The Girl in the Picture

by Denise Chong

  THE NEXT DAY, TUNG RETURNED TO TRANG Bang to help Nu with the grim task of cleaning up their house and land. They found three Viet Cong dead: one in a tunnel opening in the garden; two in the house, one of them in his machine-gun nest, the leader having chained him at the ankle there to ensure that he fought to his death. Tung and Nu waited until night to drag the bodies, one at a time, to a vacant corner of Grandfather Kiem’s land and bury them there. While the departing Viet Cong had not taken these fallen comrades, they had tried to carry away Nu’s treadle sewing machine, which would have been invaluable in the deprivation of the jungle. It must have proved too heavy; Nu found it nearby, at the edge of the property.

  The job of removing the putrid and rotting animal carcasses was one that could be done by daylight. It took three men, Tung and two others he hired, to load each pig carcass into a burlap sack that normally held one hundred kilograms of rice, and then drag it away to be buried. Not all the pigs could be accounted for; some, like many of the chickens and ducks, had escaped from the garden during the fighting. Townspeople who chanced upon them captured them and slaughtered them for meat. Nu had found a few pigs alive, badly dehydrated and near death. After a last salute to her “war veterans,” she put them out of their misery. So haunted was she by how the animals had suffered that she vowed never again to raise pigs for slaughter. The pens would sit empty and unrepaired for as long as she and Tung owned the house and land.

  Clearing the garden of mortar tailings, bomb fragments and shrapnel proved tedious and dangerous. Every fruit tree was damaged in some way: singed, splintered, pitted with shrapnel or severed at the base. Tung and Nu feared unseen risks, especially buried and unexploded bombs and grenades. Nu was unable to find anyone in town willing to take on the job. She finally asked someone whom the town regarded as a “half-wit.” He spent several days at it without incident. Concerned about chemical contamination of the soil, Tung and Nu condemned the vegetable garden and orchard to wasteland.The garden would self-seed; Nu later harvested the tops of greens, but dared not touch root vegetables. Many of the fruit trees proved resilient; within a year shoots sprouted from severed trunks. Some would produce flowers and—long after the family moved from the house—bear fruit as they once had.

  Nu and Tung scrubbed the walls and floors of the house of spattered human blood and guts. They cleared the ham, still damp and musty with blood, of old bandages and dressings. They saved canned goods from America that the Viet Cong had left, originally probably pilfered or privately traded to the Communists by corrupt South Vietnamese. They carted out a bed and some armoires damaged beyond repair. The family told neighbors to help themselves to broken furniture as fuel for their hearths. Months later, Great Uncle was still picking up slivers of shrapnel in the house, and tending to the cuts they inflicted on the children.

  The outside of the house was a sorry sight, with gaping holes in the roof and empty doorways. Few doors had survived their use as tunnel coverings. Machine-gun fire had pierced walls. In the following weeks, officials from the provincial office of Hau Nghia came to Trang Bang to assess war damage to property and pay compensation. Under this program, begun by the Americans and ceasing with their departure, homeowners could receive maximum damages equivalent to about forty dollars American. Tung received ninety sheets of sheet metal, each measuring three feet by six feet, and three weeks’ supply of rice for his household—all in all, a fraction of what he would spend repairing the house and of losses suffered.

  AT THE END OF A WEEK’S CLEANUP, TUNG and Nu returned to see Phuc. However, Nu found she could hardly bear to stand at the door of her daughter’s room for the stench of dead and rotted flesh.

  The parents found a foreigner anxiously awaiting them. From what they understood, he represented a humanitarian aid agency that wanted to evacuate their daughter from South Vietnam to West Germany for treatment there. Neither Tung nor Nu realized that hospital care at the Barsky was possibly the best available in Vietnam, or that the nurses would work to save their daughter’s life. (Had this been a regular hospital, a patient’s relatives would have provided the nursing and stayed on hand to pay for medicines and, if necessary, bribes. They knew only that so far they had been asked to pay nothing, not even for the ambulance.)

