The Girl in the Picture

by Denise Chong

  LATE THAT MORNING, THE JOURNALISTS noticed the darkening skies. The clouds had formed a low-lying blanket. The typical afternoon downpour of the wettest summer months began. The photographers and television cameramen covered their equipment with army-issue rain ponchos, bought in Saigon markets. The photographers cast about to see if anyone was thinking about calling it a day: the cloud cover would mean a halt in air strikes and, therefore, ground assaults.

  “What do you think today’s picture is?”

  They compared notes: refugees on the road, people fleeing the town. Other journalists who’d arrived later that morning had run into the aftermath of a firefight in a hamlet east of Trang Bang.

  “Maybe I’ll go early today.”

  “What time?”

  Some said one o’clock, others two at the latest. Talk turned to where to go tomorrow for pictures.

  Ut took from his camera bag his lunch of French cheese and a baguette sandwich. He decided that leaving any time before three could still be considered early, but that he’d aim for two, because of the heavy refugee traffic. One o’clock came and went without a break in the cloud cover. Some of his colleagues left, presuming that the Communists and the Viet Cong would also take advantage of the weather to retreat and leave the town. The rain continued. A soldier began washing his jeep, taking pails of water from the stream.

  THE CHILDREN INSIDE THE OUTBUILDING, enlivened by food in their tummies, were running around. During the last three days, Phuc had taken Auntie Anh’s second child under her wing. The chubby three-year-old, Danh, was her favorite cousin.

  There was sudden excitement when a black bird found its way into the building. Danh chased it, snatching it out of the air.

  Adult voices cried out in alarm. “Don’t touch it! Let it go!”

  “Danh! Let it go!” Phuc called out to her cousin.

  The boy released the bird but was disconsolate about losing a plaything. Even as the bird found its way outside, the adults were shaking their heads: “A bird inside is bad luck.”

  PERHAPS AN HOUR OR MORE AFTER IT HAD begun, the rain stopped. The wind began to clear the clouds. Here and there, bright sunlight poked through a sky still dirtied by black smoke from the morning’s bombings and fires. A small observation aircraft circling in the northeastern sky began an approach. Dipping low above the treeline behind the temple, it fired two phosphorous rockets that spewed white smoke upon impact. Immediately, several government soldiers ran out from a masonry building, originally a mausoleum for two village chiefs, outside the temple gates. Some dashed onto the temple grounds and popped violet- and mustard-colored smoke grenades. The colorless smoke fired by the observation plane marked the enemy; the colored smoke, popped by those on the ground, identified the South Vietnamese forward position. Perhaps as much as one hundred and fifty yards separated the opposing positions. What happened next was up to the pilots on the bombing missions.

  THE SOLDIERS INSIDE THE OUTBUILDING suddenly came to life. Some were stringing together curses. An argument broke out among them, apparently about the meaning of the smoke. Suddenly, they turned to the confused villagers: “Get out! Everybody get out! They are going to destroy everything!”

  Tung assembled his children and their cousins, instructing them all to make for the “American base.” He sent out the littlest and oldest first. Grandmother Tao and Auntie Anh, carrying her nine-month-old son, and her other two children, including three-year-old Danh, were with the first runners. Next, he sent out the middle children, including Phuc and two of her brothers. Then, the oldest siblings. Some of the panicking soldiers had already run out with the first of the villagers. Others who remained behind barked at the stragglers, trying to hurry them. “Run! Run fast, or you will die!” Among the last to go were Tung, who ran out with his youngest in his arms, and Nu. She stopped to scoop up Loan’s daughter, who, too scared to run any farther, had stopped in her tracks.

  The thirty to forty soldiers and civilians sketched a ragged line from the outbuilding, past the side and front of the temple, through its main gate and onto Route 1. How they appeared from the air through the lens of a dirty, partly clearing sky is debatable.

  NICK LOOKED AT HIS WATCH. IT WAS WELL after one o’clock. I have this shot, he told himself, staying put as a South Vietnamese Skyraider approached. Changing his mind, he scrambled out of the embankment and onto the road. I’ll get a couple more, he thought, then I’m going home.

