The Girl in the Picture

by Denise Chong

  The official at the foreign ministry equivocated. “If this were to go ahead,” he told the two journalists, “it would put the government of South Vietnam in a bad light.”

  Wain was incredulous. “The entire world has just seen the South Vietnamese air force bombing the hell out of their own people, and this would make it worse for you?!”

  He waited, and no answer came. “So, your final word is no?” He whipped out a Bowie knife, a souvenir of Vietnamese weaponry. “Here! Why don’t you do her a kindness, go round to your hospital and cut her throat now!”

  After a long silence, the official conceded, saying quietly, “Okay.” A couple of days later, the reporters would be at the Barsky, requesting permission to film the girl there.

  ON THE MORNING OF JUNE 11, AT THE BIEN Hoa air base, fifteen miles north of Saigon, Captain John Plummer stopped on his way into the mess hall to pick up that day’s Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper for American servicemen abroad. He wanted to check on baseball scores back home.

  Three months earlier, the army had cut short Plummer’s home leave in Alabama. The Easter Offensive was breaking, and Plummer, on his second one-year tour of duty, was needed in Bien Hoa. His job there was to coordinate air support under joint American and South Vietnamese military command, for the military region that extended from the bottom of the Mekong Delta to provinces on the western and northern flank of Saigon and to the Cambodian border. Plummer’s main task was to set up an order for the next twenty-four-hour period of B-52 strikes reserved for his area. Working from relayed information, he would determine the rough target area of ten to twelve strikes, amounting to half the daily total of the counter offensive, by locating one-mile by one-half mile “destroy boxes” on a map. Up to five hours before the scheduled strike, he would be instructed to realign the strikes from the rough target area onto priority targets. He also coordinated on a daily basis an average of 130 American air force strikes and 60 South Vietnamese air force strikes. While most were pre-planned, a few came in as “Tac-E” calls. These were calls from ground troops asking for tactical emergency air support, or, in other words, low-level air strikes. Typically, the troops had either come into sudden direct contact with the enemy or were at risk of being surrounded or overwhelmed. Planes suitable for such strikes were on standby at Bien Hoa.

  Since he’d come back, Plummer had worked eighteen- to twenty-hour days. Often, with no time to return to his barracks, six miles away, he’d had to sleep in the bunker at the air base. However, he preferred to get back to his barracks. There he could knock back bourbon, which was cheap. He could drink a lot without getting drunk, and still be able to make the excuse that he’d been drinking and ought to wait longer between shifts. Each shift ended with Plummer collapsing into his bunk and mentally signing off: “Another day of killing Cong.”

  Plummer now sat down with his meal tray and opened the newspaper. “A Misplaced Bomb . . . And a Breath of Hell” and “Why Trang Bang? It Was in the Way!” were the headlines over a story by the AP’s Peter Arnett. Underneath were three pictures: a bomb exploding across a road; a girl, running naked, in terror; and children, the girl among them, getting help from soldiers.

  Plummer choked on his coffee. He swore aloud: “That lyin’ son of a bitch! He told me a cotton-pickin’ lie!”

  The “Tac-E” Plummer had handled from Trang Bang had been a routine call. He clearly remembered the voice of the adviser as it had come over the radio: “We’re at a standstill against an enemy force in Trang Bang.”

  “What is the nature of your target?”

  According to the adviser, the enemy was dug into a trench line at the edge of town. Plummer then acted as a go-between for the adviser and the air force command and coordinated the dispatch of aircraft from Bien Hoa. Within minutes, South Vietnamese air force planes loaded with high-explosive bombs and napalm were on their way to Trang Bang.

  The rest of the call was just as routine, as Plummer remembered it. “What’s your friendly situation?” he’d asked.

  He knew it could be confusing. On his first tour of duty as mission commander, his unit returned what they thought to be enemy fire in the aftermath of an air strike called in by the American adviser with a South Vietnamese unit, only to hear the adviser scream on the radio: “Stop! You’re shooting us!” Plummer’s unit wounded twenty of the adviser’s men.