  Tung and Nu had both been fixated on the idea that their daughter was going to die. Since the napalm attack, their only appeals had been to the benevolence of Caodai. Tung had turned to the official prayer book for “Crisis Rites” covering accidents, sickness and death. Nu’s reaction to the foreigner’s offer was that if they wanted their daughter to live, they should take it up. She left immediately for Trang Bang to retrieve the necessary documents, but she returned to find Tung adamantly opposed. “I cannot visit Phuc’s tomb if it is so far away,” he said.

  Tung stayed behind in Saigon in a deathwatch at his daughter’s side. His bed was a bench on the hospital grounds, which he staked by hanging a washcloth and clothes on a nearby tree. Nu visited only on those Saturdays when Loan could relieve her at the noodle shop. More often than not, she sent another member of the family, or she found someone else in the town already going to Saigon to bring Tung a basket of cooked food and a packet of money for the week.

  Phuc remained in critical condition for thirty to forty days. More than 80 percent of severely burned patients succumb to infection or other complications before that. For weeks, the main concerns were to keep up her strength as her body battled progressive malnutrition (brought on by the leakage of body proteins) and to rid her body of the toxic poisons of infection from charred tissue circulating in her body. Infection is an ever-present threat, and where it cannot be checked, amputation is the only option.

  The daily cleansing of a burn patient inflicts pain that defies description. One of the Barsky’s surgeons, American Dr. Mark Gorney, described the physical pain of the daily procedure as the most intense known to human beings. In his words, it inflicts a “wound to the soul” and is akin to being “flayed alive.”

  Tung forced himself to watch, finding each time harder than the last. At eight o’clock each morning, the doctor on rounds would examine Phuc. Then the nurses would come for her, to take her to a special burn-case bathtub. The tub—normally used at the Barsky to soften and slough off skin grafts that did not take and had to be redone—was filled with a surgical soap solution and warm water. The nurses undid Phuc’s old dressings, then took a hand-held showerhead to chip away at dead and infected skin and tissue, using scissors if necessary, all the while trying to ignore the inhuman screams escaping from Phuc. Removing dead tissue is necessary to ward off infection and to allow new tissue to regenerate. Finally, they applied a fresh topical antibiotic preparation and new dressings.

  When Loan visited, she fainted at her sister’s screams. Only the first time Phuc was immersed in the burn-case bathtub, when the three-day-old dressings had to be removed, was anesthetic used. Its repeated use, day after day, is not possible. Other painkillers, such as Demerol, eventually lose their effectiveness; the pain and terror have to be endured. A nurse gave Tung a stern warning: “We haven’t got nurses enough to care for visitors, too!”

  Years later, when the Vietnamese nurses would remember Phuc, they would call up the image of her father, parked in a chair by her bedside. Most patients at the Barsky were from the provinces, their families far away. Often one or both parents had died or been killed by war, and they were cared for by older siblings. In their entire stay at the Barsky, many patients did not have a single visitor. However, day in and day out, Tung sat beside Phuc’s bed, focused on listening to her breathing. If it sounded faint, he stood up to check to see if she was still alive. The occasional moan from her would send him into a panic, worried that he had drifted off. He stayed after normal visiting hours, waiting until the nurses were about to turn off the lights in the ward. If they were hovering, Tung left. None of the nurses was aware that he retreated only to a bench outside in the night air. But if the nurses were occupied elsewhere, he hid himself
under Phuc’s bed. He explained to Nu: “If she dies in the night, I’ll be there to take her home to be buried.”

  One day, in the third month of Tung’s bedside vigil, he was standing there looking at his daughter when he saw what he was certain was a deliberate effort on her part to open her eyes.

  He leaned forward. “Phuc,” he whispered, “do you know your father?”

  There was no reply. He asked again.

  “Know.”

  It was just one word, but the next morning, Tung took a bus to Trang Bang. He went directly to the noodle shop: “Phuc has come back to herself!” he told Nu. She wept to hear that their daughter’s spirit had chosen to stay with her body. Yet, Nu felt torn. After believing for weeks that her daughter was going to die, she wondered what kind of life she would have. Nu voiced aloud her prayer to Caodai: “If Phuc is going to be ugly and deformed, better that she dies than lives. If she lives but is not normal, then let God take her.”

  It would be a couple of days before Phuc could manage more than one word—at first little more than a feeble “Drink,” to which Tung would respond by spooning water into her mouth. Finally, Tung spoke the words that he’d been saving for weeks: “Phuc, you have life, first, because you received your mother’s blood; and second, because your mother and I prayed to Caodai.”

