The Girl in the Picture

by Denise Chong

  The cash-strapped Saigon regime—while living under the threat that, at any time, full-scale war might erupt—could not meet its military payroll. Wages went unpaid. Soldiers couldn’t feed their families on what they did receive, and many were deserting. After the Americans withdrew, wrongdoing in the army, always a hotbed of corruption, ran amok. Soldiers from the highest levels on down embezzled funds and rice and supplies, stole payrolls and profited from illegal dealings. However, the cronyism and corruption began at the top, with Thieu and his relatives, and was mirrored by the Saigon elite. As the Vietnamese saying goes, “A house leaks from the roof.” In a growing backlash, middle-class Saigonese, with support from students, non-Communist intellectuals and religious leaders, raised their voices in favor of Thieu’s removal. The prevailing desire was for political stability, seen to be impossible to achieve with him as president.

  SEVERAL MONTHS INTO THE CEASE-FIRE, THE district chief came to see Tung and Nu with an unexpected announcement. Some Americans wished to give the family a donation. The handoff would take place in front of the Caodai temple. “We cannot meet at your house,” he explained, “because of its condition.” On the appointed day and hour, a convoy of nine vehicles, seven military jeeps from the province of Hau Nghia and two cars from the district, pulled off Route 1 at the temple.

  There were speeches by the Vietnamese officials and by one of the two Americans there; the other was filming the presentation. The donation in dong, equivalent to three thousand American dollars, was from the community firemen in New York. Their wish was that the family of Kim Phuc use it to rebuild their war-damaged house.

  An official invited Tung to reply.

  He had barely begun—“We are a country living with war, but people from other countries are sharing”—when the whistle of an incoming mortar round interrupted him. Officials scattered to their vehicles. The one who was clutching the brown envelope of money yelled to Tung, “Because of the war, there is no point giving you the money now. After the war is over, we will give it to you!” The convoy sped off.

  Later, inside the temple where Tung and Nu had sought cover, Tung was rueful. “They put the taste of money in our mouth, but we had no chance to swallow it.”

  That evening, footsteps woke Nu. Suspecting thieves, she removed the bundle of dong—that day’s profits from the noodle shop—from around her waist and slid the bills under the bamboo mat beneath Phuc and the two youngest sleeping alongside. Phuc opened her sleepy eyes. Nu shushed her, wordlessly instructing her to feign sleep.

  Two burly men herded the sleeping household from their beds. The intruders bound them to two separate pillars inside the house.

  One brandished a gun at Nu. “The Viet Cong needs one million dong.”

  She denied having such a sum.

  “The government gave you the money today! The Viet Cong needs it! Give it to us!”

  Nu explained the phao kick that had interrupted the presentation earlier that day. The frustrated intruders began to search the house. Meanwhile, Great Uncle loosened a knot enough to free Phuc’s seven-year-old brother. “Run to your grandma’s house!” he told him. “Call for help!” The boy ran screaming all the way there. By the time his grandparents arrived with fire-lamps, the intruders had fled.

  Later that morning, Loan, with Nu on the back of her motorscooter, set off for the provincial office of Hau Nghia, hoping to collect the donation. At Cu Chi, they continued south along a secondary road. Mortar fire forced them back. Loan eventually got word that the donation was in a Saigon bank, and that the government would give it to the family when the war was over.

  ONE YEAR INTO THE CEASE-FIRE ACCORD, President Thieu declared that the country was again in a state of war. During that dry season, the Communists did not, as Thieu had predicted a year earlier, launch an offensive. Instead, during 1974, they sought only to consolidate and expand existing strong-holds.

  Thieu was off by only a year. The Communists planned to launch an assault not in the dry season of 1974 but in the dry season of 1975. The surprise element was that it would be directed not at the northern provinces, as South Vietnamese forces might expect, but at central Vietnam. Hanoi calculated that a decisive defeat of South Vietnamese forces there by Communist forces would put them in a position to make a final drive on Saigon during the following year’s dry season.

