A STORY COMPLETED
New book is the final chapter in lifelong journey of the ‘napalm girl’
Fire Road: The Napalm Girl’s Journey through the Horrors of War to Faith, Forgiveness & Peace Kim Phuc Phan Thi Tyndale Momentum
In many ways, Kim Phuc has never left Route 1 in Vietnam, the highway where Associated Press photographer Huynh Cong (Nick) Ut captured her running on June 8, 1972.
It’s one of the most enduring images of the 20th century, highlighted again in Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s 18-hour PBS series, The Vietnam War. Phuc runs naked toward Ut’s camera, her arms flung away from her body. The nine-year-old is screaming, “Too hot! Too hot!” because of the napalm searing her back and left arm.
For most of her life, Phuc — now Phuc Phan Thi — writes in a new memoir, she tried to run away from that moment when she became the “napalm girl.” Throughout Fire Road, she explains how she came to see her life instead as a journey toward faith and peace.
Phuc’s survival and the errant bombing of civilians in her village outside Saigon by the South Vietnamese military have been comprehensively explored by journalists in the decades since the war, and in Denise Chong’s 1999 book, The Girl in the Picture, that detailed the war from the Vietnamese perspective. Fire Road, written with Ashley Wiersma, completes the picture by adding Phuc’s own voice to the story.
It makes a reader hungry for the flavours of her childhood in Southeast Asia. She writes of her mother’s noodle soups, the guavas and bananas she plucked off the trees outside her family’s home.
Equally rich are the details of how war appeared to a child: Sandal prints on the ground, where Viet Cong had crossed their property during the night. Bright purple-and-gold smoke that marked bombing targets. The deceptively soft whump-whump sound of napalm canisters hitting the ground. Napalm sticks to its victims like jelly, burning through layers of skin and muscle. Phuc writes that the Vietnamese government’s use of her story for propaganda stuck as painfully to her, interrupting her studies and threatening to confine her until she defected to Canada.
Still, Phuc doesn’t dwell on the war, its aftermath or her efforts to distance herself from her government minders. Her focus in Fire Road is her conversion to Christianity and her persistence in persuading her husband and family to join her religious journey.
Phuc writes in the same soothing tone she has when she speaks in public as a UNESCO goodwill ambassador. Even though well-intentioned journalists and doctors may not have helped her move on entirely from her trauma, she has found a balm to ease her pains.
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