Vietnam: Picture of War Turned into Picture of Love, Hope and Forgiveness
You recognize it when you see it, this iconic photo from the waning years of the Vietnam War.
A 9-year-old girl, naked and screaming, runs down a road with other scared children. A wayward napalm strike by South Vietnamese planes had burned much of her body.
Nick Ut, a photographer for The Associated Press, won a Pulitzer Prize for the June 1972 picture. He also helped get the girl to a hospital, where she spent the next 14 months and, against odds, survived.
The horrific image helped further sour American support for the war. And the girl, Kim Phuc Phan Thi, now a 45-year-old mother of two living outside Toronto, has taken her unsought fame and put it to use over the past decade to help other children victimized by war and terrorism.
All miracles, she said by phone Monday.
“The first picture, yes, it is a symbol of war, and I have no choice,” she said. “But the second picture is my life right now, is a picture of love, of hope and forgiveness. And it is my choice.”
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The other “iconic” photograph of war from Vietnam appears below, along with this comment from former Hanoi Hilton resident Mr. Mike Benge:
“I have problems with sending the accompanying Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan executing Nguyễn Văn Lém, a Viet Cong officer without an explanation of the events that had just taken place prior to the execution. The Viet Cong was head of an assassination squad who had just finished cutting the legs off the wives and killing children who were the dependents of the police under the Genera’s command, and writing on the walls of the barracks where they were staying something akin to this is what you get for collaborating with the capitalistic American pigs. Semper Fi Mike”
Eddie Adams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan executing Nguyễn Văn Lém, a Viet Cong officer.
