The Girl in the Picture

by Denise Chong

  Once back in Hamburg, Kretz would find that he could not forget either the smile of the girl, or how abruptly it had faded that afternoon. He had come to journalism only lately. More than two decades earlier, he’d left his first job as a typesetter in Germany to live with relatives in New York in order to learn English. After various jobs there, including waiting tables and tending bar while studying photojournalism at night, he served with the United States navy during the Korean war. Later, he worked in the picture unit of the New York City police department, then with a news service. He was in his fourth year with Stern, his assignments out of Germany mostly to Indochina to cover the war.

  I should have been a doctor, he told himself, a self-apology for his inability to do more for the girl that day.

  ON JANUARY 27, 1973, NINETEEN DAYS AFTER diplomatic talks had resumed, the United States, North Vietnam and South Vietnam formally signed the Paris cease-fire agreement. On the same day, the defense secretary announced that the American military draft was over. But the accord did not end recruitment either by the South Vietnamese or by the Viet Cong. Nobody in Vietnam expected peace—the South Vietnamese pronouncements conspicuously avoided use of the word—only the end of American involvement and an interlude before fighting erupted again. Within one day of the signing of the accord, each side would accuse the other of cease-fire violations.

  On March 19, the last American flag was hauled down over the last American military installation in Saigon. On March 30, the last of the American military personnel in Vietnam left for home, and one day later, Hanoi released a last contingent of American prisoners of war.

  With America out of the picture, foreign news agencies lost their appetite for daily coverage of the Indochina conflict. Those with bureaus in Saigon either closed them or sharply cut back staff and resources there. The focus upon horror shifted elsewhere in the world. It would allow the Americans to continue a bombing sideshow for the next several months over Laos and Cambodia—until, that is, an angry Congress finally blocked all funds for American military involvement in the region. That same summer, President Thieu would openly accuse the Communists of planning an offensive for the coming dry season. As the Communists continued to pester and grab what territory they could, Thieu counted on the Americans to intervene and come to the aid of South Vietnam should Communist troops surface openly.

  To Americans, Vietnam was not so much a country as a war. For them, it had finally ended. Measure was taken of the human price Americans had paid: some 58,000 Americans had died there; 300,000 had come home wounded; nearly 600 had been captured and held in Communist hands; and 1,300 were still missing in action in Vietnam, more elsewhere in Indochina. At home in the United States, veterans among the 3 million who had served in Vietnam searched for meaning to their sacrifices. Whatever the morality of America’s involvement in that conflict, the American public was sick and tired of hearing about it. That the war in Vietnam was not over, or that more Vietnamese soldiers and civilians would die, did not weigh heavily on its conscience. At the end of the previous year, Life magazine published its usual “The Year in Pictures” issue. In it had been only one item related to the Vietnam war. It was a two-page spread of a portrait of a smiling ten-year-old Kim Phuc at home in Trang Bang, inset with the famous picture of her running in terror from the napalm strike. The headline: “Kim Phuc, Memories Masked by A Smile.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  LEAVING THE COCOON OF THE BARSKY unit for the world outside proved too abrupt and harsh an adjustment for Phuc’s body to make. It was apparent from the moment she and her father stepped out of the gates of the Cho Ray Hospital. The pedicab ride across town from busy Cholon, the Chinese district of Saigon, to the western bus terminus exposed her body, its burned areas newly encased in thin and unstable skin, to the hot sun. Her lungs, damaged by the burn, suffered the irritation of dust blowing through the open windows of the bus. The headache she had was worsened by the jolting ride over tarmac rutted by shelling. Then, the sight of the damaged house, which she had last seen before the napalm attack, proved a shock. “You can see the sun and the moon from inside!” Phuc remarked.

