“No more wars, no more deaths”: the photo of the “Napalm girl” turns 50

Half a century later she was photographed naked, crying on a highway with the burned skin while fleeing from a US bombing on a field in Vietnam, the so-called “The Napalm Girl”, Kim Phuctoday a 59-year-old woman still cries out against all wars.

Such was the iconic power of that photo, taken on June 8, 1972, that it is considered one of the factors that made that Vietnam war more unpopular and this precipitated the defeat and departure of the American army a year later.

On the 50th anniversary of that photograph, Kim Phuc is in New York to attend a panel of war reporters alongside Nick Utthe photographer of the AP agency who took that image, but who did not limit himself to that, but later he accompanied her to the hospital to heal her from her raw wounds.

In an interview with Efe, Phuc calmly talks about his own tragedy, but he bursts into tears when he thinks of the wars in progressand that of Ukraine in particular: “There is no just war, every war is a mistake, it consists in killing people, in making people suffer (…) My heart breaks only at the thought of all those who died by my side, and now I repeat … I have to say: No more wars, no more deaths!“.

The story of Kim Phuc makes a movie: after being burned by American napalm and subjected to 17 interventions to save her, the communist regime in Vietnam took her out of the university – where she studied medicine – and turned her into her a weapon of political propaganda against the United States.

On one of those propaganda trips between Moscow and Havana, Kim took advantage of it in 1992 a technical stopover in Canada and defected; She was accompanied by her boyfriend, another Vietnamese man she had met in Cuba; together they obtained political asylum and then full citizenship. They have been married for 30 years and are already grandparents.

On several occasions Kim has described his skin reconstructed like “that of a buffalo”a rough skin without pores that it prevents you from sweating and still gives you painbut he doesn’t mind talking about it and even showing off his extensive scars, saying he prefers to see his skin “as a reminder that I have a missionno longer as a victim, but as a survivor, mother and wife and grandmother who invokes peace ”.

In fact, Kim has spent several decades telling her story, often alongside longtime photographer Nick Ut. a friend-, and created the Kim Phuc International Foundation with the primary purpose of caring for children injured or orphaned by wars.

The interview, in fact, takes place on a large screen where the iconic photo of Kim escaping from napalm appears enlarged.

The mission to tell my life

Kim admits that she had a dream, to become a doctor, and although she was unable to graduate, “somehow I managed to make my dreams come true, not healing one by one, but telling my story and helping to relieve other pains, both physical and emotional. “

That photo that made her suffer and made her famous come to hate her for a long time: “I thought: Why was I photographed like this? She was a naked girl who ran away, ugly, ashamed … But now I am grateful to him: it was a power that was given to me, to change my life. Look at me: I never thought I’d become a goodwill ambassador (UNESCO) or anything I would have been received by the Pope in Rome“, as happened last month.

It is surprising to note that Kim do not look Back In Anger against anyone – “not even against the pilot who released the napalm”, he points out – and has managed to forgive all his enemies. She says it was the discovery of Christianity that helped make it happen, but she is very careful to make any proselytizing comments and she specifies that this was simply her “personal experience of hers” of hers.

Kim doesn’t mind retracing the tragedies of her life, because she believes has the “duty” to tell everything knowing the power of the media, the power to “tell the truth about what is happening and show the new generations the consequences of all wars”.

But to keep anyone from thinking that Kim idealizes her life, she makes one thing clear: that if she had the power to go back and change the past, she would simply cancel that bombing sequence and choose “the life of a normal girl”.

By Javier Otazu, EFE

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