The Girl in the Picture

by Denise Chong

  Among Phuc’s graduating class, the student who, from the sixth grade on, had won the highest academic honors scored well below the minimum. Three more times that student would write the examination; never would the bureau score her higher. When their time came, three younger siblings, also excellent students, also failed to attain the minimum. “That family has no future because of what their father did before Liberation,” others said. Not so for Phuc: the province of Tay Ninh notified her to report that fall to a “pre-university” school in Tien Giang province in the southern Mekong Delta. Such regional schools prepared students to retake the university entrance examinations in the coming year.

  THE FIRST LEG OF THE DAY-LONG BUS TRIP from Tay Ninh was to Ho Chi Minh City. From there, Phuc took a pedicab across town to another bus terminus and boarded another bus south to Tien Giang, the capital of the province by that name, and the name of one of the major branches of the Mekong River that empties into the South China Sea. The city was picturesque; its houses were built on stilts over hundreds of inlets. At first, Phuc was repulsed by the smell of tidal flats and by the brackish, brown water that came in with the tide, gathering in stagnant pools during the rainy season. However, the tides set the rhythm of the town, each house relying on them to fill their individual cement reservoirs with water.

  The school in Tien Giang served students from some ten provinces. Home provinces paid their students’ tuition, as well as providing a dormitory and a monthly stipend for food, books and other expenses. Tay Ninh was one of the poorer provinces; its monthly stipend wasn’t enough to live on. Every weekend, Phuc took a same-day round trip to Trang Bang—Tay Ninh was out of reach in a day—bringing with her laundry to wash in the cleaner well water there and returning with cooked food and money from Nu. Often she saw both parents there, her mother at the shop, her father at the outbuilding of the temple. Having seen Phuc through high school, Tung now considered his fatherly obligations mostly discharged. By the conventions of the Vietnamese family, a parent’s job is to raise the younger children until older siblings take over the responsibility. Nu kept her fold-out cot at the shop and Tung hung a hammock at the temple in exchange for some caretaking there.

  The six-month course was anything but onerous. Phuc enjoyed making new friends and did so easily, especially because they were all from the same province and, typically, of the same religion. By day, she and her friends liked to cross the “monkey bridges” over the inlets, named for the agility needed to navigate the spindly poles lashed together. A favorite entertainment was to gather at midnight in a crypt at an adjacent cemetery to ask resident ghosts for predictions about future loves and next year’s entrance examination results.

  Phuc’s closest friend was her roommate, whose ambition was also to study medicine, and they made a pact to try to attend the same school. Trieu was as carefree as she was pretty. Phuc was always cheerful and laughing, but ever mindful of the task at hand: to study. Trieu had a boyfriend, and Phuc found herself fending off more than one hopeful. Most eager among them was an older student, respected by the teachers for his grasp of all subjects, which was superior to their own. The military had interrupted his engineering studies to send him to Cambodia, and he was now hoping to transfer into medicine. Though amused to hear he was warning others “Kim Phuc is mine!” Phuc hardened her heart against him when he sent her a love letter. “I want to be with you and love you,” it began. It offended her sense of propriety.

  From the start, Phuc kept from her classmates and teachers, Trieu and her nine other roommates, the secret hidden under her long hair and her long sleeves. They thought she had a passion for coconut milk; she drank it because she thought it was good for her skin. During a chemistry lecture about the burning qualities of phosphorous, she kept to herself the question on her mind. In class, “napalm bomb” blared in her mind, against an image of her body afire and canteens of water being poured over it. Later, she went to her textbooks. From what she read there, she concluded that the water would have fueled the napalm still burning on her body. She kept her silence: I am smiling on the outside, she told herself, but I’m sad inside. Not until the second to last week of the last term at Tien Giang did her classmates get any inkling that she was a student not like any other.

  IN LATE APRIL, A BLACK CAR PULLED OFF Route 1 in Trang Bang and stopped in front of Nu’s noodle shop. Two men stepped out. They were looking for the “Tung” for whom the shop was named according to the sign above it. The man they addressed themselves to was not, as they thought, Tung, but his second son, Tam.