  The adviser replied that the “friendlies” had been evacuated. Plummer asked for confirmation; that was his practice whenever the person on the ground had not asked him to allocate an observation plane or forward aircraft to mark the enemy’s position and, therefore, the target. “Not a problem,” confirmed the adviser.

  Plummer recalled that the adviser came back on the radio several minutes later to say thank you. “The bombs were right on target—appreciate that a whole lot. We’ll be moving in now.”

  Another soldier joined Plummer at his table in the mess hall. Plummer showed him the newspaper. “I put in that strike,” he said, pointing to the headlines and the pictures.

  “Bummer, man,” the soldier said, shaking his head. “Bummer.”

  TUNG AND NU BRACED THEMSELVES FOR what they would find behind the door of the outbuilding. Their daughter lay on a cot in the fetal position. A gray-brown gob matted her burnt hair, her face was badly swollen, and the bandages on her wounds were fetid with infection and stuck with charred and dead skin. On the next cot was a boy, his burn wounds alive with maggots.

  Nu went to their daughter, took her in her lap and rocked her, silently weeping a mother’s tears.

  After what seemed like a long time, the woman sitting on the end of the next cot spoke. “Who is Danh?”

  Nu looked surprised. “Oh, he died one hour after he was wounded.”

  Through a haze, Phuc formed a single thought when she heard of her cousin’s fate: “. . . to die is better.”

  Both Tung and Nu, upon hearing the feeble noise that came from their daughter, realized that she was conscious, that she had recognized her mother’s voice.

  They immediately went in search of the only doctor they’d come across in their earlier search of the hospital. They clung to his jacket—the last act of desperate parents. A glint of recognition passed between the two men, and later they would recall being pre-university students together in Saigon.

  Tung pleaded: “Please, our daughter has been left to die.” Twenty minutes later, there was an ambulance at the door.

  PUBLIC BUILDINGS IN SAIGON WERE DESIGNED to cope with the city’s oppressive heat: corridors and stairwells are exposed to the outside; windows are large, with louvered shutters. Among the buildings of the Cho Ray was a modest, two-story building. Built with American materials to American specifications, it was sealed to accommodate central air conditioning, and windowless on its ground floor to guard against terrorists’ grenades.

  A picture of an eternal flame identified “Children’s Medical Relief International,” the New York-based foundation to help child victims of war in Vietnam. The foundation was the creation of Dr. Arthur Barsky, a pioneering American plastic surgeon, and a young lawyer named Thomas Miller. In 1968, it opened the 54-bed National Center for Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery in Saigon, better known as the Barsky unit, and across town a 120-bed Reception Convalescent Center, where patients went before and after surgery. Patients paid nothing; operating funds came from the American and South Vietnamese governments.

  Dr. Barsky had first come to public prominence in 1958 when he brought to a New York hospital for surgery seventy-five disfigured victims of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. That project convinced him that it was better to bring services to the victims, and to recruit top-notch doctors and nurses from abroad to do tours of duty. South Vietnam had few modern medical facilities and a serious shortage of public doctors and nurses, made worse by low fixed government salaries and wartime inflation. (Medical staff would spend only as much time at the hospital as was necessary to collect their pay, leaving them more time free to
earn quick money in other ways, such as buying and selling untaxed tobacco.) In 1972, Vietnam had one government-paid doctor per forty thousand people; by comparison, the figure for the United States was one per six hundred. The country had almost no specialists. In 1972, there was one fully trained Vietnamese anesthesiologist for the civilian population in the south. Certainly only the wealthy could afford plastic surgery, which they paid for privately, often out of the country.

  The Barsky’s admissions policy was to select candidates for one-time plastic surgery; follow-up surgery was beyond its resources. It maintained a waiting list of 370. One day a week, doctors from the Barsky conducted ten rotating clinics—one in Saigon, nine in provinces where the impact of war was harshest. From the start, it was difficult to draw the line. Who was more legitimately a victim of war: The child who took a high-velocity missile in the face or the one who stepped on a homemade booby trap? The child with a congenital deformity from malnutrition in a country bombed and sprayed with defoliants or the child burned in an explosion of a kerosene cooker fueled by pilfered American jet fuel? Without surgery, each would have his lifetime cut short.

