The Girl in the Picture

by Denise Chong

  Taking that as a yes, Kretz negotiated the three-way cooperation of Stern, the burn clinic and Dr. Zellner, and the Paris-based humanitarian aid agency Terre des Hommes. He then brought the proposal to Phuong in Vietnam’s liaison office in Bonn. She passed it on to Hanoi.

  Once every week or two, Kretz called to check on a reply. Months went by without so much as an acknowledgment. Phuong, herself frustrated, pledged to facilitate his future dealings with Vietnam when she was in Hanoi—she was due to be posted back in a year. For Kretz, a consolation for the delay was the chance to talk to Phuong at length about Vietnam. It gave him cheer to hear her decry the Communist way of categorizing southerners as good or bad, depending on whether they had the right or wrong revolutionary past.

  A full year had passed without word from Hanoi when Kretz received a letter from Kim Phuc. Dear Papa, it began. After platitudes of greeting, it ended cryptically: I am sick and I have no money. Kretz rang up Phuong. He was blunt: “Jee-sus Christ! A person could die waiting for Hanoi to decide!”

  It was mid-July 1984 before Phuong notified him that Hanoi had given its go-ahead, that Kretz could go collect her. By his own precondition, he and Kim Phuc would leave Vietnam for West Germany unaccompanied, with no minder from the Vietnamese government.

  VIET APPEARED AT THE DOOR OF HUONG and Dai’s flat. “I am taking you to see my boss,” he said to Phuc. The top official in the foreign affairs office for Ho Chi Minh City was a man named Vu Hac Bong. On the way there, Viet scooped Bong’s news: Ho Chi Minh City had received an order from Hanoi to prepare papers for Phuc to go to West Germany for medical treatment. Gleefully, Viet recounted what had transpired when Ho Chi Minh City had advised Tay Ninh: “They were very afraid,” he said. “They did not want you to go. They say to Hanoi: ‘If you let Kim Phuc go, she will never come back!’” Phuc was silently grateful for God’s divine intervention. In this second test, God had answered her again; he had sent Perry Kretz to be her savior. This is God’s way of opening a door to a better future for me, she told herself, with all the certainty of faith.

  ON ONE SIDE OF THE TABLE SAT KRETZ, VIET, Phuc and her parents; on the other, Tam and his usual contingent of aides and security cadres. Tam spoke first, asking Kretz accusingly: “Why are you here?”

  “Why am I here? I’ve come to pick up Kim Phuc, that’s why.”

  “Explain why.”

  “What the hell is this about?” Kretz was indignant. I’m being treated like a prisoner of war, he thought. I will not be interrogated. “You know why. I met her for the first time during the war, then I came back because I wanted to see her again, and now I’m going to get her medical help in West Germany.”

  “We can do it in Vietnam.”

  “If you can do it in Vietnam, then why haven’t you? Why have you waited so long?”

  Tam asserted his dominance in the only way he knew how. “You Americans think that your ways are superior, you always think you know better. You think that your government in the United States—”

  It was Kretz’s turn to interrupt. “I live in West Germany. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He glowered at Tam. “Look, I came here to help. I’m here with the backing of your government in Hanoi.”

  The room fell silent; the Vietnamese had not seen such defiance. Phuc felt sick with panic. God has opened a door, she thought, and Tam is going to slam it shut.

  Finally, Tam spoke. “You must understand our attitude. She is a daughter of Tay Ninh province. The government of Tay Ninh wants only the best for the girl . . .”

  Kretz abruptly pushed back his chair. “Come on, Viet. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

  “Please, please!” Tam gestured at them. “Sit down, please.”

  Tam barked out an order in Vietnamese, and someone scrambled forward with some papers. He turned back to Kretz. “If you think that you can help her, then we can proceed.”

  Kretz affixed his signature to the papers, undertaking to guarantee Kim Phuc’s security en route to Germany, and to guarantee her return to Vietnam. He stood up. “Kim, let’s go. We gotta go.” Phuc’s parents and Viet stood up with them and headed for the van that would take them to Ho Chi Minh City. Tam sent two minions scurrying after them.

  KRETZ LOOKED IN DISBELIEF AT PHUC’S ripped black vinyl shoulder bag. In it she had packed one change of clothes and several packages of dried soup noodles that Nu had insisted she take.