  “Phat Mau,” Phuc replied, naming the Holy Mother of the religion. In 1969, Caodaists in Trang Bang had built a “mother” temple to worship her. This modest temple was located down the road from the food and drink shops on Route 19 towards Cambodia. Phuc’s parents took these first words from their young daughter after weeks of hovering between life and death as a sign that she saw the shining path of Caodai even more clearly than they.

  IN THE THREE MONTHS SINCE THE ATTACK on Trang Bang, Nick Ut had spent much of his time covering the waning Easter Offensive. The Communists had held areas of the central highlands into midsummer, and of the northernmost provinces into the fall. One day, along with picture editor Carl Robinson, he took a trip up Route 1 and pulled off at the Caodai temple outside Trang Bang. Supposing them to be journalists, an inevitable crowd gathered. The adults pestered them for news of the fighting, and the children for a bonbon, gum or a pen with colored ink. Nick asked for directions to the home of Kim Phuc’s father. He presented Tung with an 8 x 10 photograph of his daughter running from the napalm attack.

  Nick said what he’d come to say: “My picture made me famous. I wanted to say thank you.”

  Tung, who’d been shown the picture by foreign journalists visiting the Barsky, showed it to Nu. Nu cried until she thought she would go blind. They put it away in a drawer of an armoire. Tung would find he could go ten days, maybe fifteen, before he was drawn back to the image. Less often, Nu felt the same need to gaze upon it. When she did, she would ask her husband to retrieve it, so that he might sit beside her as her tears flowed.

  Their wounded daughter, the picture, and the ideals and rituals of Caodai swirled together, lending singular meaning to Tung and Nu’s earthly existence. Up until the napalm attack, the family had been strong but not devout Caodaists. They were Caodaist by family tradition, having inherited their religion from their own parents. Above their ancestral altar, they had framed a picture of the deities worshipped by Caodai. They obeyed the minimum religious requirement, prostrating themselves to Caodai at one of the four ritual times each day. Tung, joined by his son Ngoc and Great Uncle, all in their religious whites, would gather at the family’s altar. It was part ritual, part entertainment. They would strike the gong three times, light the incense, and kneel in worship. Then, to the accompaniment of percussion instruments, they would chant the prayers.

  After Phuc’s injury, no matter how busy Nu was, she visited either the main temple or the mother temple once a day. Tung himself paid homage by remaining at Phuc’s side in Saigon. Unless Nu sent word that he was needed in Trang Bang, he remained there until she returned home for good, almost thirteen months later. To Phuc’s parents, her injury became a marker of when the family’s fate had turned. Exactly how they did not yet know. They relied on Caodai’s infinite wisdom to decide the extent of their own and their daughter’s earthly suffering. Much depended on how disfigured she would be and how her health would be affected, but they expected to have to care and provide for her for the rest of their lives. How much redemptive suffering she and they would have to endure, and how much benevolence they could bestow upon her from the spirit world once they were gone, depended on the measure of the balance of good and bad in their lifetimes, past and present. Only Caodai could determine that. There was but one way to sway Caodai in their favor, and that was for all of them to be better disciples.

  AS THE EASTER OFFENSIVE WOUND DOWN, the mood of the American public towards Vietnam hardened. Americans wanted to be free of the torment of war. In late July 1972, the United States Congress caught up with that mood. It legislated a scenario for the pullout of the last of the American troops in Vietnam upon the release of American prisoners of war. President Nixon got the message: get a peace deal and bring a quick end to America’s war.

  Nixon was in the midst of his reelection campaign when, in October, Henry Kissinger achieved a breakthrough in talks in Paris with the North Vietnamese negotiator. Le Duc Tho, the commander overseeing both the Communist troops and the insurgents in the south, got Kissinger to acquiesce and agree to allow Communist troops, upon ratification of a cease-fire, to remain in areas of the south that they controlled: about 25 percent of the territory of South Vietnam. Tho in turn dropped the north’s demand for the resignation of South Vietnamese President Thieu.

