The Girl in the Picture

by Denise Chong

  Off the road in a field, ITN’s Christopher Wain was doing a stand-up. Without time himself to comprehend the full tragedy of that afternoon, he closed his piece with: “. . . One of the biggest-selling souvenirs from Saigon is the engraved Zippo lighter. As one of the engravings says, ‘Sorry about that!’”

  Among the last correspondents to leave for Saigon was Fox Butterfield. Still reeling at the series of military mistakes he had seen the South Vietnamese air force make in what was an otherwise inconsequential firefight, he wanted to find out how many of their own soldiers they had killed. Once the fires had burned away so that he could get by the bombed-out area, he made his way forward.

  A soldier, seeing the foreigner, screamed out “South Vietnamese air force Number 10!” borrowing GI numbered slang, in which, on a scale of one to ten, ten indicates the worst. The temple and the nearby masonry building, along with two armored personnel carriers parked in the field beside it, were covered in the solidifying brownish syrup and grayish-white threads of napalm. Soldiers rushed to tear burned pants and shirts and yank boots off half a dozen or more fallen colleagues. Among the soldiers were civilians, including parents looking for their children. The first army jeeps appeared on the scene to load the military’s dead and wounded. The army refused to take civilian casualties. A policeman came by on a jeep, but he too ignored villagers’ pleas to take their wounded to hospital. He couldn’t, he said, without orders from his superior.

  THE DRIVE BACK TO SAIGON ALONG ROUTE 1 with the two burn victims was nerve-racking. Not even the rush of air through open windows could dissipate the gut-wrenching stench of burned flesh. The driver had to swerve around refugees, making it a bumpy ride. With each scream from the wounded girl, Nick urged the driver to make haste, then turned around to try to reassure her: “We’ll be at the hospital very soon.”

  Some forty-five minutes later, the van pulled up to Bac Ha Hospital in Cu Chi. “Please, help them,” said Nick to the surprised nurse as he and the driver left behind the two victims. “Sorry, we cannot stay, we have to leave.”

  Night was already falling. Windows glowed with lamplight. Fortunately, once past Cu Chi, the refugee traffic disappeared and the van made good time to Saigon. Nick’s thoughts turned to his rolls of film. He appealed to Buddha: Please, let my pictures be in focus, don’t let the light metering be over or under. Since leaving Trang Bang, he had not stopped perspiring. In his head, he heard napalm, napalm. His dilated pupils saw everything within a halo of red. To tame his anxiety, he told himself: If not, I will say to myself, bad luck.

  AN OLDER JAPANESE MAN, A CIGARETTE hanging from his mouth, stood under a street lamp in Saigon. It was the AP’s darkroom technician, known as Jackson. He saw the AP van pulling up to the curb and threw his butt to the ground.

  “Nicky, what do you have today?”

  “My film is very important today.”

  They went upstairs and the technician disappeared into the darkroom. Nick paced to steady his nerves.

  Ten minutes later, Jackson came out with several negative strips to put in the dryer. A couple of minutes later, he took them to the light table.

  Nick joined him there. He breathed easier. “I have very good pictures of napalm today.”

  “Where?”

  The technician moved a magnifying glass over the strips.

  “Oh my god . . . ” He looked up in horror. “Nicky, what happened?”

  THE DEADLINE THE TECHNICIANS WORKED to was the hour booked each evening with Radio Saigon, when the bureau would relay its pictures by radio wave to the AP bureau in Tokyo. From Tokyo, they were sent by satellite to New York. Pictures sent from Saigon in the early evening made the next day’s papers in America. The day’s work was not done until Tokyo sent confirmation that the pictures had been received. On a clear night without interference, a single picture could be transmitted in as little as eleven or twelve minutes. Often, it took longer, or had to be resent.

