The Girl in the Picture

by Denise Chong

  WHEN KIM AND TOAN WERE LATE RETURNING from their honeymoon, rumors that a defection to Canada was the reason reached the Diazes. Nuria kept her silence, but Manuel and Yamilen lamented that, had they known that the couple was planning to leave for good, they could have talked them out of it. Yamilen soon discovered that someone had been before her to Kim and Toan’s residence room. The television, bedding, clothing and shoes, even personal papers, were gone. All that remained, other than a few books, was a Russian plastic roly-poly doll, with a Vietnamese chiffon scarf tied babushka-like under its chin. Its hands were broken. Yamilen gave a push to the lower ball that was its body, sending it rocking and clinking. She picked it up and headed home.

  In early 1993, Tung and Nu in Trang Bang were visited by Tam, the hated bureaucrat from Tay Ninh whom they had not seen in years.

  He wasted no breath on niceties. “Did you tell your daughter to flee Vietnam?”

  “Phuc is in Cuba!” Nu was insulted. Why ask such a thing? she thought.

  “She is in Canada!” Tam declared. “Speak to your daughter. Tell her to go back to Cuba. If she doesn’t go back to Cuba, your whole family will go to jail!”

  Some months later Nick Ut was in Vietnam, again with George Esper. Esper was reopening a bureau there for the AP, marking the news agency’s return after an eighteen-year absence. Relations were opening up between the United States and Vietnam on several fronts, though mostly in readiness for Americans to invest and do business in Vietnam. The turning point for the United States’ attitude towards Vietnam had come the previous fall, in October 1992. Hanoi agreed to hand over archival documents and personal effects relating to MIA cases, and within two months, the United States had authorized American companies to sign contracts in anticipation of the lifting of the trade embargo (the United States would lift it in February 1994, and the two countries would grant full diplomatic recognition to each other in July 1995).

  Though Nick knew Kim Phuc to be in Canada—“Uncle, I escaped,” she’d said on the telephone, pledging him to secrecy—he wanted to hear what authorities would say if he asked where she was. “She is studying pharmacology in Cuba,” was their reply. Later, in Ho Chi Minh City, a fellow diner in a restaurant, a policeman, recognized Nick as the photographer who’d taken Kim Phuc’s picture.

  “Where is she now?” Nick asked.

  “She’s a homeless lady in the city,” the policemen replied, only to be contradicted by another patron, who claimed that Kim Phuc was a pharmacist working in the city.

  About that same time, Vu Hac Bong, the kindly, hale official in Ho Chi Minh City who had arranged a stipend for Kim while she went to school there, asked Merle Ratner to relay a private message on his behalf to Kim Phuc: “Vu Hac Bong wants you to be happy.” As Tet was being celebrated in early 1994, an official from Ho Chi Minh City delivered to Tung and Nu in their mud hut a large basket of candies and sweet cakes, and an envelope. Inside it was Vietnamese dong equivalent to several hundred American dollars. “This is from Pham Van Dong,” the official said. “He loves your daughter Phuc very much.”

  THE MORNING OF NOVEMBER 11, 1996, IN Washington, D.C., was filled with bright sunshine. A crowd of three thousand had gathered for the annual Veterans’ Day Ceremony at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The veteran on the stage, set against the backdrop of the cold, black granite panels listing American dead in Vietnam, introduced the next speaker, a Vietnamese woman named Kim Phuc. Her name had not appeared on the program, but once the picture was mentioned, there were few in the crowd who did not know who she was.

  Included among them was forty-seven-year-old John Plummer. Earlier that summer he’d been channel-surfing and had come across a show on CBS entitled “Where are they now?” featuring, among others, the photographer and the subject of his famous photograph from the Vietnam war. Plummer was astonished to learn that the victim of the napalm attack lived not in Vietnam but in Toronto, a day’s drive from Purcellville, Virginia, where he lived. If she could look into my eyes, Plummer thought, she would see my pain and remorse for what I did to her.

  The first inkling Plummer had had that the picture was a much bigger thing than one day’s news in the Stars and Stripes came some months after he’d returned from his second tour of duty in Vietnam. Twenty-four, divorced and the father of three, he was engaged to be married for a second time and was working as a flight instructor in Fort Rucker, Alabama. One evening, his fiancée and her friends were reading a magazine and it flipped open to that picture. Plummer leaned over and said: “I’m the one who put in that air strike.” The reaction was revulsion. His fiancée shot him a look as if to say, How can you be proud of that? Why would you boast about it?

