The Girl in the Photograph

IT’S THE magic hour in Havana, when the sky goes iridescent indigo before the light drops. The young woman poses for the photographer on the low wall of the esplanade above the sea, with racing clouds as a backdrop. The young woman loves the camera, and the camera loves her. She’s a Vietnamese Marilyn, wrinkling her nose, giggling and tugging at her skirt. She flirts with the photographer, wants to pose rubbing her cheek against his, giggles and tosses hair caught back by an orange and silver flower.

Seventeen years ago, there was a different picture. Then, in 1972, the scene was the war-torn Central Highlands of South Vietnam, and the billowing clouds in the background were the black smoke from a burning, napalmed village. The young woman--Phan Thi Kim Phuc--was a 9-year-old child running naked down a road, screaming in agony from the jellied gasoline coating her body and burning through skin and muscle down to bone. The same photographer, Nick Ut--at 21 already a seasoned combat photographer for the Associated Press--raised his camera and squeezed off several frames. One of those frames flashed around the world and came to symbolize, more than any other photograph taken in Vietnam, the atrocity of war.

But Kim Phuc--like Vietnam--has outlived that savage image. Now a student in Havana, she will embark in September on a six-week trip across America, the country that brought both the napalm that almost killed her and the doctors who saved her. Seventeen years later, now that she can speak for herself, her message is simple. Its anti-war theme is the same as the photograph’s. But its spirit of reconciliation--for Americans and Vietnamese, for warriors on all sides--is radically different. On the eve of the trip, it was time for a reunion between the photographer and his subject. There were new pictures to be made.

BOTH THE photographer and the subject whose lives took on such epic stature because of his photograph were born to peasant families in the South before the war with the Americans engulfed Vietnam. Photographer Nick Ut was born Huynh Cong Ut in Long An province, southwest of Saigon, on March 29, 1951, at the tag end of the war with the French. By the time he was 9, more and more “unofficial” Americans were showing up in South Vietnam, and Ut’s older brother, Huynh Thanh My, had gone to work for the Associated Press as a photographer in Saigon. When his brother died in 1965, covering combat in the Mekong Delta, the AP offered Nick a darkroom job. A year later, Horst Faas, AP’s photo editor in Saigon, agreed to let Ut begin shooting photos, with some misgivings: “Horst was afraid I’d get killed, too,” Ut remembers.

There were many close calls. When Americans and South Vietnamese invaded Cambodia in 1970, Nick Ut was wounded twice, once in the stomach and once in the right hand, both by rockets. Another time, a rocket “parted my hair. I was very, very, very, very lucky.”

He tells one war story with deep sadness, less bravado. He and Henri Huet, a French / Vietnamese photographer, were covering the buildup for the invasion of Laos in 1971. Huet took Ut’s place on the first chopper into Laos so that Ut could go back to Saigon for a rest. When Ut walked into the AP office in the capital, he was greeted with the news that the chopper carrying Huet had crashed and burned in Laos. There were no survivors. “Henri used to call me ‘Nic-nic-nic’ or ‘Nicky,’ ” Ut says. “He said it was because my name Ut means youngest , and I guess it meant that in French, I don’t really know. So right then I decided to keep it and call myself Nick.”

Kim Phuc, whose name means “Golden Happiness” in Vietnamese, was born in the Central Highlands on April 6, 1963, the year President Kennedy began the American buildup. She and her two sisters and six brothers grew up in the hamlet of Trang Bang in Tay Ninh province, about 30 miles northwest of Saigon. Kim Phuc’s father was a rice farmer, and her mother ran a little soup shop on the nearby national highway, Route 1, that linked Saigon and Phnom Penh. Before the war, Tay Ninh was a pastoral haven, with peasants raising rice, sugar, bamboo and beans and fishing in nearby streams. But the war ended all that.

Tay Ninh became a major base for South Vietnamese communist troops and a critical link in the infiltration route for North Vietnamese soldiers and supplies into the South. Route 1 was the key American and South Vietnamese supply route between Saigon and the Central Highlands. Tay Ninh quickly became one of the most heavily fought over and most extensively bombed, napalmed and defoliated provinces in South Vietnam.

