On the morning of June 8, 1972 the Vietnamese photographer Nick Ut He showed up like every day at the Eden building, where the Associated Press offices were located in Saigon, and left for the destination entrusted to him for that day: the Trang Bang village, some forty kilometers northwest of the city, where an imminent Vietcong offensive was announced. Ut was alone with the driver in one of the AP vans (the war had already entered its last phase and most of the European correspondents had taken it for granted when the Americans began to evacuate their heavy artillery). A few kilometers before reaching the village, Ut and the driver ran into a contingent of villagers on foot, by car or bicycle leaving the area. A little further on, the trip came to an end: South Vietnamese troops and press vehicles waited in the middle of the road for aircraft to bomb the village that was supposed to be occupied by the Vietcong. A few minutes later they had before their eyes a familiar spectacle: the flash of white phosphorus heralding the flare of napalm. They were only struck by the fact that the sound of Vietcong anti-aircraft guns defending themselves could not be heard amidst the din. What they did hear, however, when the planes were lost in the distance, were the bloodcurdling screams of a group of children from the village who burst from the thicket in the middle of the route. One of the creatures had ripped off its burning clothes and was stumbling around naked, howling, arms outstretched.between soldiers who looked the other way.
the girl was called Kim PhucShe was nine years old and was the sister of the thirteen-year-old boy seen on the left of the photo. While Ella Ut was shooting her camera, she understood that the girl was shouting at that brother, and what she was saying was: Nong qua, nong qua! (“It burns a lot, it burns a lot!”). Ut and her driver managed to stop her and poured the water from her canteen on her body. After her they loaded her into the van and drove to the Cu Chi hospital. Knowing that doctors treated napalm victims according to their severity (read: only those who had a chance of surviving), Ut showed his AP credential, shot his camera a couple of times, said he would return in a few hours to check the girl’s condition and continued on to the Eden building in Saigon.
The photos were hastily developed in the AP darkroom, sent as radio photos to Tokyo, and from there to New York, where a major brawl ensued between the editors, who refused to give frontal nudity. The legendary Horst Faas, who came to Vietnam from Algeria in 1962 and was head of the AP in Saigon, yelled at them over the phone that this was Pulitzer material if they listened to him and kept the photo wide-framed, without doing close-up on the camera. chick. That’s how the photo was published, that’s how he went around the world, that’s how won the Pulitzer in 1973 (although erroneously attributed to the American photographer Nick Pat, something that would be corrected three years later).
The image was so shocking that the General Westmoreland, military commander of US troops in Vietnam, had to come out and declare that it was “a strictly domestic incident”: South Vietnamese troops believed the Vietcong were still in the village when they bombed; no American soldiers had participated in the operation. For the Yankees, it was about avoiding another scandal like the My Lai one at all costs (Westmoreland went so far as to report the names of the ship’s crew, belonging to the 518th squadron of the South Vietnamese Air Force, based in Bien Hoa). Still, the little Kim Phuc became a “national symbol of war” that the Vietnamese communist government was able to use effectively in the following years.. And not just for internal use: on the tenth anniversary of that photo, Stern magazine offered to pay for Kim Phuc’s reconstructive surgery in West Germany (a total of seventeen transplants) in exchange for an exclusive. And, in the mid-1980s, the Prensa Latina news agency announced that Kim Phuc was in Cuba studying pharmacology, in a socialist student exchange program.
Meanwhile, Nick Ut had managed to board one of the last helicopters to leave Saigon in 1975, landed in the Philippines and then in a refugee camp at Pembleton Marine Base, where he was rescued and hired by the Associated Press. for its subsidiary in Los Angeles. Before leaving Saigon, Ut had passed through the village of Trang Bang a couple of times and learned that, against all odds, Kim Phuc had survived and was slowly recovering from his injuries. But he only saw her again in 1987, when the Los Angeles Times proposed a meeting with Kim in Cuba, fifteen years after the famous photo. A little later, the phone rang in the middle of the night at Ut’s house in Los Angeles: it was Kim from Canada. He had requested political asylum when the Cubana plane in which he was going on vacation to Moscow stopped to refuel on Canadian soil. Ut made the pertinent calls and managed to get Kim Phuc to stay and live in Ontario with her North Vietnamese husband, Bui Hu Toan, whom he had met and whom she had married in Havana.
Nick Ut returned to Vietnam twice: in 1993 he opened the Hanoi correspondent of the Associated Press and in 2002 he was in Trang Bang, where Kim Phuc’s family still lives, just a few hundred meters from the bombing that destroyed the village in 1972. Much has changed since then in the area: the road is wider, the Cao Dai temple is higher, there is electricity and running water and even satellite television in the town. Phan Thanh Tam, Kim Phuc’s older brother who appeared next to him in the photo, runs an open-air bar at the exact scene, on the side of the road. Every time he is asked to pose next to the famous photo, which he has framed behind his back, he accepts with a smile and offers the guest book, which contains the signatures of the many journalists who have interviewed him. But the earnings that he leaves the bar are rather meager: he had to cancel his telephone line and only communicates with his sister by letter.
As for Kim Phuc, in 1997 she was named a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador, in 1999 a book was published about her (The Girl in the Picture, written by Denise Chong) and in 2002, after being received by the queen of England, created the Kim Foundation for War Orphans, financed by voluntary donations, with headquarters in Ontario and Chicago. But to this day she has not returned to her native country: “I am still not ready, neither emotionally nor financially,” she declared the last time she was required by the press, on June 8, 2007, the date on which she turned 35. years of that photo that symbolizes like no other the atrocities of Vietnam. Irony of ironies: that same day, Nick Ut managed for the second time in his life that a photo of him occupied the front page of the most important American newspapers. It was the image of another girl crying and screaming hysterically. But it was not an image of war; not even of a tragic event: it was a close-up of Paris Hilton, entering a limousine at the Department of Justice in Los Angeles, to serve her 23-day prison sentence.
* The original version of this note was published in Page 12 on April 17, 2009.