  “That’s all the luggage you have?” Kretz asked. “You have no purse?”

  Phuc laughed. “I have no money!”

  On the highway, Viet turned to look behind. “They sent somebody after us,” he reported.

  In Trang Bang, Kretz stopped for pictures first at the noodle shop, then at the Caodai temple. Each time, the van behind pulled off and the two minders jumped out. At the temple, Kretz was posing Phuc in front when one of them came running forward, yelling to Kretz: “No, no. NO!” Then, to Viet: “Tell the American he cannot take pictures here!”

  “Why can’t he?” Viet demanded to know.

  “We are following orders! He cannot do it!”

  “It is only a temple,” said Viet, “not a military installation!”

  “You do not give orders!”

  The minder put his hand in front of Kretz’s camera. “No!”

  That was not the move to persuade Kretz; the minder was now in some peril. Kretz leaned down so that he could look him in the eye. “If you don’t move away from me, if you interfere with me, I’m gonna kill you.” Despite his menacing tone, the minder did not move. Kretz straightened. In his posture and stocky build was the measure of his ability to use more force than the average person. “You better move away, or something is gonna happen in this town.” The minder took a step back.

  Kretz turned to Viet: “I don’t want to see either of those two”—he waved his hand at the pair—“ever again.” There was an exchange in Vietnamese and, minutes later, the vans headed down the highway in opposite directions.

  THERE WAS ONLY ONE COMMERCIAL FLIGHT from Vietnam to a non-Communist country, and it left once a week: Air France’s Thursday morning flight from Ho Chi Minh City to Bangkok. Phuc and her parents spent Wednesday night in a hotel in Ho Chi Minh City. Neither Tung nor Nu was uneasy that their daughter was traveling on her own with a foreigner; both were elated that she would receive Western medical treatment and medicines.

  The next morning, two dozen family members, neighbors and friends turned up at Tan Son Nhut airport to see Phuc on her way. She was going out; that she would return did not take away from her celebrity in their eyes. She posed for pictures outside the departure gate, then, gripping Kretz’s hand, nervously boarded the airplane for her first ever flight.

  The flight attendant greeting passengers surprised Phuc by recognizing her. “You’re the girl in the picture!” The plane taxied on a runway still scarred by shelling from the final days of the war; several runway bays had fallen into disuse, their concrete veined with weeds. Once the plane was airborne, Phuc’s nerves gave way to wonderment at the perspective on life below.

  In Bangkok, Kretz had Phuc wait for all the other passengers to deplane. To avoid setting foot in the crowded terminal, where he feared she might be recognized, he had arranged for the Vietnamese embassy there to expedite her arrival through diplomatic channels and to have a car standing by on the tarmac. To his disappointment, a gaggle of journalists awaited on the tarmac, cameras at the ready. As he and Phuc appeared, a smiling Vietnamese embassy official bounded up the airplane’s steps with a bouquet of orchids. It was Thach, the one who’d found her for Kretz, and it was he who had notified the local press. The next day’s Bangkok Post carried the story on the front page. The headline: “Napalm girl seeks cure for scars of the terror.” Underneath were two pictures: the famous one; and another of Phuc, in sandals, a floppy cotton hat, and a tired-looking blouse hanging out over loose-fitting black Vietnamese trousers, clutching a bouquet while reaching for Kretz’s hand.

  Kretz checked
himself and Phuc into two rooms at the Siam Intercontinental, one of Bangkok’s five-star hotels. Normally, the regime required all Vietnamese traveling abroad to stay in the guest quarters of their diplomatic compound, where they could be overseen by a minder. Without benefit of an interpreter, Kretz conveyed his strict instructions to Phuc: she was not to answer the telephone; and should anyone knock, she was to look first through the peephole, and to open the door only to him. He also arranged a round-the-clock security guard outside her room.

  The Siam, set in twenty-six lush acres of a former royal estate, was unimaginable luxury to Phuc, from the marble lobby and the pianist playing there to the bedside console with its remote controls and the brass faucets that delivered hot and cold water. In Bangkok, Kretz had one priority: “I’m taking the poorest girl from the poorest country in the world shopping.” From a department store, Phuc chose a couple of crisp blouses, slim pants and a wide-brimmed straw hat. Kretz picked out for her a small rattan suitcase, trimmed in red leather.