  Kissinger took the tentative agreement he and Tho had worked out to Saigon. Predictably, he found it difficult to win over the indecisive Thieu, whose sole objective was to delay the departure of the Americans and stall the Communists. Without the decisive factor of American air power, the military odds in the south favored the Communists, who had more fighting will, despite being outnumbered by the South Vietnamese ground troops five to one.

  As the Americans showed resolve to push for an accord, the Communists and the Saigon regime skirmished to seize as much territory as possible in the south, anticipating that a cease-fire accord would be followed by political settlement of the conflict.

  Outside of Saigon, which remained curiously removed from the immediacy and threat of war, a sure sign that the government was losing its grip was the appearance of Viet Cong in broad daylight. In Trang Bang, the sight of neighbors scattering to the open fields raised the alarm: Viet Cong were approaching. Haste was essential: one wanted to avoid capture by the Viet Cong, but at the same time, being seen in one’s home with them could provoke arrest for sheltering the Communists. Great Uncle would collect the children, on the way out grabbing some packets of dehydrated rice (such pilfered American army rations remained readily available) that would sustain them until it was safe to return to their home. They all ran as if for their lives, hoping to reach the safety of an open field before they were spotted running by the government military or police. “Halt!” was an order that had to be obeyed; to run implied guilt and could invite a shot to the back.

  While peace talks went on in Paris, a new chapter of war was opening in contested district towns like Trang Bang. After the Communist attack there in June, nearby hamlets were targeted by both the Viet Cong and the South Vietnamese military. That fall, three or four times, artillery barrages damaged houses anew. Always the phao kick came from beyond: sometimes fired by the Viet Cong, sometimes the South Vietnamese military. On rare occasions, a helicopter made several passes and a voice broadcast a warning: “Leave your houses! If you stay, you will die!” When the barrage was over, the helicopter would return, broadcasting a call for all Viet Cong to surrender to authorities. Surprise was usually the government’s tactic. Typically, the district command, often miles away, acting on intelligence that certain peasant homes were occupied by Viet Cong or being used as safe houses, simply fired off ordnance enough to give an impres
sion of strength. Hitting any particular target was unimportant.

  Given the unpredictability of war, Tung did only the most makeshift of repairs to the house. Damage undid the restoration done after the attack in June. The costly double-louvered doors on the front entrances were not replaced. What with part of a supporting side wall fallen in and holes in walls and ceilings, one could see through almost to the rear of the house. Tung took to salvaging sheet metal and broken lengths of wood from one hopelessly damaged part of the house to shore up another, and nailing pieces of cardboard over holes. The injured house took on a forlorn look; even the potted plants in front dropped their leaves, their pots too cracked to hold water.

  The intensifying war in Trang Bang forced the villagers to adroitly juggle their shows of allegiance. Loan was one person “caught between the sticky rice and the bean.” Being a war widow gave her a certain credibility, and being a teacher yet more. She held down a post at the elementary school. Whenever there was artillery damage to buildings in the town, the district chief would come calling on her, asking her to make a broadcast, which played over the town’s loudspeakers mounted on cement poles. Loan complied. As the Vietnamese saying goes: “A person is judged first by the voice.” The script she read condemned the Viet Cong and blamed them for the damage.

  The other side targeted Loan as well. Teachers were ideal liaison agents for the Viet Cong. Most southern-based commandos were uneducated or poorly educated, having had no chance to go to school or having dropped out; either way, they were likely to have spent their entire youth in the forest. One night, a “night visitor” showed up at Tung’s house to “escort” Loan into the forest. She was assigned one of the most dangerous of liaison jobs: to read aloud the accounting of the crimes of a prisoner before he or she was executed. Loan dared not refuse the Viet Cong. A colleague—a woman who had been Phuc’s second grade teacher—had refused, and word was that her name was on a Viet Cong death list. She fled to Saigon. One time, the bloodied body of a teenage boy was deposited at the doorstep of his parents’ home. Another time, a body was found among the charred remains of a thatch house. Rumor was that both the dead had wanted to leave the Viet Cong. To avoid playing too closely to any one side, Loan sought to make herself available only irregularly to the Viet Cong. She took to staying overnight from time to time with friends in the business district, which, being nearest the government offices, had no night visitors. In all, the Viet Cong came for her four times.