  Because things didn’t get busy until late, everyone would take a late, long lunch. Most went home over the lunch hour, sometimes for a siesta. By the time Nick came back from Trang Bang, only Jackson was in. That day, Faas had gone to lunch with reporter Peter Arnett, another veteran Vietnam correspondent and Pulitzer prize-winner for his work there, whom the AP’s head office had also sent in to bolster coverage of the Easter Offensive. The two were at their old haunt, the restaurant at the Hotel Royale, which served Corsican fare. In the early days of the war, the two would meet there with sensitive sources in the American military at a table concealed behind Chinese screens.

  Nominally, the picture editor on duty that day was Carl Robinson. However, he conceded authority to Faas. Head office had been less than happy with the recent output of the Saigon bureau, which was why Faas had been sent in. Some of the unspoken blame had to fall on Robinson and his inexperience. Besides, Robinson, a Saigon-hire, owed his job to Faas. The son of a Methodist minister, Robinson had come to Vietnam at twenty to be a community development officer for the American aid agency USAID. Full of youthful enthusiasm when he started, five years later, discouraged by the debacle of the Tet Offensive, he quit. He met Faas in a bar in Saigon and confided his disillusionment with American policy towards Vietnam. He had no desire to return to live in the United States, and he was engaged to a Vietnamese woman whose family was in Saigon. Faas hired him on the spot.

  Robinson arrived back from lunch to find Jackson had started editing the day’s pictures. To save time, editing was done from negatives rather than contact sheets. The editor identified his initial choices by hole-punching those frames at the edges. That way, even in the darkroom the technician could feel which frames were to be developed. These would then be developed into 5 x 7 prints, from which the final selection would be done.

  Either Robinson or Jackson pointed out to the other the notable frame of the girl, running naked into the camera’s eye. Jackson remarked that certainly no newspaper in Japan would run it. The two didn’t have to discuss whether or not it was a usable picture; the AP’s policy was clear: no frontal nudity.

  Together they examined the prints. Robinson was impressed by the sequence of shots: from the plane that delivered the napalm to the explosion and the villagers emerging in the aftermath. He and Jackson agreed on two or three that should go out.

  Faas, back from lunch, started the re-edit—a routine AP procedure. Robinson and Jackson stood beside him at the light table. One of them pointed to the frame on one of the negatives strips of the naked girl. Because it had not been punched, there was no print. “There’s this one,” one of them said, “but we can’t use it.”

  Faas examined the frame. “Damn!” he exclaimed. He himself printed the negative. Carefully, he maneuvered a piece of paper between the enlarger and the photographic paper, in order to even out the high contrasts created by the glaring subtropical light.

  The mood in the office, transformed by the unspoken tension of going against the rules, was no longer routine. Once the print was done, the job of composing the caption was Robinson’s. He began typing: “South Vietnamese forces follow terrified children fleeing down Route 1, near Trang Bang, South Vietnam, June 8, after a misplaced napalm strike. Girl at center had ripped off her burning clothes. She suffered back burns. The firebomb was dropped by a South Vietnamese Skyraider plane.” Done, he pulled the glue-backed paper out of the typewriter, trimmed it, licked the back and affixed it to the bottom of the print.

  Someone in the office remarked that the shadows on the girl’s body gave the appearance of pubic hair where there was none. Faas called over a technician, telling him to bring his paintbox of white and grays. The technician set to work, and when he was done, there were compliments on his artistry and guffaws all around. A messenger left with the picture for Saigon Radio.

  As happened every early evening, correspondents from other news organizations dropped into the AP office. Fox Butterfield came in to see what pictures the AP had transmitted that would go with his story, focusing on the m
ilitary effect of the mistake on the South Vietnamese soldiers’ zeal to fight. Only the day before, South Vietnamese planes had mistakenly bombed their own paratroopers in My Chanh, north of Hue, killing nine and wounding twenty-one. Butterfield was pleased that the AP had sent out a picture of the napalm exploding on the highway. He saw that it had also sent out one of the girl, but saw no need to revise his story to include mention of her.

  Life photographer David Burnett also came by. He had an arrangement with the AP to “soup” his film, meaning that the technician there would develop it into strips of negatives that he himself could then edit from. Burnett saw the shot of the girl. “Sure beats the shit out of anything I got,” he said. Burnett had been reloading his camera when the last group of children had run out. He would always remember Faas’s compliment to Nick in response: “You did good work today, Ut.”

