How she hated this photo! And how she resented the photographer for having captured her, on June 8, 1972, in that moment of absolute suffering and vulnerability, that moment when, a 9-year-old girl caught in the Vietnam War, she fled a bombardment by napalm, naked since her clothes were reduced to ashes, her back, legs, arms ravaged by a fire at 3,000°C! How was it possible, she thought, that newspapers around the world had dared to publish the image of a child screaming in pain and fear, risking burning to death? And why, among thousands of photographs illustrating the war, had the history books retained this photo, which froze her forever as a victim? For a long, long time, Kim Phuc felt anger, bitterness, and even, “yes, you can write it, despair”.
“I wanted to die because of this photo”, she confides to us, fifty years after this bombing, sitting in front of the iconic photo exhibited in Milan, as part of an exhibition dedicated to its author, the photographer Nick Ut, who was only 21 years old in 1972. “I couldn’t bear to be ‘the little girl with the napalm’ anymore. She stole my life, it locked me in the drama, I was no more than that: “the ideal victim”, exploited by the communist government of Hanoi to serve its propaganda. This photo was my prison for a long time…”
It was on returning to her village of Trang Bang, after fourteen months of hospitalization in Saigon, sixteen skin grafts and treatments that had often made her faint from pain, that Kim Phuc saw her for the first time. time. The photographer, who had won a Pulitzer Prize, had given a print to her father, and the child looked at it first with embarrassment, then with horror. Then she forgot him. She had many other problems.
She suffered martyrdom
His once prosperous family had lost everything in the war. Her parents deployed a thousand tricks to support their eight children, but had little money to buy painkillers or creams that could have relieved the little girl. And Kim was in agony. She moved with difficulty; his hands, deformed, had trouble grasping an object, his pains were shooting. The only way to find respite was to pound her flesh to stimulate blood circulation, she asked her siblings to hit her with both hands.
The whole family was also called upon to help him do exercises that could restore his strength and flexibility: rotating his head while keeping his torso still, working his fingers to prevent them from curling up. Everyone took care to prevent her from scratching until she bled to calm her itching, ran to buy ice to put on her back or her neck when she was too hot, because her skin, unable to sweat, was often boiling hot. . But they felt helpless in the face of his recurring headaches and bouts of pain that made him cry out.
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