By 1972, the war had gone on so long that, despite rumors of peace from Paris, it seemed to the peasants in the south that it would never end. The Phan family’s house in Trang Bang had been bombed and rebuilt twice. The Hunyhs had lost two sons--a second had been killed in the Mekong Delta fighting with the Saigon army. But these tragedies in no way distinguished them from hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese families, not in the way that what happened June 8, 1972, would change their lives forever.

THE PARTICULAR catastrophe that blew through tiny Trang Bang in early summer began on June 5, when National Liberation Front troops cut Route 1 and occupied the marketplace in Trang Bang. Troops from the South Vietnamese Army’s 25th Division were called in, and heavy bombing began. The villagers of Trang Bang abandoned their homes and moved into the nearby pagoda, Kim Phuc remembers, “because we thought the pagoda wouldn’t be bombed.”

For two days, the pagoda was the eye in a storm of artillery, bombs, rocket fire and fighting between the two sides. On the third day, a score of journalists, including Nick Ut, drove up from Saigon to cover the siege. The villagers had just finished eating lunch, Kim Phuc remembers. Nick Ut was shooting his last pictures on the road, watching the time so that he’d get back to Saigon through the bottleneck of military traffic before dark. At about 2 p.m., South Vietnamese Skyraiders dropped white phosphorous marker bombs into the pagoda’s garden. “We knew the bombs would then probably drop right there. The grown-ups were afraid the pagoda would be hit, so they told us all to run outside,” Kim Phuc remembers. “The smallest children who could walk ran first. I was in a middle group of older kids, then the parents grabbed the babies and our belongings.”

Just as the children left the pagoda, the Skyraiders returned and dropped four bombs and four drums of napalm next to it and on the road. “They made a terrible BOOOM and a huge fireball from the napalm rose up,” Ut says. Two of Kim Phuc’s brothers, one 3 years old, the other 9 months old, were killed instantly by what the villagers called “the fire that fell from heaven.” Kim Phuc was hit directly with a splash of napalm.

“There was terrible heat,” she says, telling the story in Nick Ut’s Havana hotel room. “I was running, running, running away. I tore off my burning clothes. But the burning didn’t stop. I was alone with that terrible heat,” she says, rubbing her right hand up and down her left arm. When she notices what she’s doing, she laughs. “That’s how I burned my right hand. I hadn’t been hit by the napalm there. But I was rubbing my left arm, which was covered with napalm, to stop the burning.” She holds up her right hand to show the scars between thumb and forefinger. “I saw my whole future in front of me--all the pain,” she continues. “I was running, running. I was lucky my feet weren’t burned. But what frightened me most were the people at the end of the road with the horror on their faces. I was so thirsty. Someone offered me a drink of water, and then I fainted. I lost all my memory until I woke up a long time later in the hospital.”

Nick Ut and the other photographers there shot pictures of the napalm fireball and then converged on the first victims they saw, including Kim Phuc’s elderly grandmother, who was carrying a 1-year-old boy. (The baby, Kim Phuc’s cousin, died a few minutes later.) Many of the photographers soon ran out of film. Only Ut and a free-lance TV cameraman saw Kim Phuc and her brother run from behind the pagoda. Ut’s photograph in no way shows the horror of what they saw. Kim Phuc’s wounds aren’t visible in the photograph. The shock is in her nakedness and the agony on the children’s faces.

“They were screaming ‘ nong qua , nong qua ‘ (‘too hot, too hot’),” Nick remembers. “Her whole back and neck and arm were black like barbecue.

“They ran right toward me. The other photographers were still taking the old woman’s picture. But I took Kim’s picture. She ran up to us. We all--the soldiers and the journalists--poured water over her from canteens.” When Kim Phuc lost consciousness seconds later, Nick Ut and her father loaded her into the AP van and raced to a Vietnamese hospital in Cu Chi, 15 miles away.

From the hospital, Nick Ut went directly to the AP office. He knew he had a great photo and was so nervous that he went into the darkroom to help develop the film. Horst Faas remembers there was a delay in sending out Kim Phuc’s picture because one AP staffer was worried that it wouldn’t be used in the States because of her nakedness. But Faas insisted that it go out right away.

The image of Kim Phuc wounded and her brother screaming in horror was to run in hundreds of newspapers all over the world and win Nick Ut the 1973 Pulitzer Prize, along with six other major journalism awards. The vote by the Pulitzer Prize committee was “instantaneous and unanimous,” remembers John Hughes, then head of the committee and now a columnist at the Christian Science Monitor.

