else except screaming “Too Hot, Too Hot, Too Hot” as she ran naked, feeing her village and all she had known of life.
Then the nine-year-old terrified child lost conciseness moments after press photographer, Huynh Cong “Nick” Ut, snapped the iconic photo of the scene. He then scooped the burning child in his arms as he rushed to the nearest medical facility. Upon arrival he was told she was so badly burnt and they were not going to treat her, as it would be of no avail. However, Ut had the foresight to flash his press badge. The medical staff took her in and treated her and against odd she made a full recovery.
Phuc was dealing with the past and was enrolled in medical school when a new communist regime came into power. The new leaders realized she was the infamous napalm girl from the iconic photo and she was forced to quit medical school and attend monitored foreign press conferences where she recited a script she was given. Her life on hold, she was forced to relive this moment daily “I wanted to escape that picture,” she said. “I became another kind of victim.”
Later Vietnam’s prime minister was softened by her story and she was allowed to go abroad to Cuba to continue her studies. While in Cuba, Phuc married and she and her husband honeymooned in Russia. On their return flight from Moscow the plain stopped to refuel in Canada. Phuc and her new husband deflected. She called Ut from Canada to let him know of her new freedom.
Margiery Mason of the New York Post interviewed Phuc and said this of the brave woman’s story “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.”