  On the afternoon of June 11, the head nurse on duty was a pretty woman named Lien Huong. When the ambulance arrived carrying a seriously burned girl accompanied by her parents, she called for the hospital administrator, Joyce Horn, an American. Her first inclination was to send the ambulance to another Saigon hospital. It was only the second time in the Barsky’s history that one had shown up unannounced. The first time, the Barsky had sent the ambulance away but, in a show of compassion, had sent a nurse over daily to help in the child’s care. Horn saw that this victim was a “fresh burn”—a burn less than seventy-two hours old. Odds were such a burn victim would die anyway, and were the Barsky to admit her, Horn knew that, because of the intensive nursing care necessary, the Barsky would be able to accept fewer other patients, its resources stretched to the utmost.

  Nurse Huong became hysterical at the prospect of turning the girl away. “Don’t send her away!” she pleaded to Horn. “If we do that, the girl will die!” There wasn’t a hospital in the entire country, the Barsky included, that had a sterile, equipped burn unit to handle such casualties. Hospitals in Vietnam treated burn victims who had already survived their fresh burns.

  The nurse ran to find the doctor on duty. That afternoon, it was Dr. My, one of five Vietnamese doctors to work at the Barsky. Perhaps especially because she was in a profession dominated by men, Dr. My took pride in quietly adhering to rules and procedures and avoiding anything that would “make noise,” the Vietnamese term for making trouble.

  Dr. My went to investigate. The girl on the makeshift stretcher was crying. “She’s suffering!” Dr. My gasped. Given the pain and shock of her burn, she could barely believe the girl was conscious. “We will try to help your daughter,” she told the distraught parents.

  God love Dr. My for doing this, the hospital administrator said to herself as she had the girl taken into one of the unit’s two operating theaters, the only sterile rooms in the building.

  AS AMERICA’S WAR EFFORT IN VIETNAM waned, the horrors of the war receded from the public’s mind. Government funding for social and health projects in Vietnam dried up. In late 1971, the government had begun a two-year phase-out of all such funding. In raising money to keep the Barsky going, the foundation had to stress its apolitical philosophy. And the unit worked hard to emphasize its medical mission, to keep the children above politics and politics out of its daily affairs. Its administrator stood firm against allowing Central Intelligence Agency operatives to interrogate children there. As one doctor said a decade later, “We knew damned well we were taking care of kids of the Viet Cong, but it never occurred to anyone to say, ‘You can’t come here because you’re from the other side.’”

  The Barsky’s parent foundation in New York eventually bowed to the necessity of putting a human face on suffering to help sell its cause. In early 1972, it authorized a television crew to shoot a documentary at the Barsky. The Gooks, by Pierre Gaisseau, co-produced by the foundation and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, graphically portrayed several victims: a seven-year-old blinded by rocket fragments; orphan brothers aged three and four, one with gangrene of the face, the other with an empty eye socket and one cheek gone so that the tongue and back of the throat were visible; a seven-month-old baby’s burned hands blobs of scar tissue; an eight-year-old paralyzed by a machine-gun bullet.

  On June 15, 1972, four days after Kim Phuc was admitted to the Barsky, the foundation publicly endorsed a statement by a Democratic senator, William Proxmire, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations. The senator announced his support for an appropriation of $550,000 to build a second Barsky hospital in Vietnam, in addition to the $160,000 already budgeted that year for operating funds for the existing one. The senator’s statement read, in part:

  Last week on the front of nearly every newspaper I saw there was one of the most heartbreaking photographs to come out of Vietnam. A little girl who had ripped off her clothing that had been set afire by napalm ran in pain and terror along with other children. Her arms were swung out to relieve the pain of her burned flesh. The little girl in the picture was sent to the Center for Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery. Her name, it was reported, is Phan Thi Kim Phuc. She is 9 years old. Her brother burned by the same bombing, died [sic]. Doctors at the Center predict that Kim Phuc will recover from her burns . . .