Kim Phuc spent the next 14 months in the hospital. Unconscious for several days, with third-degree burns over half her body, she was at first given little chance of living. She remembers the first thing she saw when she opened her eyes was her mother sitting by her bed weeping. “My whole body was wrapped in bandages and all my hair had been burned off. I was lying on my stomach because the worst burns were on my back and I couldn’t move because of the pain.” For six months, she was forced to lie in this position. The worst part of every day was the early morning when her wounds were washed and the bandages changed. It was so painful even to be touched that she would black out as soon as the nurses began to carry her to the bathroom. The first time one of her sisters came to visit, she watched the bandage changing and was so shocked by the wounds that she fainted. She wasn’t allowed to visit again. Kim Phuc got through it, she says, “because everyone--the nurses, the doctors, my family and friends--wanted to help me. My blood didn’t circulate, and everyone who visited gave me massages. Even my 10-year-old friends were taught how to help me move the fingers on my left hand.”

In six months, excruciatingly painful reconstructive surgery began on Kim Phuc at the Barsky unit, a children’s plastic surgery hospital set up by Dr. Arthur Barsky in Saigon. Dr. Mark Gorney, then a Barsky volunteer, now a prominent San Francisco plastic surgeon, operated on her in late 1972. Her chin had been welded to her chest by scar tissue and her left arm had so little flesh on it that scar tissue had attached it to her rib cage. The scar tissue on her back and chest had hardened into what Gorney calls an “armored plate” and contracted so that Kim Phuc couldn’t straighten up. “We took skin grafts from unburned parts of her body to cover the arm so she could raise it, released her chin and stomach so she could sit up,” Gorney remembers. “Changing the dressings was like being flayed alive. There’s nothing more devastating than third-degree burns. They’re not only the most painful wounds to flesh and blood there are; it’s a wound to the soul. There are no mirrors in burn wards. There would be too many suicides.” He pauses. “In a way, Kim Phuc was lucky. Her face was spared. We had so many children like this. Dozens and dozens.”

BENT OVER Nick Ut’s famous photograph in his room at the Havana Riviera, Kim Phuc points out her brother and a cousin in the picture. She and Ut might be long-lost relatives poring over the family scrapbook. Kim Phuc calls the photographer Chu Ut-- Uncle Ut--and he says that he has a blowup of her photograph hanging in the den of his Monterey Park home. “To me, she’s part of our family. I tell my children Bettina and Michael, who were born in America, how lucky they are to escape war.” (Ut, sponsored by the AP, fled Vietnam in April, 1975, when the communists took over. He worked for two years in Tokyo for the AP and then was transferred to Los Angeles in 1977.)

Kim Phuc and Ut say they had dreamed of this reunion for many years. For Nick Ut, it was a shock. The agonizingly wounded child had grown into a beautiful young woman, not a crippled, embittered war victim. Her devastating scars--back, chest and arm pitted, gouged and ridged like a hillside strip-mined of precious metals--are concealed by a white T-shirt emblazoned with red and yellow roses and a gossamer, full, white skirt. Three-inch heels and Jackie O oversized white sunglasses complete the ensemble. Her perfect moon face is carefully and skillfully made up. It’s an act of self-transformation that makes a charade of the old putdown that beauty is only skin deep.

With her entourage of three officials from the Vietnamese Embassy, a Cuban government press official and a Cuban driver, and her impulsive hugging of everyone in sight, she’s like a just-discovered ingenue. She’s been waiting since 9 a.m. for what turns out to be a 2:30 p.m. photo session and interview. She’s amused to discover that there are two photographers--Nick Ut and a second cameraman to shoot Nick photographing her.

But Kim Phuc is also too honest to follow a purely sentimental script. She admits that she doesn’t remember anyone taking her photo that day. She asks Nick how old he was and where he was exactly when he took the photograph. Nor does she remember that Nick Ut drove her to the hospital, visited her there, brought her books sent from overseas, set up a bank account for the money sent to her by concerned Vietnamese or even that he visited her more than a year later in Trang Bang. “I was a small girl. I don’t remember his face,” she explains apologetically. “But my parents told me of this kind uncle who took my picture and helped us so much.”

