The Girl in the Picture

by Denise Chong

  “Yes, I know. I cannot be quiet again,” Kim had said.

  But after a month of jangled nerves and recurring nightmares, Kim was having second thoughts. She worried that plans made with her agent to have the media pay for publicity might be for naught, that, like those two women from the British tabloid, the media would try to get a story and pictures of her without paying a cent. She felt as though the journalistic hounds would make her into a victim all over again. “The accident of those two women on the sidewalk,” she lamented to Toan, “was like a bomb falling out of the sky.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  ROUTE 1, THE HIGHWAY RUNNING northwest from Saigon and over the border of South Vietnam with Cambodia to Phnom Penh, was a time-honored trading route. By the early 1960s, traffic along it was a parade across generations: creaking oxcarts, jitneys and bicycles, aging French Citroëns, three- and four-wheeled truck-buses, late-model Honda and Lambretta motorscooters and shiny new GMC trucks. War in South Vietnam—first with the French and now with the Americans—only enhanced commercial profits: all manner of goods and drink and cigarettes bought in Cambodia could be peddled for several times the price in Saigon.

  Such commerce provided a convenient cover for guerrilla activities of insurgents and resistance fighters plotting against the regime in Saigon. Indeed, this corridor had echoed for decades with their footsteps. Geography and politics also combined effortlessly in their favor. Northwest of South Vietnam’s capital, the terrain is a large plain formed by the merging of two river systems, the Mekong, the great river of Indochina (present-day Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos), and the Dong Nai. The plain is elevated enough (unlike the Plain of Reeds to the southwest of the capital) to remain above water during the rainy season, affording year-round passage. It gives rise to a line of scattered and densely forested peaks, bowler-like in their shape. Nearer and over the border, the vegetation turns into subtropical jungle, so thick as to be impenetrable by sunlight. The mountains were natural guerrilla bases and staging grounds for terrorist strikes, while the jungle provided ideal hiding places and headquarters. And by crossing the border into supposedly neutral Cambodia, those collaborating against Saigon had a political sanctuary out of reach of South Vietnamese government troops.

  Part of South Vietnam’s national highway, Route 1 was a pot-hole-riddled tarmac road, two lanes wide, except where bridges narrowed it to a single lane. The last and only major town in the roughly seventy-five miles between Saigon and the Cambodian border, reached by a road that forked off Route 1, was Tay Ninh, ten miles from the border and capital of the province of the same name. In the sixty-five-mile stretch between Saigon and Tay Ninh were two “district towns.” These were not urban centers but rather a collection of hamlets. Both were in the province of Hau Nghia. Meaning “deepening righteousness,” it was created by South Vietnam’s president Ngo Dinh Diem to amalgamate the most politically troublesome districts of neighboring provinces, in which the more remote hamlets had been abandoned to guerrillas.

  Coming from Saigon, the first of these district towns was Cu Chi, some eighteen miles from the capital. Twelve miles farther, halfway between Saigon and Tay Ninh, was Trang Bang. The approach to Trang Bang was marked by a bridge over a stream. From that slight elevation, several hundred yards away, the town’s only landmark became visible: a twin-towered temple. A sign warned motorists to slow to ten miles an hour to make a sharp turn. Because the ornate temple sat exactly at the turn, a lingering look was unavoidable.

  Past the temple, the road straightened. Half a mile farther was a monotony of low-slung buildings housing the district government offices, a clinic, a high school and the marketplace. However, Trang Bang merited note mainly for the intersection, reached before the business district, of Route 1 with Route 19, a secondary road heading north towards the Cambodian border. Huddled on the main highway at that intersection were several ramshackle structures with corrugated tin roofs, perhaps a dozen food and drink and sweet shops serving breakfast and lunch to travelers between Saigon and the border. Among the shops here, one owned by Phan Tung was favored because of the excellent cooking of his wife, Nu.

  It was to this stretch of highway, from the temple to the intersection, that the fate of the family of Tung and Nu would be tied. It was on this highway in Trang Bang that a photojournalist would take a picture of their daughter that would become one of the most famous images of the Vietnam war.