  Over the years, Plummer had increasingly avoided talk of the war. Those who found out he’d done duty in Vietnam usually had only one question: “Did you ever kill anybody?” He had; he’d shot dead a Vietnamese woman in her twenties, a figure in the night running towards the perimeter of the base he was guarding. American intelligence later concluded that the woman had been captured by the Viet Cong to carry supplies, and that she had escaped and was seeking refuge with the Americans when she was shot. Plummer had kept a picture of the corpse, taken by a fellow infantryman.

  Plummer’s second marriage would end in divorce. His wife would claim he had “problems dealing with the war.” Bullshit, he told himself. He accepted that he had a drinking problem; often he woke up in his truck, or on someone’s couch, wondering how he’d got there. He admitted to no one, however, that there was one reminder of his experience in Vietnam that broke through his defenses every time: the picture of the girl wounded by napalm. It seemed to be everywhere he turned—newspapers, magazines, films on television, even in books on his own bookshelves. Each time Plummer saw it, he was stricken with remorse. It got so that her screams haunted his nightmares of war.

  Only after the military grounded him, and with the support of the woman who would become his third wife, did Plummer start to pull himself together. A committed Christian, she had a brother who had been a helicopter pilot in Vietnam. In 1991, Plummer entered the seminary and four years later became pastor of the Methodist church in rural Purcellville. On the strength of his faith, he came to accept that God had forgiven him the pain he’d caused the girl in the picture. Though he slept better at night, the burden of the remorse he carried never got lighter.

  Some weeks after catching the CBS television show that united the photographer and the girl, Plummer attended a Vietnam veterans’ reunion for helicopter pilots and crewmen. He browsed a table of books, and there, again, was that picture, this time on display alongside a poem. Ambushed by his emotions, Plummer broke down. The poet was nearby, and without asking for explanation, shared a moment of prayer. It turned out the poet knew Nick Ut. Word got to a Canadian filmmaker who was making a television documentary on Kim (entitled Kim’s Story: The Road from Vietnam, it first aired in early 1997) and thus to Kim herself: the American commander who had “ordered” the napalm strike that injured her, now a church minister, had surfaced. Word was that the man was unwilling, however, to come forward publicly.

  Now, on Veterans’ Day, even as Kim Phuc was being introduced, Plummer was reeling. The veteran on stage said that while Kim Phuc had survived the attack, two of her brothers had not (again the mistaken identification of the dead as her brothers rather than her cousins). Plummer was in shock, believing he was responsible for a greater tragedy than he had known.

  Kim stepped to the podium. “Dear friends. I am very happy to be with you today . . . As you know, I am the little girl who was running to escape from the napalm fire. I do not want to talk about the war because I cannot change history. I only want you to remember the tragedy of war in order to do things to stop fighting and killing around the world. I have suffered a lot from both physical and emotional pain. Sometimes I thought I could not live, but God saved me and gave me faith and hope. Even if I could talk face to face with the pilot who dropped the bombs—”

  Plum
mer heard those words and felt they were also meant for him. He scribbled on a piece of paper: “Kim, I am THAT man,” signing it Reverend Plummer.

  “—I would tell him we cannot change history but we should try to do good things for the present and for the future to promote peace . . .”

  At the conclusion of her brief remarks, Kim embraced a retired United States Air Force colonel and former prisoner of war in Vietnam. Jointly, they laid a wreath at the wall. Taps was played. Kim wiped away tears while many in the crowd wept openly, feeling that they had taken a step together along the road back from Vietnam.

  The ceremony over, one of the hosts led Kim through a tangle of television cameras and boom microphones, pausing while she stopped to shake the hands of veterans eager to touch her. As they reached the police cruiser waiting to take her back to her hotel, her host whispered in her ear: “Kim, you know that man you’ve been wanting to find?”

  “Yes?”

  “He’s right behind you.”

  She turned around and looked into a face of pain. She held her arms out.

  Plummer fell into them. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry . . .”