  Quickly, it became apparent that the plane was off course to hit the white smoke and had crossed into government lines. Having miscued on that most elementary of maneuvers, instead of aborting his run, the pilot dipped into a dive and dropped two bombs. No explosion came; the bombs were duds. Fox Butterfield shouted in disgust and anger: “The pilot must be out of his mind! Was the guy drinking last night?!”

  Some moments later, a second Skyraider came in on an approach even more off target than the first, its course aligning with the bridge on the highway. It dipped in a kind of corkscrew motion, a maneuver normally used when under fire. “Oh shit!” Butterfield, incredulous that the second pilot was going to drop his bombs, flattened himself to the ground, as did some of the others at the bridge, soldiers and journalists alike.

  Nick did not move from the road. He kept his camera lens trained. Dinh, the NBC cameraman, kept his camera rolling. With him, because his equipment was wired to the camera, was his soundman, a Vietnamese freelancer hired for the day. So low did the plane dip that anyone on the road could plainly see its South Vietnamese identification, red stripes on yellow. There was another unwritten “rule of engagement” that the Americans had established early in the war: no fire was to be directed at unarmed Vietnamese unless they were running. Anyone running could be assumed to be fleeing Viet Cong, and therefore fair game. However frightened Nick and his colleagues were by what the pilot was about to do, they followed the essential rule of conduct when covering combat during a bombing run: stand still, and lift your face towards the pilot.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ONCE THE BOMBS HAD FALLEN FROM the Skyraider, Nick swung his lens down. In his mind, he had already composed the shot: silhouetted figures in uniform on the road in the foreground; the twin towers of the temple against an expanse of sky as the background. He had time. Hard bombs drop heavily to the ground, but the lighter napalm canisters tumble end over end, making forward progress as they head earthward.

  Upon impact, the napalm ignited in a fierce explosive splash across the highway and the fields on either side. Flame shot upwards. Shades of saffron, blood, fire and sunset filled the viewfinder. “Oh, my god! So beautiful!” In that instant, Nick was sorry that he was shooting black-and-white instead of color.

  Even from a distance of several hundred yards, the blast of heat was as if a door had opened on an immense brick furnace. Fire rolled and roiled out of the treetops. Heavy, dirty black smoke swirled skyward. Gradually, as ash rained down, the scene was recast in shades of gray. The darker rooftops of the twin spires of the temple rose mirage-like beyond the obliterated road and fields in between.

  Faint shouts and screams could be heard.

  “Jesus! People have been bombed!” someone yelled out. It was Shimkin, the Peace Corps worker who’d once documented human rights violations. He was the first to run forward. Other journalists followed, some cradling telephoto lenses. One among them, ITN’s Christopher Wain, called his crew back. “Hang on, guys. There’s another plane up there. We don’t want to be a statistic.” Even as he spoke, a third plane circling the area was departing.

  The first discernible figures, rendered against the smoke like a child’s drawing of stick-men on a dirty pane of glass, were a half dozen or so women and children and a small black dog. A boy carried a child on his hip; two girls clutched jute sacks. The same stunned emptiness was in the eyes of human and animal, as if they did not comprehend what they had run from, or what they were running to. They found a curious reception—journalists and soldiers dressed alike in battle fatigues, som
e pointing long lenses, which, from a distance, can look like gun barrels.

  Two stragglers appeared. One woman was ahead of the other, on the left edge of the road; the second woman was on the right, by habit, keeping out of the way of vehicles. The face of the first bore a wounded expression of tragedy witnessed. She carried a baby, its face and scalp smudged black, facing forwards. It was alert, even cute, as it bounced to her hurried steps.

  “My god . . .” The same cry of revulsion escaped from several mouths, and all eyes went to the woman lurching up the road.

  An old lady, her face torn with anguish, struggled forward with the limp weight of a child’s naked, blackened body in her arms. Her baggy black trousers slapped at her ankles, and with every flat-footed step charred skin flapped or fell from the child’s limbs.

  “Nguoi oi! Chay di dau nhu vay ne troi? Chay di dau nhu vay ne troi?”