  “Do you have a daughter named Kim Phuc?” they asked.

  “She’s my sister,” Tam replied.

  “Was she wounded by napalm in the war?”

  When he said yes, they produced a letter from the government of Hanoi that was an order to officials in Ho Chi Minh City to find her. The two were from the information ministry of the People’s Committee—the formal governmental authority from Hanoi on down—of Ho Chi Minh City.

  Two days later, Phuc was summoned from her mathematics class. She stepped outside to meet four men standing in the hallway. They stared, saying nothing.

  “Yes?” she asked politely, smiling.

  Finally, one spoke. He sounded skeptical. “You are Kim Phuc?”

  “Yes—I am Kim Phuc.”

  “You are the girl in the picture?”

  A memory flashed into Phuc’s mind: a newspaper, maybe a magazine, being passed from hand to hand among neighbors crowding the veranda of the big house, as if it were a marketplace. “You are the girl in the picture?” one of her chums asks.

  “Yes,” Phuc replied to the men. “I am the girl in the picture.”

  “You are the real Kim Phuc?”

  She laughed. “Yes, yes—I am for real!”

  “But, you look very—normal!”

  Phuc understood. She drew up the sleeve on her left arm.

  She returned to class, amused by the conversation in the hallway, but also puzzled. Why would the government be interested in someone wounded so many years ago? In the dying days of the term, she reflected on the picture. She had not given it a thought since, along with the other reminders of her past that her father had kept stored in the suitcase, it had gone with the thieves who’d robbed their household as the family lay asleep. She acknowledged that, when first published, the picture had attracted some attention. But she saw it as a pebble thrown into a pond. The ripples on the surface had long since disappeared. So much has changed since the end of the war, she thought. Why would someone want to pluck that pebble from the bottom now?

  Aftermath of the napalm strike, June 8, 1972, Trang Bang, before

  Kim Phuc runs out. Grandmother Tao carries three-year-old Danh.

  [Nick Ut/AP]

  Stars and Stripes, Pacific Edition, June 10, 1972.

  Tung, Nu (holding a granddaughter) and family, Trang Bang, 1973

  and (bottom) Kim on Route 1, seven months after napalm strike.

  [Perry Kretz/Stern]

  Kim at home, Trang Bang, 1973.

  [Perry Kretz/Stern]

  Kim baring her wounds for the camera, and (below) seeking pain relief with a shower, 1973.

  [Perry Kretz/Stern]

  Kim, aged twenty-one, in front of Caodai temple, Trang Bang, en route to Germany for medical treatment. [Perry Kretz/Stern]

  Accompanied by Perry Kretz, she arrives in Bangkok. [AP]

  Kim and Nick Ut, reunited in Havana, 1989. [Jim Caccavo]

  Kim and Toan with Thomas, and Nancy Pocock, Toronto 1995. [Shannon Sweeney/ Mail on Sunday]

  Nu, Tung, and their son, Tam, Trang Bang, 1996. [author photo]

  Kim and Thomas, portrait for Life, 1995. [Joe McNally/Life]

  Kim after ceremony at Vietnam Veterans Memorial, 1996. [AP]

  CHAPTER NINE

  IN 1980, THE FIFTH YEAR SINCE IT HAD taken over the south, the leadership of the Communist Party in Hanoi promoted into its ranks a career diplomat with knowledge of the West. Born in
the north to a peasant family and once jailed by the French for resistance activities, Nguyen Co Thach had served North Vietnam on diplomatic postings, including a stint in India, and had risen by 1960, at thirty-five, to the rank of deputy foreign minister. His role as chief aide to North Vietnam’s negotiator at the Paris peace talks sent his star on the ascendancy. Thach himself later led the Vietnamese side of the talks in New York that brought Vietnam and the United States to the brink of normalization.

