Vietnam napalm victim says `God used me that day’

c. 1998 Religion News Service CLEVELAND _ With one small, graceful gesture _ merely inching up the sleeve of her sweater _ Phan Thi Kim Phuc becomes a jolting reminder of the devastation of war. The mottled, raised scars begin halfway up her forearm and claw their way around her shoulder and across her entire […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

CLEVELAND _ With one small, graceful gesture _ merely inching up the sleeve of her sweater _ Phan Thi Kim Phuc becomes a jolting reminder of the devastation of war.

The mottled, raised scars begin halfway up her forearm and claw their way around her shoulder and across her entire back. Twenty-six years after the napalm fell, the physical scars still rage. “They are like a knife,” she said, smiling. “They feel like they are cutting me.”


The image of 9-year-old Kim Phuc, running naked and screaming from her village of Trang Bang after a U.S.-ordered strike by a South Vietnamese air unit, remains one of the most searing images of the Vietnam War.

The napalm, a jellied gasoline, scorched 75 percent of her body with third-degree burns. Associated Press photographer Nick Ut captured the little girl on film and then rushed her to a hospital, saving her life. His photo of her anguished, contorted face was published around the world, and is widely cited as having expedited the end of the war.

“I am proud about that,” said Kim Phuc, now 35. “God used me that day. Even though so much of my body was burned, my feet were not burned, and so I could run out and be there for that photo. It saved a lot of souls and brought an end to the war.”

God used me that day. Kim Phuc knows her words cause some to wince and others to question how she could possibly accept her fate that day as God’s will. But she only smiles and then laughs.

Those five words not only embody her spiritual beliefs, they are the driving force behind such activities as her recent appearance at a seminar on anger and rage reconciliation held at a Cleveland health center.

Hers is a message of forgiveness and the healing power of God’s love.

“People ask me a lot, `How can you smile all the time?”’ Kim Phuc said. “I tell them: `I was never angry. God created me this way. He created me laughing and smiling.’

“And he created that moment when I was burned and photographed so that I could help others. He gave me a life, and then he changed my life, and then he healed me.”


Kim Phuc said she was never bitter, even as she endured a long struggle with physical and emotional pain.

For 10 years after the napalm attack, she was forgotten by the same world public that had been been outraged by her photo image.

“After the war ended, nobody knew me,” she said.

Forget about it _ everybody left was a survivor, she was told. Many others died, she was reminded.

Among the dead were her two infant cousins _ not two of her brothers, as was widely reported. She, her parents and seven siblings all survived, but they lost everything else to the war.

In 1982, a German journalist asked the Vietnamese government what had become of “the girl in the picture.” His inquiry led to a two-year search for Kim Phuc.

When government officials found her, they ordered her to leave medical school and return to her village so they could use her for propaganda. For several years, she was forced to do interview after interview with foreign journalists.


At the time, she was emotionally devastated. But her anguish led her to God, Kim Phuc said. “Deep in my heart now I thank them (the Hanoi government) because I turned to God. I realized I was so unhappy, and even though I tried so hard in my own religion, Cao Dai (a syncretic Vietnamese faith featuring elements of Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism and Christianity), I felt no peace.”My body was weak, I just cried and cried, and finally I went to the library to read every book I could find on other religions.”

Phan converted to Christianity and now regularly shares with audiences how she accepted Jesus into her life and has been healed. “He removed my burden,” she said, touching her heart. “I was free.”

In 1986, KIm Phuc was allowed to study in Cuba, where she met and married fellow Vietnamese student Toan Huy Bui in September 1992. Later that year, they flew to Moscow for their honeymoon; when their plane landed in Newfoundland to refuel, they suddenly decided to defect to Canada.

Last year they became Canadian citizens. They now have two young sons, Thomas, 4, and Stephen, 8 months. The family’s life revolves around the Baptist church to which they belong.

Last fall, Kim Phuc was named an unpaid goodwill ambassador by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). At the same time, she founded the Kim Foundation in Chicago, a nonprofit organization for providing aid to child war victims.

Last November, Phan took her message of forgiveness to America’s war veterans, addressing a Veterans Day crowd at the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C.


“Even if I could talk face to face to the pilot who dropped the bombs, I could tell him we could not change history,” she said. “We should try to do good things for the present and the future to promote peace.”

DEA END SCHULTZ

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