  TUNG AND NU’S FIFTH CHILD AND THIRD daughter was born on April 6, 1963. She was given the name Phan Thi Kim Phuc. Phuc means “happiness” (if a male, the meaning is “blessing”). Phan was her father’s family name, Thi signifies a female, and Kim, meaning “golden,” was a name she shared with her two sisters. To her family, she was known as Phuc.

  The year of Phuc’s birth opened ominously for South Vietnam. Eight years earlier, Ngo Dinh Diem had proclaimed the area south of the demilitarized zone, which separated the Communist north from the capitalist south, the Republic of Vietnam, and installed himself as president. At the beginning of 1963, the two sides had their first major battlefield confrontation. At Ap Bac, a village to the southwest of Saigon, Hanoi-led Communist troops, though grossly outnumbered and ill-equipped, routed South Vietnamese government troops. The inept South Vietnamese command deliberately ignored American advisers on the scene, in the knowledge that President Diem himself regarded defeat as a way to ensure continued American aid. That summer, with characteristic and undeterred brutality, Diem moved to crush a Buddhist uprising, ordering troops to fire on Buddhist demonstrators and conduct bloody raids on Buddhist temples. The protest escalated. A monk sat in the middle of a Saigon street, calmly poured gasoline on himself, struck a match and burned to death. American journalists, who had been alerted beforehand, sent the grisly image around the world.

  Diem’s handling of the Buddhist crisis confirmed to the American administration its distaste for the regime it supported, which it now saw as damaging the war effort. That summer, more monks resorted to self-immolation, and public clashes with police became widespread. In response, Diem declared martial law, a move that sealed his fate. His own generals murdered him and his powerful brother, Nhu. At the news of their deaths, the streets of Saigon erupted in celebration, jails emptied of political prisoners, padlocks came off nightclub doors.

  Then, three weeks after Diem’s murder, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy rocked the world. It would be his successor, Lyndon Johnson, who would dramatically escalate America’s war effort in Vietnam, while the leadership of South Vietnam remained weakened by successive coups.

  Hanoi regarded the war with the Americans as the second Vietnam War. The first, the Franco-Viet Minh war, had been waged in Vietnam since the surrender of the Japanese occupiers at the end of the Second World War. The Viet Minh, an independence league founded by Ho Chi Minh (giving rise to his nom de guerre, He Who Enlightens), had seized power in Hanoi from the occupying Japanese and renamed the north the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Returning French military forces quickly regained control of Saigon and their colony in the south. At Ho’s urging, the Viet Minh fought the French to prevent them from returning to the north, and as well, to drive them from the south. The Franco-Viet Minh war came to an end in 1954, when the Viet Minh overran the remote French garrison at Dien Bien Phu after a fifty-seven-day siege. Under the terms of the Geneva accord, a demilitarized zone was established, and reunification elections were to be held within two years. The United States, which had provided military and economic aid to the French in Indochina, was committed to propping up the Saigon regime. The Americans had been the sole participant to refuse to accept the Geneva accord.

  In the south, Diem—ascetic, emotionally volatile, scornfully anti-Communist—refused to hold reunification elections. He was backed by the Americans, who, fearing a dominance of the Communists in the north, would not accept a reunified Vietnam. Accordingly, the Viet Minh decided to pursue reunification by resuming the conflict in the south. In 1960, southern patriots formed a
resistance front against the Saigon regime and declared their solidarity with the Viet Minh. Diem dubbed the southern guerrillas Viet Cong. The name itself would emphasize their link to the Communist policies of Ho Chi Minh’s coalition in Hanoi. The name stuck, replacing the term Viet Minh.

  Hanoi fought this war with the Americans differently from that with the French. This time, it waged a predominantly guerrilla war, using Viet Cong commandos recruited among southerners, who relied on homemade weapons, such as mortars fashioned out of the exhaust pipes of old cars and booby traps made with sharpened bamboo. Regular North Vietnamese army units, or “mainforce soldiers,” were reserved for conventional battles and to wage broad offensives. Hanoi’s strategy was to infiltrate the south by moving mainforce soldiers and military equipment and supplies across the demilitarized zone along what became known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The trail began as a web of rudimentary paths crossing mountain streams, damp forest and jungles infested with mosquitoes, deadly snakes and leeches. Its ten-thousand-mile-long route crossed into the panhandle of southern Laos, turned back into the highlands of South Vietnam, then cut into Cambodia astride its border with Vietnam, ending about sixty to seventy miles northwest of Saigon.