  In preparation to launch what they expected to be a two-year offensive, the Communists began to send mainforce troops and supplies down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The Communists also began construction of an oil pipeline to reach within seventy-five miles of Saigon, and to lay out a modern radio grid that would put Hanoi in direct contact with field units. Nowhere was their fierce attachment to the goal of victory over the south more evident than in their ten-year transformation of the Ho Chi Minh Trail from a web of primitive footpaths into an all-weather road over mountains and through jungle, able to accommodate trucks, tanks and armored vehicles. The road was also now defended by hilltop anti-aircraft emplacements, should the Americans return and resume bombing to rescue the South Vietnamese.

  The South Vietnamese people did not need to be told that the country was again at war. The fighting had never really ended. At the sound of gunfire or mortar fire, Phuc, fuelled by panic, made for the ham even as Great Uncle was screaming at the children: “Hurry! Inside! Inside!” Always, she assumed unseen Viet Cong were firing from the forest. Adults and children alike knew that running for the ham was itself a gamble; the sound of mortar fire was no indication of where it was being fired from, or where it was going to land, far away or near. In its trajectory, an incoming shell could easily catch a treetop or a building and spray from that height.

  The war bred in Phuc a belief that during wartime there was little use in calculating one’s steps. Life, it seemed, was either chance or destiny. One day, Phuc was sitting in the noodle shop, close enough to see the phosphorescent burst of mortar fire and hear the crump of a shell bursting. She watched the scene unfold as if in slow motion. People broke into a run in whichever direction their feet propelled them. One woman smashed headlong into a slow-moving military truck. She picked herself up, and despite blood gushing from her head, began to run again.

  Without warning, in life’s syncopated dance with death, the rhythm could shift from unhurried to frantic. One could be arguing with a sibling one minute, and be struck dead the next. Twice, there were close calls at the house. Moments after Loan had shut off the engine of the motorscooter and leaned it against the wall, a mortar round landed nearby, driving shrapnel into the scooter just as she was stepping into the side doorway. Another time, Great Uncle was lowering himself into the ham behind the last child when a piece of hot metal from an exploding shell bloodied his hand.

  Phuc began to have recurring nightmares of war. In one, she and her brothers would be standing in the midst of soldiers in uniform. An argument would break out among them, and gunfire would erupt. In another, she would be in an unfamiliar part of town. Bombs would fall, and fires flare all around. “We have to get out!” someone would scream. And as always, she would run, terrified of being killed. Urging herself onward, she would become tired, so tired that she would not know how she could keep going.

  In her waking hours, as in her nightmares, Phuc was still running from war. She wanted to stop running; she wanted whatever was making her run to stop as well. She just wanted it all to end.

  THERE WAS ONLY ONE WAY TO LIVE WITH THE insidiousness of war: one had to adhere to the normal habits and tempos of one’s life. Phuc wanted most, after her year in hospital, to resume a normal life, which for her was going to school with her friends. At the time of the napalm attack, she had been in the third grade. When she returned from Saigon, her former classmates were starting fifth grade. With Loan’s help, as her fourth-grade teacher by day and her tutor after school, Phuc was able to finish two grades in one. By the summer of 1974, she was studying for the nationwide fifth-grade examinations. The sixth grade was considered to mark passage from ch
ildhood to adolescence, as it was the start of middle school (grades six to twelve).

  School and studying had their frustrations for Phuc. She regretted the interruption when the school, at the sound of either mortar fire or nearby fighting, sent the students home early, or even closed for a day or two. In her zeal to study, she found she suffered headaches and was beset with dizziness. Her endurance would always fall short of her desire. Burn victims might seem otherwise recovered, yet often report headaches and dizziness for which there is no apparent physiological cause. Such symptoms are seen to be related to psychological scarring.

  “I don’t want you to go crazy in the head from studying,” Nu told Phuc. “You don’t have to be the best student. Average marks are good enough.”

  Phuc placed sixteenth among fifth-grade students in seven district schools in and around Trang Bang. “If I hadn’t been burned, I could have been number one!” she told her parents.