  “It’s okay,” she replied. “I forgive, I forgive.”

  A CONTROVERSY ERUPTED ACROSS THE United States among Vietnam veterans who took exception to Plummer’s admission, “I am THAT man.” Nationwide, the media had picked up the compelling story of one man’s burden that had been lifted by his victim’s forgiveness, first published in a religious magazine that reproduced Plummer’s account posted on the Internet to his Vietnam veteran friends. The controversy finally subsided one year later when Plummer acknowledged that he hadn’t, in the military sense, “ordered” aircraft into action. However, he maintained that he was part of the sequence of events that led to that air strike.

  The truth about memory is that it is powerful, but flawed and only ever fragmentary. There are discrepancies between Plummer’s account of the radio transmission of the air strike and those of journalists on the highway outside Trang Bang that day. One version has an American advisor, one does not; one has no forward aircraft, one has one. Can these contradictions be explained? Does it matter?

  One military historian summed up the Plummer controversy with this comment to The Washington Post: “I got the feeling [Plummer] was putting a lot of guilt on his shoulders when he may have just been a cog in a wheel.” Interviewed for the same article, Kim Phuc said: “Whether or not he played a major role or a minor role, the point is I forgive him.”

  “IT’S A PICTURE THAT DOESN’T REST,” SAYS Horst Faas, when asked to comment on its enduring power. He explains his own reaction when he first saw it, which decided him on the need to bring it to the public. “Pain keeps you conscious,” he says.

  In the voiceless cry of the girl in the picture is the silence of guilt, of public and private flaws. War, any war, not just the Vietnam war, has dimensions of moral ambiguity. This picture is itself ambiguous: who or what the girl is running from is unclear, the extent of her burns is not evident, and whether she will live or die is an unknown. But the state of anxiety conveyed by the camera’s eye concentrates the minds of us, the viewers, simultaneously dispatching each of us into our own personal history of darkness. We privately flail at our human limitations, failings and self-indulgence in the face of the chaos and wrongdoing of war. We who live in places that are “safe” feel chained by our individual helplessness to aid those who live in places that are not.

  Americans were collectively and individually marked by sadness, and for some, shame and remorse, by the Vietnam war—a conflict much disputed, and one that offered few heroes. None of us is without flaws, but our hope is that we can be flawed yet still have a worthiness of character. We feel that when we are forgiven. Yet the power of forgiveness is realized only if it is sought. Though we may wish more from her, this is what the most famous victim of the Vietnam war, Kim Phuc, has to give.

  The picture exerted its power on nobody more than her, its subject. She would be plunged into despair by those who manipulated her life as though the picture were the scaffolding of their own. She suffered, victimized once by the napalm bomb, and yet again by those who would control her. Human nature is to seek redemption for a terrible wrong, and for some, suffering itself is redemptive. Kim Phuc did not find it so. The more she suffered, the deeper she fell into her solitary darkness. She recast herself spiritually, forsaking one religious faith and committing herself to another, and navigated her way out. In paying homage to her as a living symbol of wartime horror and suffering, others, religious or not, feel a hopeful sense of being able to mitigate the darkness together.

  The cycle of war repeats and repeats, the girl in the picture is ever running. One lesson to be taken was perhaps foretold in the Vietnamese fable told to Kim, which she brought to mind when deciding to defect. Kim saw herself as the bird much admired for its plumage and song, and resolved to escape the cage she had been put into. I just want to be free, she told herself. However, the original fable has a twist in its ending: “Each little bird that met with archer Yi was sure to be caught. Such was his prestige. Since the whole world was his cage for them, there was no place where the birds could hide.”

  Kim Phuc will always be the girl in the picture.

  EPILOGUE

  SINCE KIM PHUC’S PRESENCE IN THE West became publicly known in March 1995, media interest in her has been intense and worldwide. For some time she concentrated on her participation in this book, and in the documentary then being filmed, Kim’s Story: The Road from Vietnam. However, in early 1997, one reporter would find his own way to Kim and Toan’s door and wangle an invitation inside. A front-page article and photograph subsequently appeared in The Toronto Star. It told of the famous war victim’s life of poverty in Toronto, of how she, pregnant with the couple’s second child, along with Toan and two-year-old Thomas, lived in a cramped, second-floor duplex. Readers responded by sending in cash donations, which Kim and Toan used for a down payment on a modest, three-bedroom townhouse, blocks from their church, in Ajax, Ontario.

