The Girl in the Picture

by Denise Chong

  That fall, there were two serious incidents suggesting that the Tung family had not proved its loyalty to either side. Both were at Nu’s shop.

  During one morning’s normal rush, as usual, early-risers were looking for lunch. An army truck pulled off the road, and hungry soldiers climbed out. Some twenty soldiers were heading into Nu’s shop when two grenades exploded in their midst. Seventeen soldiers were killed. Of Nu’s four children helping to serve at the time, only Ngoc was injured, taking a sliver of shrapnel in his thigh. The police speculated that someone riding by on a motorscooter had thrown the grenades. No witnesses came forward, and police made no arrests.

  The second incident was weeks later. This time, Nu’s customers were mostly a large family from Saigon. They had stopped on their way to the town of Tay Ninh where a party was being held to celebrate the engagement of their son. Chauffeurs awaited them. A huge explosion collapsed half the shop, burying the customers in chunks of roof, walls, furniture, dishes. Nineteen people were killed. Among the injured, Loan was scalded by broth she had been carrying. Nu’s left forearm was pitted with burns, she was dazed, and her hearing was damaged.

  That afternoon, Loan hurried to Saigon to find her father.

  “Ma has been arrested!” she told him, explaining that the provincial military police had taken Nu away in a truck. Back in Trang Bang, Tung explained to the children: “Your mother had to go to Saigon, so I am at home.”

  Seventeen of the nineteen killed in the second blast at the noodle shop had been from the engagement party. The other two deaths roused the government’s ire. One victim was a civil servant, recently transferred from Saigon to head the Hau Nghia district information and education department. The other was his military escort; no high-ranking official traveled without one. A bicycle left parked at that corner of the shop where the two were seated had its frame packed with plastic explosives.

  The truck, with Nu in the rear unable to see out, rattled along for roughly two hours before arriving at a provincial detention center. Nu was led into a building and marched into a small, bare room, which held about a dozen other prisoners, male and female. No one came to see if she needed medical attention.

  In the morning, a guard summoned her for interrogation. She sat on a chair, facing her questioners.

  “Who put the bicycle there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Tell us who put it there!”

  Daily, the routine was the same. She was returned to a solitary cell, and the next morning, it began all over again. Her interrogators shouted at her, and the more she denied any knowledge, the more they tried to goad her into confessing her sympathies for the Communists. “You care only for the Viet Cong! You feed them; you look after them! Confess!” When she showed no inclination to do so, the interrogators called for their “tools.” They used clubs to strike her legs, attached electrical prods and clips to her fingertips. The worst was a bucket of water poured down her throat while a cloth was placed over her nostrils, which gave her a sensation of suffocating.

  Nu kept her wits about her. “I know nothing,” she insisted. Using her contacts, and those of the husband of Auntie Anh, in the provincial office, Loan found out where her mother was being held. When Loan could get away, she brought cooked food to her mother, and, upon seeing her blistered arm, medication and bandages. Three weeks passed. One morning, instead of being led to interrogation, Nu was escorted to the front gate, where she was left. Loan was there.

  “What did you have to pay to get me out?” Nu asked. Her daughter shook her head, holding to the code of silence.

  THROUGH LATE SUMMER AND INTO THE FALL at the Barsky, on any given day, Tung’s biggest problem was smuggling into the ward a treat of fruit or candy for Phuc. The Barsky strictly forbade outside food, because of the stringent need to avoid risk of infection. As well, diet management is critical to the convalescence of a burn patient. It pleased Tung to see Phuc’s growing appetite. He’d sneak her a bonbon or two, and share with her a soursop, the green fruit with white sticky pulp and large black seeds, which had a short season, and which he knew to be his daughter’s favorite. The Vietnamese nurses played along, feigning anger when they found an errant candy wrapper or black seed.

  Once Phuc’s burned areas remained clear of infection and her strength rebounded enough, skin grafting began. The process, which taxes the patient’s strength, inflicts pain anew. Each patch of donor skin excised from the patient for grafting exposes underlying tissue to the air, which is equivalent to inflicting a first- or second-degree burn injury. The donor site has to be dressed and kept clear of infection if it is to heal. If the grafted skin covering the burned areas gets infected and does not take, then the graft has to be sloughed off in the burn bath, and donor sites robbed for a second try. Phuc’s skin grafting operations proved routine, a tribute as much to the surgeon’s skills as to the nursing care.

  Decades later, when the adult Kim Phuc figured prominently in the eye of international media, more than one Western doctor would be publicly credited with having done her surgery. At the time of the war, the foreign doctors who rotated through the Barsky became aware of the fame of the photograph only when they chanced upon it at home, months or often years after the fact. Many of the patients they treated at the Barsky could have fit the description of a child needing extensive skin grafts to her upper body. The person who rightly should have stepped forward to take the credit was Dr. My, the same doctor who broke the Barsky’s rules by accepting Kim Phuc as a patient. However, Dr. My, who left South Vietnam for the United States at the end of the war, did not want the limelight, and did not want to disabuse Kim Phuc of the belief that foreigners were the ones who had helped her. Besides, Vietnamese surgeons at the Barsky were technically under the supervision of Western doctors. And Dr. My recognized that, were it not for the special circumstances of Phuc’s admittance, she likely would not have remembered that she had operated on her, so heavy was the surgical schedule.