  . . . Little Kim was not burned and her brother was not killed by American planes. South Vietnamese bomber pilots misplaced the napalm drops in trying to rout out North Vietnamese troops entrenched around her hometown of Trang Danh [sic] near Saigon. . . . So how much is $715,000? It’s about 28 loads of 500-pound bombs for a B-52. It’s less than one tenth the original cost of a B-52 . . .

  . . . Unfortunately, there are more than just one Kim Phuc. . . . This is one Senator who feels that the costs of a fraction of one bomber, a few bombs is little enough for American taxpayers to bear to help these innocent children. An addition of $715,000 will be more than offset by the cuts to be made in military assistance.”

  The appropriation bill went nowhere.

  In the opinion of Western doctors who had worked in war-torn South Vietnam when the Barsky unit first opened, the child victims of war there in need of reconstructive surgery numbered at least 100,000. In the six years that the Barsky unit operated, until it closed upon the surrender of the south in 1975, it would treat an average of 1,200 children annually, the average age of whom was eight. One would become famous.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  NAPALM, FIRST USED IN FLAME-THROWERS during the Second World War, is a highly lethal weapon when dropped from an airplane. The bomb explodes and fragments, and the burning jellied napalm (the name comes from its combination of naphthenic and palmitic acids) sticks to whatever it lands on. Its burns at 800 to 1,200 degrees Celsius (by comparison, water boils at 100 degrees Celsius) and for a long time. A big enough mass of burning napalm will consume the full thickness of skin; gone instantly are hair follicles, sweat glands and sensory nerve endings. In such a third-degree burn, the burned area appears red, mushy and oozing. If the napalm continues to burn downwards, feeding on fat, muscle and other deep tissue, the injury has the severity of a fourth- or fifth-degree charring.

  Napalm wounds were to the Vietnam war what bayonet wounds had been to the First World War. Doctors did not expect to be called upon to treat the victims of a napalm burn, as they were more likely to die than need medical aid. The chances of surviving a burn from any cause depend on how much of the body surface is burned; more than 10 to 15 percent constitutes a major burn and wreaks havoc with all organs and body functions. Those victims taking a direct hit of a mass of napalm will suffer burns to at least 25 percent of their bodies. One-third of them will die within a half hour of their burns or of asphyxiation. Many have spread the napalm themselves in trying to remove it from their skin or clothes, or in strippin
g off burned clothes.

  Phuc sustained burns to the severity of third degree or worse to 30 to 35 percent of her body surface. Those burned areas included almost her entire back, reaching around on her left side to her chest, the back of her neck and into her hairline, and her entire left arm. Lesser burns resulted from burning napalm that splashed from her clothes onto her right arm, buttocks and stomach. The inside of her right hand was also burned from where it touched napalm on her other arm, and she had singeing to her left cheek and both ears. Life or death for such major burn victims depends on making it within twenty-four hours, seventy-two at the most, to not just any hospital but one with the facilities and staff to stabilize the fresh burn victim.

  IN THE OPERATING THEATER AT THE BARSKY, Dr. My’s first life-saving imperative was to give Phuc some pain relief. Shock is the greatest danger to a burn victim, and pain alone can cause it. Even the smallest napalm burn is intensely painful. Equally urgent was to find a vein to transfuse blood and other fluids, which has to be done continuously for at least a week. The loss of bodily fluids, not only blood and plasma but body proteins (which leak out where there is no skin to contain them), can also produce shock and, as well, organ failure.

  The doctor used Nu’s blood, finding it a match. Her parents’ murmurs of thanks to Caodai when the blood began to flow into her was one of Phuc’s last memories before losing consciousness. Tung stayed behind for another night, and only Nu went on her way. Before she left, a nurse insisted that she take some nourishment to compensate for having donated blood. She was offered a meal—a steak if she wanted it. Finally, but reluctantly, she accepted a glass of milk, though it too was food she was unaccustomed to. Later that evening, she alighted from the bus in front of the Caodai temple in Trang Bang, took a few steps down the footpath and fainted from exhaustion.