  In a plan to cut off supply routes to the south, and to rout the Communists from their southern headquarters, American planes bombed the Ho Chi Minh Trail and sprayed herbicides to defoliate vast tracts of forests and jungle in areas bordering northeastern Cambodia. In 1965, Johnson ordered the first bombing raids over North Vietnam, in hopes of deterring Hanoi from pursuing the war and reunification. That year, he also sent the first American combat troops into South Vietnam.

  In Phuc’s earliest childhood, the modern firepower of war was unseen and unheard in Trang Bang. Battlefield confrontations took place far in the southern Mekong Delta and the central highlands. In Trang Bang, as in Saigon and in America, the public’s impression of the distant war was not of gore but of monotony and repetition.

  ALONG ROUTE 1, DAILY LIFE WAS LITTLE changed from the time of the French war. Even the government police maintained the same checkpoints from one war to the next. The guerrillas had their old ways of sabotage at favored locations. They obstructed roads with homemade mines, took out bridges, conducted ambushes and assassinations. In places like Trang Bang, the district authorities, unable to maintain electrical power after repeated acts of sabotage by the Viet Cong, decided not to make repairs until the war was over. Anyone traveling knew the one unbreakable rule: they could follow their normal routine by daylight, but the night belonged to the Viet Cong.

  Each hamlet or collection of hamlets defined its “safe” area; everything beyond this would be unpatrolled by local public security forces. The delineation of these inhabited areas was most apparent in an aerial view. Trang Bang’s ended on one side where rice paddies gave way to a natural line of thick growth of bamboo and flame trees, on another side at the river, and, where there were not these natural boundaries, the line was marked by a three-foot-high row of mounded earth. Only the desperately poor, who could not choose where they lived, did not heed these borders. The poorest of any hamlet were always the street vendors, always women—usually abandoned by husbands—who lugged their wicker hampers from dawn until after midnight, selling snacks in the town. Their children were the ones in rags and bare feet, with dirty faces, who didn’t go to school but instead spent their days calling into doorways hawking fresh eels and catfish that they caught in the river.

  Of Phuc’s parents, Nu’s family had its roots in Trang Bang. Nu’s father, Du Van Kiem, was a middle-class peasant. He inherited from his father, who had worked for a French engineering company on a rubber plantation, seventy-five mau (about twelve acres) of land on the eastern edge of Trang Bang. In Trang Bang, Grandfather Kiem was best known for his allegiance to his family and to his religion, Caodai. This cult, confined to the provinces ringing Saigon, was founded by a civil servant under the French regime in the mid-1920s, and its name comes from a Taoist term meaning “high tower.” The religion took the term Caodai to refer to God, a heavenly being which the cult depicted with a mystical eye, representing the universal conscience. The eye adorns Caodai temples in the way that the cross does Roman Catholic churches.

  At the time of its founding, Caodai was one of several rural movements agitating against the peasant’s declining lot and loss of a voice in everyday affairs under French colonial rule. Other political or quasi-political organizations were the fledgling Indochinese Communist Party and the Buddhist sect Hoa Hao. Caodai purported to offer the final revelation of all world religions and of world history. As a doctrine, and in its religious practices, it was mainly an adaptation of the three Eastern religions, relying heavily upon Taoism and its belief in spirits and the occult, incorporating Buddhism and Confucianism, and venerating their respective deities. Borrowing a little here and a little there, the religion took advantage of the popularity of spiritualism in Europe in the 1930s and consulted, through mediums and sorcerers, a host of deceased world figures—Lenin, Jesus Christ, Victor Hugo, Joan of Arc, Louis Pasteur and William Shakespeare. Modeling its organization after the Catholic Church, it established a Holy See and installed as its pope, known as the Ho Phap, a man named Pham Cong Tac, one of the religion’s founders.

