‘Napalm Girl’ undergoes final burns surgery
THE woman known globally as “Napalm Girl” has received her final round of burns treatment, 50 years after her village in Vietnam was struck by a napalm bomb.
Kim Phuc was nine years old in 1972 when she was photographed running naked and terrified from her home in Trang Bang, her body covered in third-degree burns after her clothes caught on fire.
The famous photograph, by Vietnamese-american Nick Ut, captured the horror of the moment, won him a Pulitzer Prize and came to symbolise the war’s awful costs.
Ms Phuc, now 59 and a Canadian citizen, has never escaped the pain and the scars she suffered in that attack but, on Tuesday, she received what was reportedly her final course of laser therapy for her scars at the Miami Dermatology and Laser Institute, according to local media reports.
Recalling the moment the bomb struck, killing her cousins, Ms Phuc told NBC 6 South Florida: “I heard the noise, bup-bup bup-bup, and then suddenly there was fire everywhere around me and I saw the fire all over my arm.
Mr Ut remembered how terribly injured she was. “I saw her arm burning, her body burning so badly,” he said. When he managed to get her to a local hospital, the staff initially refused to treat her. “I get upset, I hold my media pass, I say ‘I’m media, if she dies, my picture’s on the front page of every newspaper tomorrow’, … they took her right away inside,” Mr Ut said.
Ms Phuc, writing in the New York Times earlier this month, said she hated the photo for a long time as she struggled to heal emotionally and physically, but that she now appreciated its power.
“It took me a long time to embrace that as a person. I can say, 50 years later, that I’m glad Nick captured that moment, even with all the difficulties that image created for me,” she wrote.
“That picture will always serve as a reminder of the unspeakable evil of which humanity is capable. Still, I believe that peace, love, hope and forgiveness will always be more powerful than any kind of weapon.”