  Her achievement bolstered her self-esteem. I’m not a child any more. I’m getting older now, she told herself, upon her eleventh birthday. I have to begin to mind my appearance. In her growing self-awareness, she would, after every shower, examine her body in the three-way mirror. She gave thanks to Caodai. Thank god, my face was not burned. Even if my character were as good as an angel, if my face were ugly, it would be better that I had died. She longed to wear the short sleeves other girls wore, but she knew that would never be.

  Phuc decided to mark her graduation in two ways: by going to the dentist for the first time and by getting her ears pierced. Loan took her several miles by motorscooter to the nearest dentist. Auntie Anh pierced her ears, and Nu obliged her request for a pair of gold earrings. Each child in the family had gold jewelry that was his or her own—each boy had a chain and bracelet, each girl a bracelet and necklace with a heart-shaped locket—which Nu did not allow them to wear because of her worry about gold jewelry attracting thieves and kidnappers. Given the lack of security at the house, Nu had had Tung put the jewelry, along with what savings the family had in gold bars, into safekeeping at a more secure house. The family would later find out that Tung had used the jewelry to pay off gambling debts.

  THE PRESIDENCY OF RICHARD NIXON WAS inexorably weakened by the Watergate scandal that had begun with the bugging of Democratic national headquarters in the summer of 1972. “Without the Vietnam war there would have been no Watergate,” one of his aides, H. R. Haldeman, would later write. One thread of Nixon’s undoing was the leak of the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times in 1971, which had exposed the previous administration’s secret policy in Indochina. That revelation had helped turn the tide of American opinion against involvement. A despondent Nixon had organized a unit (called the “plumbers” because they were supposed to plug leaks) to clandestinely investigate the man who had copied and leaked the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg. The unit went on to other unseemly and illegal missions that, ultimately, implicated the president in the cover-up of the Watergate affair. On August 9, 1974, Nixon resigned to avoid impeachment.

  The Communists saw Nixon’s downfall as bringing the prize of Saigon closer. The lingering uncertainty affecting the Communists’ plans for the assault in the coming spring had been whether Nixon, exercising his presidential veto to wage war in spite of the American withdrawal, would intervene with air support, congressional funding or both. One of Nixon’s last acts as president was to legislate a spending ceiling on American military aid to South Vietnam for the coming year. Congress moved quickly to lower the limit from $1 billion to $700 million, sending a signal to Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, that it was not interested in sustaining the Thieu regime.

  THE COMMUNISTS SET THE CLOCK TICKING on South Vietnam in January 1975. That month, Communist forces chose a province near Saigon, only fifty miles to the northeast of the capital, to test the resistance of government forces. The Communists easily overran the capital of that province, marking the first time ever that they had “liberated” a southern province. The ensuing American silence encouraged the Communists to proceed as planned with the main assault in the central highlands. On March 10, 1975, the Communists attacked a city in central Vietnam.

  By mid-March, wire stories filed from Saigon and ripped from clattering telex machines in America reported a frenzied stampede of army and civilians down coastal routes south. No one, including the Communists, expected that government defenses would crumble so quickly; in a matter of days, half the country was practically handed to them. Old Indochina hands raced to return to Vietnam to cover what looked to be the final curtain falling on South Vietnam. President Thieu had made a fatal strategic error in ordering his forces to pull back from the central highlands to the coast. Columns of retreating troops were hemmed in. Thieu had also ordered his elite Airborne troops to Saigon, where he feared a coup attempt. Then he reversed himself, telling them to save Hue, which had been held by the Communists for twenty-six harrowing days during the Tet Offensive—but it proved too late. Hue fell on March 25, Danang on March 30. Thousands of panic-stricken soldiers and civilians waded into the sea there to reach boats. People clung to the rear stairways and wheel wells of planes, falling to their deaths.

  Hanoi sensed a South Vietnamese army on the run. It abandoned the limited objectives of the offensive and decided to make the final military push to Saigon. The Communists knew they had, at the most, one month; come May and the start of the summer monsoon, they would have no choice but to pull back and wait for another day.