  The Holy See, with its great cathedral-like yellow stone temple, a mystical eye in every window on all four sides, was two and a half miles outside the town of Tay Ninh. On the three most important anniversaries in the religious calendar, the birthdays of Buddha, Jesus Christ and the Ho Phap (after he died, the anniversary of his death was celebrated), followers of Caodai and their families came from far and wide to the Holy See. Ceremonies at the great temple were a spectacle of color and pomp, presided over by the pope and a ranking of cardinals, archbishops, bishops and priests, as well as numerous religious, legislative and administrative ritual servants, in robes of designated colors. Some thirteen hundred adepts, all in white, the color of worship, filled the temple, the women and girls wearing the ao dai, the diaphanous, full-length, high-necked tunic slit to the waist worn over silk pants.

  Grandfather Kiem became a ritual servant, often presiding over weddings and funerals and mediating local disputes. His wife, Grandmother Tao, adopted vegetarianism, a practice required of priests; normal minimum religious practice for Caodaists was to eschew meat for ten days each lunar month. When a call went out for adherents to build local temples, Grandfather Kiem donated one-third of his land for a temple in Trang Bang. In 1948, the pink- and saffron-colored temple that stood prominently at the town’s eastern edge opened its doors. Daily temple rituals were four times a day, at six in the morning, noon, six in the evening and midnight. Religious law required followers to make one daily act of obeisance before an altar, which could be at home. Attendance at the temple was expected only twice monthly, on the first and fifteenth of every month.

  Other than as a benefactor of Caodai, Grandfather Kiem was best known for his prized pomelos. Finicky to grow and time consuming to tend, these were trees of the well-to-do. Those who bought his fruit at the market, finding that its juiciness fulfilled the promise of its evenly grainy skin, often found their way to his door, asking to buy a graft from a tree. Grandmother Tao was the model of the rural tradition of the laboring, uneducated farm wife who works long hours to allow her husband a life of scholarly leisure. The couple had six children: two sons died young, while four daughters survived.

  Phuc’s mother, Nu, was their second-born daughter. It was she who inherited Grandmother Tao’s talent for cooking. One of the teenage Nu’s daily chores, which she performed sitting on the ground outside the house, was to grind rice into liquid flour that could then be steamed and made into either banh trang, a rice-paper wrap, or banh canh, the soft rice noodles put in soup. She caught the eye of a passing truck driver. Phan Tung, who lived in a nearby hamlet, was a young man with a high school education, blessed with charm and humor. While driving his aunt’s three-wheeled truck and looking for paying passen
gers traveling to and from Saigon, he noticed the girl hard at work turning the millstone. It crossed his mind how much he liked eating banh canh. He appraised the girl’s looks: “So-so,” he decided. Seeing the house behind her to be of wood and brick, he surmised that she must come from a good family. He was the younger of two brothers and had lost his father when he was two. With his ever-astute ability to sense opportunity, Tung had a friend introduce them. In 1951, they married. He was twenty-one; she was seventeen.

  Living under the same roof as his in-laws, and knowing his new wife’s desire to have her own home, Tung told Nu: “The taste of your banh canh is very good. People will pay for it.” Noodle soup is the most popular and basic Vietnamese daily fare, eaten as a snack or a meal in itself, especially at breakfast and lunch, but also at any time of the day or night. While any family can make it, few bother, choosing instead to patronize the street vendors. Putting her husband’s prediction to the test, Nu hefted a shoulder pole to the market. She squatted there with dishes and utensils in front of a charcoal brazier and offered fresh, thin noodles in a steaming, clear broth, flavored with a dash of fermented fish sauce, made from anchovies and salt, and served with a plate of garnishes: bean sprouts and chilies, wedges of lime and sprigs of mint and basil.

  After three years, Nu had saved enough to raise a one-room wood-and-brick house in the shadow of her parents’ home. One year later, a baby was born to Nu, and thereafter, every two or three years, yet another—alternating girl, boy. The midwife in attendance each time was her sister, Auntie Anh. Because Nu worked seven days a week, upon the birth of her firstborn, a daughter, she and Tung took in a distant relative, Great Uncle Don, as a manservant and to help care for the children. The arrangement suited Great Uncle; his elderly father’s new wife had cast him out of the house. Because of the demands of the shop, Nu weaned her babies at two weeks on a diet of sweetened liquid rice, breastfeeding them only at the end of the day.