The Day I Saw a Naked Girl Running From the War and Into the History of Vietnam

A great puff of ugly black smoke was rising on the skyline as we drove up Route One from Saigon one overcast day in June 1972. North Vietnam’s Easter offensive was raging. I had picked up the car, driven by a driver I trusted, outside the venerable Continental Hotel. A Brit, Willy Shawcross, later the author of books on the war and much else, and his girlfriend were in the back seat.I asked the driver to head toward the smoke. We stopped at a clutch of reporters and photographers up a side road. Ahead were the thatched homes of Trang Bang, 28 miles northwest of Saigon. A sign said, “Welcome visitors,” but the town appeared dark and foreboding. At the center loomed a Cao Dai temple — a Vietnamese religion combining folk worship with Buddhism and Catholicism.Then, we saw a naked girl and her little brother, their faces contorted in agony and terror, running toward us — away from the smoke, from the napalm the A1 had dropped on the town. South Vietnamese soldiers were firing toward the North Vietnamese, entrenched among trees on the edge of the town.The girl and her brother had escaped, scarred for life but alive and able to flee. I went into the town with an interpreter. On the way, we ran into a woman clutching her baby, burned by the napalm. “My baby is still talking, save him,” she implored. Four of her seven children had been scalded.“Nobody but soldiers and civilians were standing on the road where the planes dropped the oil bombs,” she told us. Globs of napalm gleamed where the napalm canisters had burst into orange flame. A sergeant said half a dozen civilians and one or two soldiers had been burned, but villagers believed the real number was higher. The A1 pilot had confused the purple from a smoke grenade as signaling where to drop the canisters. More than half a century later, “the girl in the picture,” Phan Thi Kim Phuc, is all that’s remembered from that horrifying day. Her image, captured by one of the photographers on the road that day and distributed by the Associated Press bureau in Saigon, symbolizes the horrors of a decade in which Americans fought for the South Vietnamese against North Vietnamese forces armed by Communist China.Images of the girl, her brother and another small child ran above my story on the front page of the Chicago Tribune, for which I was working at the time, and in hundreds of papers around the world, I hadn’t looked at it again until getting a call from someone gathering material for a documentary. She wanted to know what I knew about the shot.I suggested she call the man who had been on the photo desk at the AP bureau in Saigon, Carl Robinson, when rolls of undeveloped film came in from both the AP’s photographer at the scene, Nick Ut, and from a freelancer or “stringer” who was also there. Carl suspected the shot was taken by the stringer, but the credit had gone to Nick as directed by the AP photo chief, Horst Faas. Nick won a Pulitzer for the shot.I got one other call about the picture — from a woman at the AP asking me whether I had seen Nick at the scene. I didn’t know him but suggested she call Carl and the New York Times correspondent, Fox Butterfield, whom I had seen there. The documentary, called “The Stringer,” showing at the Sundance Film Festival at Park City, Utah, delves into doubts about who took it. AP’s study concludes Nick was the man.Nearly 30 years ago, 20 years after the fall of the old Saigon regime, I revisited Trang Bang. “My two little sons were killed on the spot,” a woman named Du Ngoc Anh told me for a story I wrote for Newsday. “My baby daughter died three months later.” She showed me the napalm scars she suffered. “In cold weather, my legs still ache.”An elderly man, Phan Thanh Tung, sitting in his newly built house behind the Cao Dai Temple, where the napalm scorched the earth, looked back. “We were citizens,” he said. “We were in the middle.” His wife talked about the terror as flames engulfed the town: “Sometimes I can’t sleep at night.”To me, the memory of the girl running down the road is what counts, not who snapped the picture.

The Day I Saw a Naked Girl Running From the War and Into the History of Vietnam

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