  That evening Faas waited around. He had been prepared to “raise hell” if the desk in New York killed the picture. He didn’t have to.

  THE NIGHT OF JUNE 8 FELL MOURNFULLY IN Trang Bang. The South Vietnamese command maintained its soldiers in their positions and told villagers to take to a nearby field.

  When the last fires from the napalm had died away, Tung and Nu had been able to account for all their children but Phuc. Dao, the neighbor in white, told them what had happened, that the journalists were going to drop her and Auntie Anh at the hospital in Cu Chi, on their way to Saigon.

  In the muddy field, the living and the dead of the family awaited the morning’s light. Danh’s body was rolled in a bamboo mat, for burial in the morning. He had died within an hour of the attack. Auntie Anh’s baby cried fitfully; he would die of his injuries six weeks later.

  No one else suffered burns except for Tam, and his were superficial. Napalm had stuck on his clothes and he was only indirectly burned. His wounds would heal within a month.

  The deaths of Auntie Anh’s two children were the only known civilian deaths in the napalm attack. Years later, press reports would repeatedly make the mistake of stating that Phuc had lost two brothers in that strike.

  As the night wore on, Nu became convinced that Phuc’s body lay in a morgue somewhere. Tung repeated the peasants’ saying: “The bullet can avoid you, but you cannot avoid the bullet.” However, he tried to console his weeping wife by citing fate’s benevolence: “If it had been any other bomb than a firebomb,” he said, “we would all be dead now.” The couple waited for the next day to come, when they could go look for Phuc, and either visit her in hospital or, as Nu believed, bring her body home for burial.

  ON JUNE 9, THE AP’S PHOTOGRAPH OF THE girl fleeing a napalm strike in South Vietnam was picked up by editors of newspapers around the world and printed on their front pages. The photograph, showing the girl running directly into the camera, would be the sole image from that angle. NBC and ITN footage that aired on their television news broadcasts showed her running past from a side angle only. NBC’s cameraman and correspondent both believed that they had that frontal shot, but that the editor in Hong Kong—where the raw film was sent to be edited into a news story before being shipped to New York—had rejected those frames because of their frontal nudity. As was the practice in those days, the unused rushes were discarded rather than archived.

  Several in the Saigon press corps congratulated Nick on his picture and predicted fame. They would prove right: the picture would win every major international photographic prize for that year, including the Pulitzer. Nick replied modestly to his colleagues’ predictions: “I care only about doing my job and supporting my mother.”

  THE MORNING OF JUNE 9 UNFOLDED IN TRANG Bang with an air of resignation. Soldiers opened a detour around the burned-out highway. They began clearing the marketplace of debris from buildings that had been damaged by mortar fire. The roof of the nearby high school had been destroyed. Of Trang Bang’s homes, as many as one in three was badly damaged, mostly near the temple.

  Tung and Nu made their way past the scarred temple, with its singed and pockmarked walls draped in solidified napalm. The footpath was still wet in places with water that had spilled from severed plants and was littered with tailings of mortars. The bombing had exposed a network of tunnels dug by the Viet Cong.

  Virtually every house had sustained some damage. Some, like Grandfather Kiem’s and Auntie Anh’s, were neither extensively damaged nor beyond repair. Further down the path, where there had once stood a mud-and-thatch house immediately in front of Tung and Nu’s, there was now only a large crater. For years after, every rainy season, that crater would fill with water deep enough to drown in.

  Tung and Nu saw that their own house, though badly damaged, still stood. The closer they came, the stronger was the stench of death that emanated from the landscape of broken masonry and tiles, severed trees and blasted earth. Nu had to hold her shawl over her nose. They went no farther than the gate. The only sound was the buzzing of flies. Nu noticed the rotting carcasses of her two swans in front of the veranda and thought how she would miss their loud shrieks, and the way they would nip at approaching strangers.