  Even as Phuc’s skin grafts healed, treatment remained agonizingly uncomfortable. To prevent new skin from fusing where it shouldn’t—her neck to her chest, and her arm to her sides—she was put in traction and immobilized in a body cast. Finally, when the cast came off, she began physiotherapy, for which increasing pain is a measure of success. Flexibility had to be restored to grafted skin (it continually tightens as it fuses to the body), deadened nerve endings and muscles buried in scar tissue reawakened, and function restored to extremities. Phuc also had to build up her strength. Weeks of immobility in bed had shrunk her muscles and contracted her body. She had to relearn how to use her limbs, sit up, stand, walk, feed and dress herself.

  In November 1972, after almost six months at the Barsky—Phuc held the record for the longest stay—administrator Joyce Horn prepared to send her to the foundation’s convalescent center across town. Phuc pleaded to go home, saying she missed her family, and it was agreed, so long as she made periodic return visits to the center for further monitoring and physiotherapy.

  Horn closed this file happily. Unlike many of the Barsky’s other patients, from what she surmised, a loving and comfortable home life awaited the girl’s homecoming. She’d heard talk among the Vietnamese nurses that Phuc’s father was a ranking district official, so she assumed also that her family was one of both means and influence.

  Most certainly, one reason Phuc survived the crucial first days was that she came from the better-off south, where food was plentiful and children were well fed, so that she was healthy at the time she was injured. Horn discharged most patients from the Barsky with more mixed emotions. Many left behind the best world they would ever know, sheltered from the true horror of their predicament by the routine of life and play there. Inside the Barsky, a gruesomely distorted face did not matter; in the outside world it would. One teenage boy who’d lost his lower body, when asked what he was going to do upon his discharge, replied without hesitation: “Kill myself.” Phuc was one of the fortunate: she had limbs that were
intact, scarring that could be hidden and a face unmarred.

  After Phuc’s discharge, Robinson and Nick visited her in Trang Bang, and afterwards Robinson put a few paragraphs on the wire about the family’s continuing misfortunes owing to the war.

  Some weeks later, Joyce Horn received an unusual letter. Some community firemen in New York had raised three thousand dollars which they wanted to spend to bring Kim Phuc on a holiday there. As Horn would recall years later, the sentiment expressed was “Wouldn’t it be terrific for her to have a ride on the carousel in Central Park?” “Please don’t think in those terms,” she wrote in reply. “This girl is lightly injured compared to most.” She could not resist a mild reproach: “Don’t single out one child; use your money instead to help many.” She sent along the address of the Barsky’s parent foundation in New York.

  The AP bureau in Saigon subsequently received a letter from the same firemen, seeking assistance in relaying their monetary donation to Kim Phuc’s family.

  The bureau had received several letters and parcels, mostly from Americans abroad, many addressed simply to “the little girl in the picture.” People sent coloring books and crayons, books to learn English, dolls, often clothing—always too big. Some enclosed an American ten-dollar bill, a twenty, as much as a fifty. In all, these donations amounted to a few hundred American dollars. Carl Robinson, the picture editor, and Nick Ut prevailed upon the bureau’s helpful Vietnamese secretary to make sure Tung received the parcels and donations. As it was illegal for Vietnamese to hold American currency, the secretary, a widow who’d lost her husband on the battlefield, had to take Tung to the bank where the AP had an account to change the dollars into dong before handing them over.

  Robinson and Nick discussed how to assist the firemen and left the matter with the secretary in the bureau. This time, Robinson decided against writing a story for the wire. This is one victim who is well taken care of, he told himself. There are other victims to think about.

  RICHARD NIXON WAS RETURNED TO THE presidency in November 1972. The business at hand remained seeking peace; Kissinger’s mid-campaign declaration that “peace is at hand” had not been realized. Thieu would insist on a list of sixty-nine changes to the tentative agreement Kissinger had reached with the North Vietnamese. Their response that December was to break off talks.

  Nixon’s patience ran out. He wanted the cease-fire accord in place for his January inauguration. In an ultimatum to the North Vietnamese to bargain “or else,” he ordered an intensive bombing campaign over North Vietnam. Beginning on December 18, and continuing until December 30, with the exception of a one-day suspension of bombing for Christmas Day, American B-52s pummeled military targets in Hanoi and in the sixty-mile corridor between the city and the north’s main port of Haiphong. Public reaction in America to what became known as the “Christmas bombings” was muted; internationally, it was one of revulsion. Nine days after Nixon finally called a halt to the bombing, talks between the United States, North Vietnam and South Vietnam resumed in Paris.

  AMONG FOREIGN JOURNALISTS GOING TO South Vietnam to file stories leading up to the expected Paris cease-fire accord were two from Stern magazine, a major weekly based in Hamburg. Photojournalist Perry Kretz and reporter Klaus Liedtke arrived at Tan Son Nhut airport, expecting, as usual, to obtain the necessary entry visas there. They were refused entry and ordered to leave the country. Kretz’s guess was that his coverage during the Easter Offensive had offended the Saigon regime; he’d photographed a soldier asleep at his machine-gun position.