  The old lady’s Vietnamese was lost on most of the journalists. She seemed to be speaking to the child in her arms, in its dying moments.

  Allan Downes, the cameraman with Wain, turned to him. “I can’t shoot this,” he said. “London isn’t going to use this.”

  “You let London sort that out!” shouted Wain, forcibly turning Downes’s shoulders so that he stayed with the woman as she moved past.

  The news photographers knew this was the day’s picture. They clicked frame after frame until there was no film left in their cameras. Already, they were thinking of the editing, of finding the frame that separated life from death. The living better convey the horror of war; the dead have no expression.

  NEVER A FAST RUNNER, PHUC HAD FALLEN A step or two behind her two brothers, one older, one younger than her. Once on the highway, she heard the drone of a low-flying airplane, and, curious, she turned her head to look. She had never before seen a plane so close. Without breaking her stride, she watched it drop four bombs before it passed from sight.

  From the moment she had left the outbuilding, with her baby clutched to her chest, Auntie Anh had worried about young Danh’s progress. While her seven-year-old daughter had run nimbly ahead, it wasn’t long before three-year-old Danh’s chubby legs began to give out. Auntie Anh was relieved when a soldier running by scooped up the little boy.

  The villagers fleeing the outbuilding had thought the violet and mustard smoke markers inside the temple grounds marked the bombing target, and once they were out of the main gate, they thought themselves safe. Soldiers in the command post in the yellow masonry building knew better what to expect, since it was they who had popped the colored smoke markers to indicate their own position and that of those taking refuge in the outbuilding. After the first plane dropped its bombs off course, the South Vietnamese commander at the post there got on his radio, trying frantically to stop the second plane’s bombing run.

  There was a deafening pop. Auntie Anh’s baby was thrown from her arms, and she buckled at the knees. Instinctively, she clutched at the back of her left leg. The fingers on that hand instantly fused, from coming into contact with the gob of jellied napalm burning there. The soldier who had picked up Danh took a direct hit of enough napalm that it incinerated him and left the child with devastating burns. Grandmother Tao found the blackened body that was her grandson and carried him farther. A man named Dao, still dressed in the white worn for Caodai worship, had seen Auntie Anh pitch forward. He came across her baby lying face down on the road, and he screamed out in anger: “They are bombing children and babies!” He found a woman to bring the baby to safety, then went back into the spreading fires and swirling smoke.

  Phuc was struck with such force from behind that she fell face first to the ground. Oddly, she felt unafraid, only curious, the same reaction she had had when she’d turned at the drone of the airplane and watched it unload its bombs. She did not wake up to what was happening until fire enveloped her. Fear took over. She would not know that she had got to her feet, had pulled at the neck of her burning clothes—in the way one would in discomfort on a hot day—and that what was left of them fell away. Her first memory of the engulfing fires was the sight of flames licking her left arm, where there was an ugly, brownish-black gob. She tried to brush it off, only to scream out at the pain of the burn that had now spread to the inside of her other hand.

  In that instant, Phuc knew she had touched burned flesh. She had taken a hit of napalm to her left side, on the upper part of her body. It incinerated her ponytail, burned her neck, almost all of her back and her left arm. As if a spirit leaving her body, Phuc saw herself burned and pitied. She saw others looking at her, heard them saying: “Oh, that poor wounded girl, look how ugly she is.”

  She came back to herself only when she heard the voice of her brother, Tam, cutting through the smoke. She saw him and her younger brother moving ahead of her, and realized she should stay with them, she should keep running. She tried to, but a tremendous fatigue and weariness overtook her, and as an intense heat seemed to eat her from the inside out, she felt desperately thirsty.

  Tung and Nu, both surprised to have found themselves among the living, feared for their children ahead. Disoriented in the fire and smoke, they heard Phuc’s terrified cries but could not find her. They saw her two brothers, then, finally, saw her stumbling, as if she were about to collapse. Tung was paralyzed by fear. Nu tried to set down her granddaughter, but the hysterical girl clung to her. Nu saw Dao, the figure in white, and screamed out. “My daughter! Help my daughter!” Then, a rising wall of searing heat forced her and Tung back. The last sight Nu had of her children ahead was of her son Tam pulling at Phuc to help keep her on her feet. Phuc’s voice kept replaying in Nu’s mind: “Oh, Ma, it’s too hot, too hot!”