Kim Phuc can’t quite remember when she saw Nick Ut’s picture of her for the first time--it was sometime when she was in the hospital. And it was years later, after the war was over, that a reporter who came to interview her told her that the picture was an international sensation. (It did not make her any more than a momentary celebrity in Vietnam, where so many others had also been wounded.) Now, she says proudly, “I myself have seen other pictures of the war. But this is my picture.”

In between shooting new photographs of his most famous subject, Nick Ut fills her in on things he recalls from the visits she can’t remember. He leaves out the first time he tried to visit her in Trang Bang and couldn’t find her. The family had moved after the village was destroyed in yet another bombing raid. Instead, he was almost killed by a mortar, which hit his camera and his leg. He tells her he wanted to meet her in West Germany when she went there for medical treatment in 1984, but he hadn’t gotten his American passport yet. “You see, I know him because he give back memories,” Kim Phuc says fondly, her hand patting her heart.

Her wounds weren’t her family’s only problem when Kim Phuc left the hospital after 14 months, she told Nick Ut. The family lost everything when Trang Bang was destroyed and was living in a tiny hut they had to throw together themselves. With runaway wartime inflation, the family quickly ran through the money that sympathizers had sent to Kim Phuc. There was barely enough money to feed the family and none for medicine and trips to Saigon for rehabilitation. Kim Phuc was still in pain from her wounds, unable to move her hand and arm, and her circulation was poor.

Had there been a time when she was sorry she had lived?

Kim Phuc giggles, embarrassed. Then she looks out the hotel window at the graceful curve of the esplanade below and the ocean lapping against the seawall.

“Sometimes, yes, of course. In 1974, I cried all day long. I kept putting my well arm next to my left one, which could not move. My mother kept saying, ‘Don’t be sad. If you cry, I will cry and then we will all be twice as sad.’ My mother is very sentimental. She believed if I carried a heavy load, she could carry it for me, but she couldn’t carry the pain inside me.”

Gradually, with her family and friends encouraging her and helping her exercise, Kim Phuc could move her hand and arm. Dealing with the physical scars was hardest when she was a teen-ager. “All the other girls looked so pretty in their short-sleeved blouses. I had a lot of pity for myself.” Kim Phuc interrupts herself. “But I could concentrate more on my studies as a result.” Now she wears a flowered blouse that doesn’t conceal the scars on her forearm. She puts her scarred arm next to her untouched one and says longingly, “Don’t you think the doctors in America could make them both the same?”

For a long time, Kim Phuc’s abiding dream was to be a doctor. She went several times to thank the doctors and nurses still in Saigon for saving her life. “My parents gave birth to me but couldn’t cure me,” she says passionately. “The doctors and nurses were like parents who could. I wanted to be a doctor to help my parents when they need it. I would feel so happy to cure their suffering.”

But medical studies in Ho Chi Minh City proved too strenuous. Kim Phuc still suffers from fevers, headaches and extreme fatigue--whether from physical causes or psychological trauma is unclear. It is difficult for her to concentrate on anything for very long. Because her extensive skin grafts have no sweat or oil glands--they can’t breathe like regular skin--she is supersensitive to heat and cold. She sometimes has nightmares about the war--in them, she is always running. She is frightened by men in uniform, fires and any kind of disturbance, such as an accident, near a road. Hot weather and a close room can panic her. This year, Cuban doctors diagnosed diabetes, which she controls with diet.

She gave up medical studies, tried to learn English in Ho Chi Minh City and then accepted a Vietnamese government invitation to go to Cuba in 1986. At first, she studied English and Spanish to become a teacher. Then she changed plans again, this time to study pharmacology. “It’s not the same,” she admits crestfallen.

At first, she missed her family so much and found the new culture so foreign that she couldn’t eat. She spent most of her time sleeping. But now she says, “I love Cuba.”

She lives in a high-rise student apartment building near the esplanade with two Cuban roommates. There are only three other Vietnamese students who live there, but Kim Phuc has become popular with other international students. She likes to go dancing and to the movies with them. One Angolan friend profiled her in the official Cuban newspaper Granma.

“When she’s sick, she gets very sad,” confides her closest Vietnamese friend in Havana. “We worry and try and help her to sleep. But when she’s not sick, she’s a very happy girl.”