  Among those who saw the award-winning Kim’s Story, which has been sold to some thirty countries, was the Canadian representative for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The representative was moved by Kim’s story of war, and her forgiving nature as depicted in the film, particularly in the meeting between herself and John Plummer following her appearance at the ceremony at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. In November 1997, UNESCO appointed Kim Phuc a goodwill ambassador for a culture of peace to “spread a message of the need for reconciliation, mutual understanding, dialogue and negotiation to replace confrontation and violence . . . ” At that same time, Kim announced the establishment of the Chicago-based Kim Foundation to help child victims of war. She chairs it, and Ron Gibbs, a Vietnam veteran who was instrumental in the decision to build the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, heads it.

  Kim and Toan became citizens of Canada in early 1998. Their second son, Stephen, born in 1997, also has a Vietnamese name, Binh, meaning “peace.” Both pregnancies, but for Kim’s diabetic tendency, were healthy. For the most part, Kim’s health has been strong. The asthmatic condition that began in Cuba vanished upon arrival in Canada, but she continues to suffer pain whenever the weather changes abruptly. Her nightmares of war are rare. She and Toan, sadly, lost their closest friend, Nancy Pocock, who passed away in 1998. Their lives revolve around family; in the fall of that year, Kim’s parents, Tung and Nu, came to Canada, their air tickets paid for by an anonymous Montreal businessman, their exit visas from Vietnam expedited by Ho Chi Minh City after months of equivocation by Tay Ninh province. Both have applied to Canadian authorities for landed immigrant status. Early in 1999, out of the media’s eye, Kim, Toan and their two sons had a quiet, month-long visit in Vietnam with Toan’s father and family. She also met for a last time, Pham Van Dong; he died the following year.

  Kim and Toan, their two sons, and her parents live together in Ajax. Toan ho
lds down a night job, working at a group home, and a day job, taking daily charge of a mentally disabled adult—while also taking Bible courses at the church. He hopes to become a minister. One month after escaping to Canada, while he and Kim were still installed in a motel, Toan accepted Jesus Christ as his savior, and some weeks later he was baptized in a church in Toronto. Kim’s parents, who spend their time caring for their two grandchildren, go regularly with the couple to their church, and when at home read the Bible in Vietnamese.

  Kim’s life outside the home involves speaking and traveling the world on behalf of UNESCO. The position is voluntary. She also continues to bring to audiences, mostly in Canada, her message about her commitment to Jesus Christ. “It was the fire of bombs that burned my body. It was the skill of doctors that mended my skin,” she says. “But it took the power of God’s love to heal my heart.” An Italian filmaker is making Kim the centerpiece of his film on Christianity at the end of the millennium. Meanwhile, a prominent Toronto artist has donated the proceeds of sales of his portraits of Kim, inspired by the famous picture, to a fund to pay for her two sons’ education.

  Two and a half decades after the end of the war, U.S. veterans still find their way to the door of Nick Ut’s home in California. They come to say, “I just want to say thank you for taking the picture; your picture stopped the war,” they tell him. Among those who fled Vietnam at war’s end or in the later exodus of the boat people, some cannot bear to look at the picture. “That picture lost the war for us,” they explain.

  The former American War Crimes Museum in Ho Chi Minh City has been renamed the War Remnants Museum. On this author’s visit there in late 1996, the famous picture that Kim herself once came across on its walls more than a decade earlier was nowhere to be seen. However, there was an entire wall devoted to photographs of civilian war casualties. Among them is a color portrait of Kim and Thomas, which appeared in Life magazine’s May 1995 issue to accompany an article about the subjects of four Pulitzer prize-winning photographs who “struggle to be recognized not as icons but as individuals . . .” The picture shows Kim, her shoulders and back bared to the camera, looking at baby Thomas asleep on her shoulder. In the baby’s smooth skin, her scarred skin seems reborn. The caption reads: “Mrs. Kim Phuc, once a nine-year-old victim of American napalm bombs. (She’s now living in Canada.) A picture of her and her boy brought a World Press Award of 1996.” The photograph is the centerpiece of that wall.