  As there was no plane connecting to Hamburg for three days, South Vietnamese police allowed the two journalists to go into Saigon, to wait in a hotel, under house arrest. Kretz chose the fading elegance of the Continental. The ornate nineteenth-century hotel, featured in novelist Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, was a favorite of journalists from the early days of the American war. It was on Tu Do Street (Tu Do meaning “freedom”), formerly Rue Catinat under the French, where early war correspondents had dubbed the bars “Radio Catinat” because of the military intelligence that one could pick up there. At the Continental’s terrace bar, relaxing on dark green wicker chairs on a floor of black and white tiles, cooled by ceiling fans overhead, one could still order citron pressé, the tart French drink.

  A guard posted outside the hotel room doors of the two journalists amiably escorted them to and from the restaurant and bar. On the morning of the second day, Kretz was determined to salvage a story from the aborted trip. He approached the guard. “We want to go out,” he told him. “Not for long, not far.” He opened his palm to reveal an American fifty-dollar bill. The guard took it and turned his back.

  The AP office was two blocks away. There, Kretz found Peter Arnett. He explained his predicament: “I’ve got a day and a half left. Any ideas for a story?”

  Arnett didn’t hesitate. “Kim Phuc is a good story.”

  “Who’s Kim Phuc?”

  “She’s the girl burned by napalm.”

  “She’s alive?!”

  At each checkpoint on Route 1, Kretz and his colleague, to avoid being asked for their passports as there was no valid visa stamped inside, flashed United States Department of Defense identification cards. “Americans,” the police said, waving their taxi through.

  When the twin towers of the Caodai temple came into view, Kretz recognized where he was from his memory of the famous picture. They found Tung at home. Clad in shorts and an undershirt, he was atop a stool, taking a saw to level the tops of lengths of bamboo, part of a repair to a shattered wall of the badly damaged house. Tung led them to Phuc. She was behind the house with Grandmother Tao, who was squatting on the ground hand-washing clothes. To Phuc’s amusement, Kretz insisted on a handshake from her grandmother, ignoring the wet soapiness of her hands. The old lady relented, though the greeting was foreign to Vietnamese ways, and particularly unexpected between a man and a woman.

  For Kretz, the elusive chemistry between photographer and subject was there from the start. With him, his colleague and the taxi driver, who served as interpreter, in tow, Phuc happily gave a tour of the house and the garden. She posed when asked. In front of the house, she obliged when Kretz urged her to join some boys playing with a soccer ball. There was a moment of consternation when Kretz’s colleague, sweating profusely, suddenly felt faint from the heat. After a rest inside the house and a cool drink, the trio and Phuc set off down the footpath to the temple and to the road where the napalm attack had occurred. Kretz spent the better part of an hour shooting pictures there of Phuc.

  He was looking through his viewfinder when he noticed that his subject’s smile was no longer as broad as it had been. He lowered his camera.

  “Kim!” Then, teasingly, “Don’t look so sad!”

  The driver and Phuc spoke together. She had become stricken with pain from the heat. The sudden onset of pain is typical for the burn victim; without sweat glands or pores in burned areas and grafted skin, and with poor circulation in constricted scar tissue, the body does a poor job of regulating its temperature. Hot and cold are abruptly, acutely felt.

  Kretz saw Phuc’s face cloud over. He was concerned. “What happened? What’s wrong?”

  “The sun is too hot for her body. Her burn wounds are giving her pain.”

  Kretz chided himself for his insensitivity. The only hint he’d had of Phuc’s injury had come in the stiff and awkward movement of her head and arms in attempting to catch a soccer ball. Kretz was puzzled. If the girl was suffering so, why had she gone through with the shoot? As they walked back to the house, he formed his own conclusion: She may be only a child, but she must be thinking: “Go through with it, maybe these foreigners can help me.”

  At the house, Phuc went to seek the relief of a shower. Kretz asked Tung if he could photograph his daughter’s burn scars. Tung winced. Kretz put his request to Phuc bluntly: “Listen, Kim. We are here now. I wasn’t there when it happened. I have to see your burn. I have to see what really happened to you.�
� Phuc obliged. She did not yet know shyness with her body; boys and girls her age and younger played naked in the rain, showered together, went around shirtless and barefoot. As Phuc showered, she was transformed. She filled cup after cup from two ceramic urns filled with water especially for her showers, letting the water cascade from the top of her head down her body.

  Among the photographs that appeared in the article in Stern was a stark image of Phuc looking over her shoulder at the camera. Her nakedness betrayed her suffering. The camera’s eye recorded frozen rivers of red and purplish skin, coursing angrily every which way on her back and her left arm, and volcanic eruptions of burn scars on her buttocks. On her thighs, there was clean but faint rectangular scarring, where donor skin had been lifted out. “Americans, feeling sorry for what had happened to the girl, had sent toys and letters,” said the accompanying article, adding pointedly, “but she said that she’d rather have medication for the wounds on her back.”