IF I EVER see those pilots who dropped the bombs on me--or any American pilots--I would say to them, ‘The war is over.’ ” Kim Phuc says earnestly, leaning forward on the edge of her chair in the hotel room. “The past is past,” she says. Kim Phuc isn’t interested in politics. She’s not a member of the Communist Party or any other political group. But she is passionate about reconciliation. “I would ask those pilots what can they do to bring us all together. There’s such a connection between Vietnam and America, but it should be one of friendship. Not bitterness. Not enemies. But I’m not coming to America to talk about the war. I’m coming so Americans can meet the girl in the photo and to tell them I’m alive and about my life and what’s happening to my family.” She pauses and smiles impishly. “And to see the Statue of Liberty and the Golden--is it Gate? Is that a bridge? And rock ‘n’ roll!”

“There is no more powerful person to speak of healing the wounds of war than Kim Phuc,” says Merle Ratner, an organizer of the Committee to Welcome Kim Phuc, which is sponsoring her six-week trip to a score of U.S. cities, including Los Angeles. “If she can forgive, why can’t anyone?”

Ratner is one of a handful of activists who never retired from the anti-war movement and have been working since 1975 to help rebuild what Americans destroyed in Vietnam. The trip has been endorsed by scores of religious leaders, artists, doctors and politicians, including Democratic Sens. Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island and Tom Harkin of Iowa and Vermont Gov. Madeleine Kunin. Their immediate postwar goal--to force the U.S. government to honor the secret pledge of $4.7 billion in aid that Henry Kissinger made as part of the 1973 Paris Peace accords--did not succeed. In the 1980s, they dropped their demand for U.S. government reconstruction aid in favor of ending the embargo and establishing diplomatic relations.

Trip organizer Don Luce says normalizing relations would permit humanitarian aid projects, American investment in Vietnam and easier travel and communications between the two countries. If Kim Phuc is the embodiment of Vietnam--of the country’s suffering and fragile beauty--she’s also got her people’s toughness and will to survive. Like the peasant soldiers who carved sandals out of the tires of downed American planes and the villagers who flew Saigon’s flag by day and the National Liberation Front’s by night, Kim Phuc is adept at plying the postwar political currents. At dinner on the lush, palm-shaded patio of a deluxe Cuban restaurant, she told Nick Ut that the seafood dinner he had treated her to cost more than what her family could live on for several months. Then she turned the conversation to the question of how she could obtain a visa to return to the United States after her trip this fall.

Like a small-town beauty queen on the Greyhound to Hollywood, she hopes that her trip to the United States will raise money for her poverty-stricken family and for her return to the United States to study and get medical treatment.

Of the photo that made them both stars, Nick Ut says: “I was very happy to take that picture. Now people know my name and who I am.” But the reunion with Kim Phuc and her impending trip to America, which is sure to set off a media blitzkrieg for both of them, has got the bones of war rattling. “I felt like crying when I saw her (again),” he says quietly. Last January, Nick Ut went back to Vietnam for the first time since 1975 and saw, he says, how Vietnamese children are still suffering from the aftermath of the war and crushing poverty. “They’re still getting wounded by unexploded mines. There’s not enough food, and no medicine,” he says in his hotel room after the reunion.

He seems haunted by the violent disjunction between what the photograph shows and the life of those who view it, including himself, now that he’s an AP photographer safe in L.A. “I took that picture but children still suffer and there is still war.”

“It’s a picture that doesn’t rest,” says Horst Faas of the still widely reproduced photograph. Faas said he tried to talk to Gen. William Westmoreland after the general, blaming the media for distorting the war, charged in a 1986 speech that Nick Ut’s picture of Kim Phuc was faked. According to a report in the Miami Herald, Westmoreland claimed that Kim Phuc had actually been burned in “a hibachi accident.” But when Faas tried to talk to him about the charge, Faas says, the general gave him the brushoff.

War calls many things out of people--crusading zeal, crushing sadness, mysticism, martyrdom, victimhood. From Kim Phuc’s wounds have sprung a passion to be normal. “I want to live my life, marry, have children.” She admits that Nick Ut’s photo enshrined her as a symbol of agony. “But I’m alive and now I’m happy!”

“A joyful young woman,” says her interpreter from the Vietnamese Embassy in Havana. “That’s the symbol now.”

Kim Phuc giggles, pirouettes and opens her arms, vamping in the international sign language of the star.