  In 1980, when Thach became foreign minister and an alternate politburo member (the first English-speaking member after Ho Chi Minh, he would be promoted two years later to full member and, as well, made deputy premier), postwar Vietnam was seeking to break its isolation from the West. Its purpose was pragmatic: to get the United States to ease the trade embargo against it. The world’s third-poorest country by per capita income, Vietnam was in desperate need of aid and investment. As well, the country wanted to offset its economic dependence on the Soviet Union. The Soviet ruble underwrote the Vietnamese economy to the extent of about one-quarter of its gross national product. It delivered such foreign aid by purchasing at higher than world prices Vietnamese exports (mostly crude oil, wood and sugar cane) and, in turn, sold Vietnam more petroleum than it needed so that it could turn around and sell the surplus to earn hard currency to buy food and other critical imports from the Soviet trading bloc.

  Considered a moderate in domestic affairs, Thach had an ability to interpret the West’s views to the Party leadership, and the astuteness to see that the foreign press could help influence Western public opinion in Vietnam’s favor. In dropping Vietnam’s demand that the United States honor Nixon’s promise to pay war reparations, Thach had recognized the unpopularity of asking Americans to honor a commitment made by the discredited president. Similarly, he accepted that Americans’ reactions to Vietnam were emotionally charged. In December 1981, his foreign ministry invited the first ever delegation of American veterans to Hanoi to discuss two issues that were contentious in America: the health effects of Agent Orange and the fate of 2,477 American servicemen officially listed as missing in action (MIA) in Indochina (most in Vietnam, a few hundred in Laos and a handful in Cambodia). Two months later, Richard Armitage, the most senior American official to visit Hanoi since normalization talks were cut off in 1977, came to discuss the MIA issue. No one foresaw that this subject would come to dominate America’s agenda with Vietnam for the next ten years. Well financed by right-wing interests in the United States, the issue fed on grudge and hatred left over from America’s defeat in Vietnam and preyed on the emotions of relatives of MIAs. Thach foresaw something different: “Tell your people we are friends,” he told visiting veterans and the foreign press in 1981, “not enemies.”

  FOR MANY AMERICANS, THE MENTION OF Vietnam brought back the shame of America’s defeat there. Reminder of that came 3 million times over in its veterans. Having treated them with indifference at best, more typically reproach and scorn, not until almost ten years after the last American troops had left Vietnam did America pause to acknowledge those who had served and died there. For one week in November 1982, thousands of veterans, many in wheelchairs, gathered in Washington for vigils and ceremonies, culminating in a march on Veterans’ Day to dedicate the new Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The monument’s design was itself the subject of dispute: a thin, angled wall of polished black granite, set in a grassy knoll, listing 58,044 names beginning with the first American to die in the conflict and ending with the last. (Eventually other, more traditional monuments would be built and names of more known dead would be added to the wall.) That America had unresolved feelings about Vietnam was evident in the thin crowds lining the route of the march, the antiwar protesters that tagged behind, the heart-wrenching notes and mementos left at the wall, the suicides that would take place in its shadow. It has been said of monuments that they are a way for the living to have a dialogue with the dead, they who have seen the unspeakable.

  IN THE YEAR LEADING UP TO THE TENTH anniversary of the signing of the Paris accord, and the tenth anniversary of the subsequent departure of the Americans from Vietnam, the Western media began to visit Vietnam in droves. They had blinders on, intent on doing the predictable “decade after” stories. Returning Western correspondents had covered the war from the point of view of the Americans and South Vietnamese, and only in the south; they had not reported from the Communist side. A chosen few had covered the departure of the last American prisoners of war from Hanoi, but most were seeing the north now for the first time. They remembered the former Saigon as freewheeling, where anything from the West could be had in its street markets, so they were taken aback to find Hanoi empty of cars and motorbikes, backward and impoverished, its street peddlers selling single envelopes and single cigarettes, ballpoint pens that they had refilled with hypodermic needles. When the journalists came south to Ho Chi Minh City, they looked anxiously for contradictions to what they had seen in the north, especially anything that might invoke their nostalgia for the former Saigon. That one could still buy croissants from a French patisserie or Kodak film on the black market figured prominently in their stories.