  In Bangkok, Kretz and Phuc merited no second glances; in a city notorious for selling sex as tourism, the pairing of a German man in a safari suit with a smiling younger Asian woman was commonplace. Phuc eyed the modern towers and shops and the smartly dressed and well-fed people coming and going, and recalled the crumbling brick and stucco and beggars of Ho Chi Minh City. Since the end of the war, Ho Chi Minh City had been getting poorer, more backward, she realized. (Thailand overtook South Vietnam in economic development during the war; while South Vietnam squandered its subsidized wealth on consumer luxuries, Thailand channeled the wealth of its fast-changing rural economy into the development of a manufacturing and services sector.)

  Kretz granted Thach’s request to entertain Phuc at the Vietnamese embassy one evening. He introduced her there to the ambassador. “Your voice is familiar,” the ambassador said. “Have we met before?”

  “No—this is the first time.” Phuc smiled demurely.

  “I know who you are!” the ambassador exclaimed. “I saw you in the Dutch film!”

  “Oh!” Phuc beamed. “May I see it, please? I have never seen it.”

  Thach cued up a videocassette. Phuc was mesmerized by the twenty-five-minute film entitled Kim Phuc, dubbed in Vietnamese. The narrator began with the Vietnam war and told of the napalm attack that injured her, and how, ten years later, she was a medical student in Vietnam. Never having seen herself on film, Phuc was proud of her performance: she was articulate, her voice was lilting, her smile bright. She was pleased to see in the film Perry Kretz’s black-and-white photographs, the ones he had brought to their reunion. She enjoyed the soundtrack that played over those pictures of her as a child, a children’s song that she knew by heart:

  Last night I dreamed of Uncle Ho

  His beard was long, his hair was gray

  I kissed him tenderly on both cheeks . . .

  The credits rolled over a red sun dropping in the day’s last light. Phuc turned to Thach: “I love it!”

  Thach signed them both up for the staff’s evening meal. It was Phuc’s first taste of Vietnamese cooking from the north. The cuisine of the north is decidedly less colorful and spicy than that of the south—chili peppers, fresh herbs and lime do not grow well in the cooler northern climate. Phuc had no taste for it, and she particularly disliked the sour fish soup. She much preferred the Thai food in the restaurants where she and Kretz had dined.

  When Thach returned Phuc to the hotel, a worried and angry Kretz was pacing about. “I’m supposed to be responsible for her!” he reminded Thach. The Vietnamese official was two hours later than promised. Meanwhile, Kretz had been ringing the embassy. Because it was after hours, nobody had answered.

  KRETZ DELIVERED PHUC TO PHUONG IN BONN The liaison office was located in the leafy suburb of Bad Godesburg, a former spa town on the eastern bank of the Rhine River and the favored location for diplomatic missions. Visitors to the Vietnamese compound had first to pass by a guard at the gate, then through the building’s reinforced steel door, the entrance monitored by closed circuit television.

  Dr. Zellner had come nearly two hundred miles from Ludwigs-hafen to examine Phuc. He was impressed by the quality of her skin grafts and by how well her body had adapted, twelve years on. Almost always, burn victims require follow-up surgery. Transplanted skin is thin and unstable, fusing unevenly and giving rise to contractures of the skin, joints and soft tissue. Surgical release of those contractures often eliminates the pain burn victims complain of, which comes mostly from trying to extend stiffening joints. Normally, such surgery is done one to three years after the initial skin grafting. The longer one waits, the more the contractures harden into an armor-like plate. The release of skin contractures is routine surgery; contracted joints are hard-est to release. The doctor found that Kim had skin contractures, but no joint contractures. Releasing them would allow her to move her neck freely without moving her body, give her near full extension of her arms above her head and lengthen her left arm so that it would be almost as long as her right.

  Phuc was transferred to the clinic. On her second day there, she went into surgery for two and a half hours. Dr. Zellner did two surgical procedures: first, he removed a large band of scar tissue near her left armpit and then covered the resulting wound with transplanted skin from her buttocks; and second, he made two incisions to release one band of scar tissue on her upper right arm and another that stretched from the left side of her neck to her ear, stretching nearby skin over the incisions. At a press conference afterwards, he described the surgery as routine and the patient as recovering well. One week later, he had to redo Phuc’s first skin graft, this time using donor skin from her thigh. He scheduled her discharge for the end of the third week.