  She and Tung set out on their mission to find Phuc. They joined streams of foot-weary refugees on the highway. When they reached Cu Chi, several hours later, they got nowhere at the hospital there. The staff insisted that they had not admitted either a child or a woman burned by napalm answering to the descriptions of their daughter and Auntie Anh, and would not have because their hospital had neither the facilities nor the staff to handle such burn victims. They advised the parents to try Saigon’s largest hospital, the Cho Ray.

  By then, day had surrendered to night and to the Viet Cong. Tung and Nu spent the night on a stranger’s veranda in Cu Chi.

  ON THE AFTERNOON OF JUNE 9, A MOTHER arrived at a small outbuilding of Saigon’s First Children’s Hospital for her daily vigil at her son’s deathbed. Badly burned from firecrackers he’d found left over from Tet celebrations, he lay unconscious. The mother saw that he had company: a girl, also badly burned.

  The small room was stifling, though the louvered shutters on the windows were open. The woman moved from one cot to the other, fanning each child in turn, shooing the flies from their faces.

  The girl drifted in and out of consciousness.

  “Danh!” she would cry out. “Danh, wait for me! I’ll go with you!”

  That evening, the woman took an offering of fruit to her pagoda and prayed to Buddha that the family of the girl would come to see their dying child on her way.

  ON JUNE 10, TUNG AND NU CONTINUED ON foot to Saigon. At the Cho Ray Hospital they drew another blank and were told to try Saigon’s First Children’s Hospital. By then, it was dark. The couple spent a second night outdoors, this time on a stone bench. On June 11 they walked across town to their third hospital in as many days, and were met with the same denials that their daughter had been admitted. It was rare that newly burned victims of war turned up in Saigon; usually they died before even reaching the hospital nearest them.

  Before they could admit defeat and begin a search of the city’s morgues, Tung and Nu decided they had to conduct a search of this last hospital themselves. The eight-story building had several wings. Floor by floor, corridor by corridor and room by room, they sorted patients from crowds of relatives bathing them, changing dressings, feeding them. In desperation they lifted cast-aside bedding and looked under piles of shoes outside each room, as if their daughter, untended, might have been pushed aside there. After several hours, they found themselves back on the ground floor.

  They sat, exhausted and spent.

  A cleaner came by. He set down his pail of water and began crisscrossing the floor with his mop, working his way from one side of the large reception area to the other. When he was done, he began mopping a corridor.

  Tung approached the cleaner. “Excuse me, did you see a young girl brought here who was burned very badly? It would have been three days ago . . . Maybe she did not survive?”

  The cleaner stood his mop in his pail and bec
koned Tung and Nu to follow him to an outer corridor. Outside, he pointed to a small outbuilding with large shuttered windows and clapboard walls, peeling and bleached by the sun. “That room,” he said, “is for children who will die.”

  TWO DAYS AFTER THE ATTACK, THE AP’S PETER Arnett, together with Nick Ut, went to Trang Bang to do a follow-up story. The story he would file would speculate on the military implications of the clash with the Communists there.

  It was the picture editor, Carl Robinson, who asked for the assignment to track the girl down. He longed to get out of the picture side and write stories that he saw as being overlooked in the preoccupation with the war’s military equation. His item on the wire on June 10 identified the girl as nine-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc, recovering at Saigon’s First Children’s Hospital.

  That same day, two foreign reporters joined forces to track her down: Christopher Wain from ITN and Michael Blakey, a television reporter from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Both were on temporary assignment in Vietnam to cover the Easter Offensive.

  With the help of the British embassy, they traced her the next day to First Children’s Hospital and to the outbuilding there. Like the boy in the cot next to hers in the small room, she looked to be either unconscious or heavily sedated. A woman sat fanning her.

  The reporters went straightaway to find a nurse. They demanded to know: “What’s going to happen to that girl in there?”

  “Oh, she die, maybe tomorrow, maybe next day.”

  Several telephone calls later, the two learned of a privately run American clinic that was located on the grounds of the Cho Ray Hospital, called the Barsky unit. They rang up the American embassy. An official there said the embassy had no objection to the girl being transferred, provided that the South Vietnamese foreign ministry agreed.