  SEVERAL MINUTES HAD PASSED SINCE THE old lady carrying the charred child had emerged, with every camera on hand having recorded the horror on film. Many journalists there had the same thought: a day that had held waning promise of a story had produced a close-up portrait of war. Whatever the military explanation for the mistaken napalm strike, this much they knew: in every war there are “friendly” casualties, one side mistakenly killing their own soldiers or civilians —most journalists there had been caught in friendly fire. But rarely do casualties come walking into view, while journalists, like an audience, are waiting for something to happen. Some photographers, having used the last frames in their cameras on the old lady and the child, began to rewind their films and reload another. Leicas and Nikons in those days were finicky, and unless rewinding and reloading were done slowly, they could easily jam. Others among the journalists had turned their minds to making haste for Saigon. No one entertained the thought that others might walk out of the inferno.

  “. . . nong qua, nong qua!” A child’s cry pierced the emptiness.

  Of the soldiers and journalists who heard the cry, perhaps only the Vietnamese understood it: “. . . too hot, too hot!” Among those who went running forward were NBC’s Dinh together with his soundman, and Nick. Nick reached for the last of four cameras he had in his bag. Keeping a loaded camera in reserve was a quirk of his; never did he want to have to live with the regret of a great picture, but no film to take it.

  A half dozen children came running out. A girl held a small boy by the hand. Another, perhaps four or five years old, ran while turning his head to look behind him. The oldest among them was a boy of about twelve in a white shirt and dark shorts. He cursed coarsely: “Du me may bay bo-bomb!” Seeing what he thought to be soldiers, he changed from issuing curses of “Fuck the plane that dropped the bomb to try to kill my sister!” to “Em tao chay! Cuu em toi voi!”, a plea to “Help my sister!”

  A screaming girl came running, naked, her arms held limply outwards.

  Christopher Wain, the ITN journalist, put his hand out to bring her to a stop. From behind, the extent of her burn was apparent. Her body radiated heat, and chunks of pink and black flesh were peeling off. Nick came forward, repeating in English her request for water. Someone put a canteen to her lips. Other soldiers began to empty theirs over her s
till burning flesh. Nick went to get a poncho to cover the girl’s nakedness.

  A tall man in white came up to Nick and Dinh. Realizing that they were both journalists and therefore would have transport, the man beseeched them to take his “daughter” to hospital. The nearest one was in Cu Chi, on their way to Saigon.

  Nick, shaking violently at what he had witnessed, talked it over with Dinh, deciding who, between them, would take the girl. Each was in a hurry to get back to Saigon. Each had his own deadline. Nick had to worry about the competition from UPI. The NBC crew had to get back so the correspondent could record the voice track for his news story, then take both raw film and the recorded track out to Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut airport to meet their regular daily shipment, bound eventually for New York.

  It was decided that Nick would take the girl. As he was leading her to the AP van, the man in white brought forward another victim. This woman, unlike the girl, was unable to walk without help. Nick felt torn between trying to do the humane thing, helping the woman and the girl, and trying to be professional about his job and getting back to Saigon as quickly as possible. The hour was getting dangerously late. There would be refugees on the road to slow the van, time lost stopping at the hospital. The later it got, Nick realized, the more he was putting not only his own but the driver’s life at risk, should they have the misfortune to be out on the road at nightfall, in the hour of the Viet Cong.

  THE CROWD AT THE BRIDGE DISPERSED. THE last villagers emerging from the strike went up the road, while the soldiers tended to their own wounded and the journalists raced to file their stories. One stopped to try to console Shimkin, who was on his knees, weeping. “Leave me alone,” he insisted. (One month later, stringing for Newsweek, Shimkin would be killed by a grenade when he and a colleague mistakenly wandered over Communist lines while covering battles from the offensive still going on in the central highlands.)