  Twice during Phuc’s first two weeks at home, she was struck down by sudden, intense pain. The severity so alarmed Nu that she dispatched one of the family on the motorscooter to bring a doctor. Each time, the family feared the hysterical Phuc would have been driven to madness but for the relief provided by the painkiller the doctor injected. Tung and Nu made the decision to admit Phuc, as the Barsky had intended, to its convalescent center in Saigon. While most patients would stay an average of two to three weeks there, Phuc would stay seven months. Doctors allowed her visits home for a week or two at a time, but she would not return home for good until July 1973, thirteen months after she had been injured in the napalm attack.

  That the child who came home had the same happy and uncomplaining personality as before she was wounded was a testimony to her strength of character. The Vietnamese nurses themselves marveled at Phuc’s constant cheerfulness. It was a quality not often seen in the littlest victims of war; some children could not bring themselves to smile even at the antics of Goofy or Donald Duck in cartoons the Barsky brought in from America. The professionalism—and even heroism—of the nurses, the same ones who inflicted on Phuc the pain of the daily burn bath, was proven by their ability to develop a trusting, loving relationship with her. Phuc’s life-saving treatment was itself traumatic. No matter how much time passed, mere mention of the burn bath would send Phuc into a wordless darkness. However, with the care of the nurses, she emerged from that haze of pain, prolonged agony and isolation, re-born.

  During her hospital stay, Phuc seized upon her life’s ambition. The role models that she saw at the Barsky convinced her: she wanted to be a doctor. This was a lofty ambition for a girl of peasant origins. Usually, families decided their children’s ambitions, in accordance with what was in keeping with their social standing. Only those in the city, with the means to send their children to the best schools, could decide who among their children would be a doctor, pharmacist, lawyer or engineer. Phuc explained her desire to her parents. “You gave me life,” she told them, “but the doctors and nurses kept me alive.”

  THE TRANG BANG THAT PHUC FINALLY CAME home to was much changed from what she had known. Under the terms of the cease-fire accord, villagers could declare their allegiance to one side or the other, and in the northernmost provinces, many hamlets hoisted the Viet Cong flag. Throughout much of the south, especially in the district towns like Trang Bang that ringed Saigon, the Saigon regime made certain that the South Vietnamese flag fluttered from the top of, or was painted on the sides of, every public building.

  Life and death had left its mark in Phuc’s absence. In the year after the attack, Nu would have her eighth child, a fifth son. Auntie Anh bore obvious signs of her injury: she had a limp, and the fingers on one hand were curled, claw-like. She had left the hospital in Saigon within days of her husband finding her there, too distraught to stay upon the news that Danh had died and that the youngest was ailing. Phuc had been told in hospital of her cousins’ deaths, but at home no one spoke of the loss more than a year gone by. Auntie Anh would go on to have seven more children.

  Sometimes when Phuc was visiting her cousins, she would come upon her aunt lying on the bed and chanting herself into a trance. Her voice would change into one not her own as she received news from the spirit world of Danh and Cuong, the baby. Back to herself, Auntie Anh would talk of how happy she was that her two sons were together. She spoke of how the younger liked to tease the older: “How ugly you are, Danh! You are burned so much!”

  In Phuc’s year-long absence, her siblings had become schooled in the manner and ways of war. The vocabulary of her brothers’ war games, once played with tree branches for guns, had expanded to include mortar fire, shells, rockets and grenades.

  In the once proud house there was no longer room enough for all to sleep. The three open front doorways and collapsed side w
all left the front room entirely exposed. The breezeway had partly collapsed, so that hammocks could not be hung there. With only the back room for sleeping, Tung, and at least one other child, had to sleep elsewhere, usually at the home of someone minding the house for relatives who’d fled to Saigon. Loan had more or less moved into the town, coming home only during the day.

  Phuc found Loan grieving. Her twenty-one-year-old sister had several friends who’d been recruited by the military at age eighteen, many of whom had died in combat or been left maimed. And shortly after Phuc returned home, she woke up one morning to find that her father had spirited her eldest brother, Ngoc, away in the night.

  Their flight had been triggered by a visit days earlier. The district military chief had sent someone around to see Tung. “When your son is eighteen,” they told Tung, “he must go to the military.”

  It wasn’t more than a couple of nights later that a night visitor came to the house to see Tung as well.