  Phuc’s recovery room afforded a view of the extensively landscaped grounds and a helicopter-landing pad. The recovery from surgery was painful. Daily, Kretz called from Hamburg, and she had company in the next bed, arranged by Phuong in Bonn. Hang, a few years older than Phuc, was fluent in German, and ostensibly there to translate with doctors and nurses. Though Phuc immediately concluded that the real reason she was there was to keep an eye on her, the two fell into easy conversation. Years ago, Hang’s parents had sent her to West Germany for her high school education, and after the war, she had stayed on. Now she lived in Ludwigshafen with her boyfriend, also Vietnamese, and neither had any wish to return.

  Envy cast a pall over Phuc. She contemplated what life in the West must be like, and found herself achingly searching the night skies, imagining space without limit. One word began to dance across her mind: escape. Her heart pounding, she prayed silently and in secret: “Dear God, I want to go. But how? There are so many people around me.” She remembered the papers Tam had made Perry Kretz sign. If something happens to me, she told herself, Perry Kretz would have to pay. Resigned to returning to Vietnam, Phuc put her fate in God’s hands. While freedom was not to be hers, she remained convinced that God intended this trip as a way to change her future for the better.

  One day, a postman came to the room to deliver an envelope addressed to Kim Phuc. He asked her to sign to verify receipt of the contents: one thousand German marks (about three hundred and fifty American dollars). The sender was identified only by a German postal box number; there was no name. Hang witnessed the entire transaction. “Keep it,” was all she said to Phuc. “Don’t let them know.” The amount was equivalent to what the average southerner would earn in a year, someone in the north in two.

  To mark their brief friendship, Hang proposed to give Phuc a goodbye present, to replace her Vietnamese plastic sandals with a new leather pair. She had her boyfriend bring a car round and she smuggled her charge, who still had on surgical dressings, out of the hospital. Hang herself drove to a downtown department store. With their purchase in hand, they were heading for the down escalator when two German customers, both men, stopped, staring at Phuc. “Are you Kim Phuc?” one asked. Phuc smiled enigmatically. Casually linking her arm in Phuc’s, Han
g led her away to browse a rack of clothing. Once out of the men’s sight, she pushed Phuc behind it. When she thought it safe, she hurried her back to the car. As Hang drove back to the hospital, Phuc stifled her wish: Take me away. I want to escape! Hang made a nervous joke: “Carrying you around is like carrying around a bomb!”

  In consultations with Dr. Zellner, Phuc was deeply respectful, adopting the reverential demeanor of the nurses. At their final visit together, she had one question: “My dream is to help people, to become a doctor. Could I manage that with my health?”

  Like others who’d read of his famous patient, the doctor thought Phuc was studying medicine in Ho Chi Minh City. Upon meeting her, he’d formed an opinion, though, that she didn’t seem to be of the caliber of a medical student. “A doctor has to be mentally strong when he comes face to face with a patient who is in pain,” he told her. “It would not be good for you, who has to endure pain, to see others in pain, and not good for the patient.”

  Phuc was hanging on his every word. He had more to say: “You have to love your career to be a good doctor. When you are needed, you have to go. Even if you have worked all day, if you are needed in the middle of the night, you have to go.” He suggested that she choose something less demanding. “How about English? You could work as a teacher or tourist guide. As long as you love your career, you can realize your dream to help people and give them happiness.”

  Dozens of journalists crowded into the final press conference at the hospital. Phuong came from Bonn and served as Phuc’s interpreter. Reading from the prepared statement Phuong had given her, Phuc began by thanking those who had made her treatment possible. The statement went on: “My hope and dream is that a hospital can be built for burn patients in my country who do not have an opportunity to go to another country for treatment. There is not only one Kim Phuc in Vietnam, there are many.” As planned, a German corporation announced its inaugural contribution of 1 million marks. Phuc added of her own accord: “I hope the burn hospital in Vietnam can be named after me.” In closing the conference, Kretz made it clear that her ongoing itinerary was private.