  THE SOUTH VIETNAMESE MILITARY WITH- drew behind a defense line protecting the southernmost regions just above Saigon. In the second week of April, Communist forces struck thirty-five miles from the capital at Xuanloc, site of a former American military base. Government forces there put up the only stiff resistance of the counteroffensive and, well supported by the air force, were able to hold Communist forces at bay.

  In Saigon, the American ambassador would be slow to evacuate Americans, as well as their non-American employees and friends, mainly because of a belief both that Saigon could be defended and that Washington would come through with money, the $700 million permitted by legislation. On April 15, Kissinger himself appealed to the Senate. Not until April 21, when Thieu went on television to resign his position to his vice-president, and at the same time complain that Gerald Ford had let down South Vietnam, did unease grow that the capital might fall. American evacuation flights began. South Vietnamese police were quick to detain and arrest any Vietnamese suspected of attempting to leave the country. Subterfuge was necessary to make it through the city streets, often in violation of curfew, past the security gate of Tan Son Nhut airport, and finally onboard waiting U.S. air force evacuation aircraft. Only those on an approved list from the United States government could leave South Vietnam.

  Some of the people who had played a part in the story of Kim Phuc made it out of South Vietnam. The day after Thieu’s resignation, the AP evacuated Nick Ut. He told his mother that he’d be back in two weeks, or at the most one month, depending on how long it might take for government forces to secure Saigon. Nick took with him his brother’s widow, Arlette, and her ten-year-old daughter. The driver of the van ferrying her and other AP dependents to the airport fooled police giving chase by stopping at a city park and pretending to have a picnic. Carl Robinson sent out his Vietnamese wife and their children, along with some of his wife’s siblings, on an evacuation flight, and he himself stayed on a few days longer. The Barsky’s administrator, Joyce Horn, drove one of three Ford wagon ambulances from the hospital to the airport carrying thirty-six of the unit staff and their families. Among her passengers were Dr. My and her children, and a three-year-old burn-scarred boy left at the Barsky whom nobody came for, and whom Horn would raise as her son. To get by police, all were disguised as hospital patients, smeared with blood from the Barsky’s blood bank and wrapped in bandages. Some had IVs strapped to their arms, while others hobbled on crutches.

  Two days after Thieu’s resignation, Gerald Ford declared in a spee
ch at Tulane University in New Orleans that there was no sense in Americans “refighting a war that is finished.” Three days later, on April 26, Communist forces made a breakthrough at Xuanloc. By then, Thieu and his family had left for Taiwan, reportedly with sixteen tons of baggage, including bullion and American currency.

  IN THE LAST WEEK OF APRIL, TRANG BANG took on a deserted air. Police and district authorities disappeared from sight. There was virtually no traffic on the highway, and the usual checkpoints had been abandoned. Several businesses and all the schools had closed. Nu closed her shop. “Nobody wants to eat,” she said. The family retreated to their house. They huddled in the back, kept talk to a whisper and did not cook, eating instead from stockpiled fruit and army rations of dehydrated cooked rice. If there was no sign of life, including no smoke from the hearth, overflying planes spotting for the Viet Cong would hopefully think the house was empty.

  The eerie silence made Tung and Nu fear that attack was imminent. They decided to move from the house, but stay within reach for food and medicines. They made for the main Caodai temple where they found a handful of neighbors already there.

  The next morning, mortar fire split the air, sending pieces of shells and rockets slamming into the front doorway and windows of the temple. The neighbors with them inside did not know what to do. The family decided to gamble on the mother temple on the other side of town. They set forth on the footpath. Just short of their house, shells crashed into the ground. “Inside! Inside!” the adults screamed. Once everyone was through the closest doorway, Nu did a head count of her children: “One, two, three, four, five . . .” She gasped. “Oh no, I lost one child! Who is missing? Who?” She did a recount, twice, before realizing that the sixth and youngest was in her arms.