  “We invite your son to join us.”

  “My son is not home,” Tung replied. He had calculated that he could stall for time; only one person stood before him. “I would like to ask his opinion first.”

  In the north, propaganda could sway one’s sympathies. It was not so in the south. Filial piety was stronger; a son followed the side that his parents told him to, the same side as their own.

  When the night visitor took his leave, Tung roused Ngoc from sleep. “The people from the forest have come for you!” Tung had already prepared clothes and bedding, a packet of money and food. Just before dawn, when the Viet Cong were most likely to have taken to their beds, Tung and Ngoc made their way west to Tay Ninh to the Holy See.

  One year earlier, Tung had laid plans so that he would not have to choose to send his son to one side or the other of the war. He decided that if that day of reckoning came, he would send his son to study Caodai. It was his wish also that Ngoc not return to hamlet life, but instead begin his married life in the city, where people were more likely to mind their own business. “I want you to escape the fate of living in a small town,” was how he explained to Ngoc his purchase in Tay Ninh of a one-room house on a crowded street near the Holy See that, upon marriage, would be Ngoc’s own.

  Father and son presented their papers at the gate to the white-tunic-clad sentries there; each of the twelve gates of the Holy See was guarded twenty-four hours a day. Beyond the walls lay a city unto itself. Dominating the landscape was the magnificent temple to which the family, like most Caodaists, made one or more pilgrimages a year. Among the dozens of structures in its shadow were several administrative buildings, many built in the French colonial style. In addition, there were two high schools, a university, a seventy-five-bed hospital and nursery, an orphanage, an old age asylum, an orchestral practice hall, a mortuary, public works garages and several businesses, among them dressmaking and weaving shops, a bakery, a gas station, a carpentry shop, a blacksmith’s forge, even a calendar factory. Several lodging houses had been constructed for the workers, who numbered more than one thousand.

  The Holy See accepted Ngoc’s services as a worker. In return, he would receive a room and two vegetarian meals of rice and soup each day. Other Caodai families saw the Holy See as a sanctuary for their sons as well. Blood had recently stained the inner sanctum when an unknown assailant murdered the chief of the former Caodai army, but this had been dismissed by the religion’s followers as intrigue in the leadership.

  When the Viet Cong returned the next night, there were two of them. “My son is following Caodai,” Tung said. They left without protest.

  Every two or three weeks, Tung, occasionally taking one of the children, made a day trip to Tay Ninh to bring Ngoc extras that the temple did not supply: tea and coffee, palm sugar, condensed milk. Nu also sent along pocket money. Ngoc needed little, as he neither smoked nor drank. The decision to take him to the Holy See seemed to be the right one, as more and more of his friends went the way of the government army.

  ALL THE FAMILY FELT SORRY THAT THEIR sparser life was hardest on Phuc. Tung was the one who had the most time to be attentive to her needs, and Nu appreciated her husband’s fussing. He has a particular fondness for that child, she would tell herself. Hoping to downplay his favoritism, he placed his own welcome-home present for Phuc among the dozens of dolls and plush toys that came from well-meaning strangers abroad. His doll became Phuc’s favorite. Made in Japan and battery-operated, it was the size of a toddler, and it could walk, open and shut its eyelids, talk, cry, and sing a song in English. It so terrified Grandmother Tao that it could not be brought out in her presence. More presents from abroad trickled in. Increasingly, to Phuc’s disappointment, the family paid to receive a parcel only to find that a thief had already emptied it or had replaced its contents with rocks.

  Nu took measure of the neighbors’ first reactions to her daughter’s burn disfigurement. She saw that children recoiled. Adults would shake their heads: “Poor you,” they moaned to her daughter. Until family and friends got used to her disabilities, there was embarrassed silence at her clumsiness. Often, while trying to help at the noodle shop or at home, she dropped dishes. At the dinner table, when a porcelain rice bowl clattered to the floor, she looked around in surprise, unaware it had fallen from her left hand.

