A couple million civilians died in the Vietnam War, and many more were maimed. Much of this carnage was caused by American bombs. Some of those bombs were filled with an incendiary gelling agent called napalm designed to set things, and people, on fire. On June 8, 1972, Phan Thị Kim Phúc was one such victim of a napalm bombing. The photo of her running naked down the road, her body terribly burned, won a Pulitzer Prize.
--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: June 8, 1972--
Nine-year-old Kim Phúc lived in the South Vietnamese town of Trảng Bàng, which the North Vietnamese Army had attacked and occupied. She was fleeing the town with her family and several South Vietnamese soldiers when a South Vietnamese pilot, thinking the group was the enemy, dropped napalm on them. It may not have been an American pilot, but it was American weaponry dropped by an American ally.
Her clothes were on fire and she tore them from her body, which is the only reason she survived. Two of her cousins did not. She suffered third degree burns. She later recalled that when the photo was taken, she was screaming “Too hot! Too hot!”
The New York Times was at first hesitant to publish the photo because of the nudity, but eventually decided to put it on the front page the following day. Immediately after snapping the image the photographer, Nick Ut, took Kim Phúc and the other injured children to a hospital in Saigon. Due to the extent of her burns it was believed she would not survive. She spent 14 months in hospital and underwent 17 skin graft surgeries. A full decade later she had a surgery at a specialized clinic in West Germany that gave her full movement again.
The infamous “Nixon tapes” reveal the president’s doubting the veracity of the photo, saying to his chief of staff, “I’m wondering if that was fixed.” What a piece of shit. Not as bad as president baby hands, but still really fucking bad.
Anyway, Phúc moved to Cuba in 1986 to study medicine, and there she married in 1992. The couple travelled to the romantic paradise of Moscow for their honeymoon. On the return trip, when the plane stopped in Gander, Newfoundland to refuel, the couple asked the Canadian government for political asylum, and it was granted.
Now a grandmother, Kim Phúc lives a life far beyond the nickname “Napalm Girl” that was given to her. She became a Canadian citizen in 1997 and works to help child victims of war via the Kim Foundation International. She and the man who snapped the iconic photo remain close friends. Ut, who was born in Vietnam and now lives in the U.S., appropriately named his photograph “The Terror of War.”
NOTE: This piece was researched and written by a human, not some bullshit "ai" plagiarism software.
Those who cannot remember the past need a history teacher who says “fuck” a lot. Get both volumes of ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY SH!T WENT DOWN at JamesFell.com/books.
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