  One journalist returning for the first time since the war was the German photojournalist Perry Kretz, with Stern magazine. In Ho Chi Minh City, he submitted himself to the obligatory interviews with whichever subjects his minders trotted out. Journalists were escorted to the former Caravelle Hotel. During the war, the hotel, built by the Catholic diocese, had been the city’s most modern. It now housed the information ministry, which shepherded foreign journalists. The point of these interviews, as Kretz knew, was to give the Communists’ version of the war. He did not expect that his line of questioning would end up hitting so close to home.

  Kretz was sent two veterans—a man and a woman—to interview, and was told that both were “revolutionary heroes.” Communists , he said to himself, noting the severity of the woman’s clothing and hairstyle, the absence of make-up. Told she had been in the resistance, he turned to her first, asking, “Why do you have so many decorations?” She replied that she had been a “courageous guerrilla fighter” during the resistance. It came out that her “great victory” was a 1971 bombing that had killed twenty-seven and injured forty at a Saigon bar on Dong Khoi—the street known to Americans as Tu Do and to the French as Rue Catinat. She herself had thrown the grenades from her motorscooter.

  “You missed me,” Kretz said to the decorated woman.

  That spring, after a grueling week in the central highlands covering American troops, during which they had run into a Viet Cong ambush, Kretz had been relieved to be back in Saigon and at the Continental Palace Hotel. He had showered and changed and enjoyed dinner with a colleague at a French restaurant. On their way later to a bar down the street, they were accosted by a beggar, who’d lost both legs. Kretz’s colleague dropped some coins into the outstretched hand, only to have them flung back. “I tell you,” said Kretz, “that’s bad luck.” The bar was crowded. Feeling hemmed in, the two moved to empty seats against the back wall. Minutes later, the blast came. Kretz and his colleague were among only three who escaped death or serious injury; the other was a waiter. Kretz’s colleague was the only one to walk away—he went on to another bar that evening—while Kretz would suffer permanent damage to his hearing.

  Before leaving Ho Chi Minh City, Kretz took a walk down Dong Khoi. He was nostalgic for the days when it was Tu Do, when pretty bar girls walked arm-in-arm with tall, good-looking American soldiers. Now, girls sat on the backs of the motorscooters of their Vietnamese boyfriends, waiting for something that would never happen. He saw that there were still street urchins pestering foreigners like him to buy something, but where they had once been Vietnamese, now they were outcast Amerasians, born of Vietnamese mothers and American fathers. He found the former location of the bar where he had survived the woman’s attack; the shabby state cafeteria there reminded him of ones in East Germany.

  BACK AT HOME IN HAMBURG, KRETZ LOOKED for
and found two articles in his files: a Saigon newspaper clipping about the terrorist attack on the bar, and one from his last assignment in South Vietnam, about ten-year-old Kim Phuc, the napalm victim, home from hospital. Another miracle, he said to himself, comparing their escapes from death.

  When he had first begun in journalism, Kretz’s attitude towards his profession had been: “You cover it as you see it, and you move on.” From Vietnam, he had gone on to cover the conflict in Nicaragua between left-wing Sandinista rebels and the American-backed right-wing government. Yet, perhaps calling up the empathy he felt as a parent—Kretz’s son was now nine—he had found himself prey to tugs of emotion, from time to time discreetly taking dollars out of his pocket and putting them into the hands of a poor Nicaraguan mother.

  The fade of Kim Phuc’s smile during their shoot together that day in Trang Bang replayed in his mind. He recalled his self-apology: I should have been a doctor. Now it rang as excuse. He was decided: he would find her and see how she had fared.

  Kretz contacted the Vietnamese representative in the liaison office in Bonn (West Germany and Vietnam had not restored full diplomatic ties). In charge was an English-speaking woman named Dr. Nguyen Lam Phuong. She was not a medical doctor; she used the title to emphasize her Western education. Kretz thought she looked less like a north Vietnamese cadre than a cabaret singer in a Paris music hall, what with her deep bangs, pageboy hairstyle and stiletto heels. But most atypical was her inclination to be helpful. Kretz did as she suggested and composed a request on Stern letterhead for her to pass on to Hanoi. In it, he explained his wish to see again the girl in the famous picture, whom he had met a decade earlier.