  Nu rallied family and neighbors, old and young, to help Phuc with her exercises to rebuild strength and restore flexibility. Nu gave instruction: she had paid close attention to how the nurses rotated Phuc’s neck while trying to keep her from turning her body with it, and to how they worked her left arm, to restore flexibility at the elbow and shoulder, and individual fingers, to keep them from curling tighter. It would be some months before Phuc regained enough use and strength of her left arm and right hand to do them on her own.

  Only Nu was able to withstand Phuc’s cries at tight skin stretching and stiff joints pulling. Pain is a necessary part of a burn victim’s rehabilitation; the more movement and flexibility gained, the more there is. A victim’s rejuvenation can take as long as two or three years. Nu was firm with Phuc. “It is very painful,” she agreed, “but you must do your exercises now if you don’t want to be ugly forever. You must do them if you want to help yourself to live the rest of your life. I will not be with you forever.”

  Gradually, Phuc recovered more sensation in her limbs so that her movements betrayed her less. Instead of having to drop her mouth to the rim of her rice bowl on the table, her left hand could again raise the bowl. Slowly, she regained strength. While she would never again have the stamina or physical ability to keep up with others her age, within a year she appeared to be like any other child, running in play, riding her bicycle to school. Unless one knew of her injury, it was not easy to detect.

  Phuc would have to live with the sudden onset of pain and headaches for the rest of her life. Usually, Western painkillers would be enough to keep the pain at bay. When heat flared in her body, as might happen if she was too long under the sun, she could find relief by showering. Daily, someone was charged with buying a chunk of ice that could be chipped for wrapping in a towel to be held as needed to Phuc’s back, neck or head. The family was also on constant watch to see that she wasn’t scratching at her left arm so that she drew blood; she could no more feel her nails raking it than she could a mosquito bite. Upon an anguished, sharp cry from her, the closest person would come running to pound and massage her back. On the rare occasions when the pain seemed beyond control, someone went to fetch Auntie Anh, who gave Phuc the injection the doctor once had.

  Phuc saw all of her family making allowances for her and sacrificing on her behalf. Of her family, she saw her mother giving the most. She saw her mother struggling to hold back her own tears at her daughter’s wincing cries. “Phuc, do not cry,” Nu would say. “I cannot carry your pain, but when you cry, I carry your sorrow.” And so, Phuc struggled to stay dry-eyed. I love my mom; I must not make her sorrowful. She did not know that, once out of her daughter’s sight, Nu’s tears fell uncon
trollably.

  DURING THE WAR, SOUTH VIETNAM HAD become a nation of spenders. The South Vietnamese spent more on imported cosmetic and beauty aids than the country’s entire export income. They were able to outspend the value of the country’s gross domestic product, the difference funded by American aid and military expenditures. In the meantime, the foundation of its economy crumbled. Manufacturing and industrial production fell drastically and became dependent on aid-financed, imported raw materials, equipment and spare parts. This was the case even in traditional industries, such as fish-sauce making. During the tenure of the Americans, the two main industries remained, as they had been in the time of the French, beverage brewing and tobacco processing. People had flocked to the cities, but to take jobs that would last only as long as the Americans stayed. In places like Danang, which during the war was a mini-Saigon, these workers accounted for half the workforce.

  The departure of the Americans from South Vietnam was equivalent to kicking out the prop that held up its economy. In their wake, the Saigon regime had to confront two serious economic problems: urban unemployment and inflation. Among the taxes the government introduced or raised were a doubling of the tax on small traders, a 20 percent rise in the land tax and a new 10 percent value-added tax. To control inflation, the government repeatedly devalued the dong (twenty-one times between mid- 1972 and the fall of 1974). It hit consumers with price increases: in 1973 it raised the price of rice by 55 percent, sugar by 60 percent, and gasoline by 75 percent. In Trang Bang, an increase in theft and looting in the business district marked tougher economic times. Tung and his second daughter, Dung—who had risen in responsibility as the oldest child at home—would arrive at the noodle shop just as Nu was leaving. It was their responsibility to keep watch overnight.