CHAPTER 3

ROUTE 1, TRANG BANG

“TOO HOT! TOO HOT!”

08 JUNE 1972

From what I could tell, this “Jesus Christ” whom the soldier summoned must have been occupied with other business that day, for neither he nor any of the other gods I had worshiped as a child were able to curtail the circumstances that came our way.

The soldier’s commands left no room for ambiguity, and so we who had been living in the temple did as we were told: With us children leading the way, we fled the outbuildings; we ran toward the front of the temple grounds; we made our way from the property onto the adjacent road, Trang Bang’s Route 1; and we pedaled our legs as fast as they could carry us as hell rose up to clutch earth.

Seconds later, I caught sight of an airplane closing in on me. It was jolting to take in something so immense, so fast, and so earth-shatteringly loud, and the magnitude of its presence left me paralyzed there on the road. My jaw fell open as the plane whizzed past, its massive grey underbelly temporarily eclipsing whatever traces of sunlight had broken through the morning’s storms. Perhaps I would have stood there for an eternity, my feet unable to move, my entire being fixed to that gravel road, were it not for what I saw next.

The fly-by was not an inconsequential event, for falling from that underbelly were four large ice-black bombs. And as the bombs softly made their way to the ground, landing one by one, somersaulting end over end—whump-whump, whump-whump, whump-whump, whump-whump—I knew I had to flee. These were not bombs that fell heavily from the sky, as I had heard that bombs would do; no, these bombs all but floated down. There was something sinister in those cans.

“Nooo! Nooo!” I screamed to nobody but the air surrounding me, all of the other children and soldiers having disappeared into the dense clouds of smoke that now encroached. Route 1 was known as the longest stretch of the famous Asian Highway Network, running through Tokyo and Korea, through Hong Kong and Bangladesh, through Afghanistan and Iran, even to where Turkey meets Bulgaria, and yet out of all the possible stretches along that road I could have found myself, I had to be here, in Trang Bang, where Route 1 and all its inhabitants were dissolving into explosions of raging fire. I will die here on this road. I will be taken to death in these flames.

If you had asked me on June 7, 1972, the day before those bombs fell, about the worst pain I had ever known, coy, quiet, shy little Kim Phuc Phan Thi probably would have bashfully shrugged her shoulders, cut her eyes this way and that, and eventually said, “Em . . . falling from my bicycle and scraping my knee?” Then she would have nervously giggled over the attention being paid her.

This was the nature of my childhood, or at least the eight-year span that was marked by love, laughter, and precious few discomforts to report. But after June 8, 1972, my answer forever would change. What a difference a day makes, indeed.

At the center of my experience that summer day was a certain terrifying and tactical weapon known as napalm, so named for the two primary components that give it its gelling quality, the things that make it so thick: naphthenic and palmitic acids. Despite its prevalence during my country’s civil war, I had never heard of napalm before it invaded my province and my body, but after that isolated introduction, I can tell you it is the fiercest adversary a human being ever could meet.

The trouble with napalm is twofold: First, its sticky nature causes it to adhere in unrelenting fashion to anything and everything it touches—including human skin; and second, once it adheres, it burns to dust whatever that target once was.

Neither my immediate caregivers that day nor I fully grasped the mechanics of how napalm burned; all we knew was that I was on fire, badly in need of help. Years later, I would learn that this was no ordinary fire. Water boils at two hundred and twelve degrees Fahrenheit, and an average building fire, at its hottest, burns somewhere between twelve hundred and fifteen hundred degrees. But napalm? It burns at five thousand. Napalm means business every time it shows up. Unfortunately, it came to my village that day.

The flames first chased me from behind. My legs were propelling my body up the road as fast as they could take me, but I was neither the swiftest of runners nor known for being a vigorous child. I was wearing typical clothing for the region, a loose-fitting, tunic-style cotton blouse over wide-legged cotton pants, and the fact that I did not have on a heavy flak jacket, as the soldiers all wore, may have well saved my life. The flames clung to the synthetic material of those jackets and refused to let go, creating something of a high-temperature oven for the soldiers wearing them. Their death was quick and sure. But the very flames that took their lives were partially extinguished in the fibers of my clothes. As the fire whisked away my garments, the licks of heat that remained on me had already lost much of their force.

Still, the effects of the napalm had done much damage, and as I continued to run up Route 1, now naked and shrieking in pain and fear, anyone and everyone who caught sight of my backside—my neck, my back, my arm—received quite a shock indeed. My skin had burned away as though it were simply a swimsuit peeling off, and in plain view was the pale, thin underlayer of skin that had never before seen the light of day. I continued rushing ahead, having no idea where I was going or what I would find once I arrived.

Where is Ma? Where are my siblings? Where are the armed men who had been charged with protecting my family from this very threat? Why is this happening to us . . . to me? How will I survive such heat?

I had no idea how I had arrived here naked, afraid, and alone.

Shell-shocked soldiers shoving us out of the temple.

The roar of engines blasting across the sky.

Metal monsters descending to earth: one, two, three, four.

Flames licking, tasting, devouring the rain-soaked road.

Nothing but fire.

Too hot! Too hot!

Before I could take in all that was happening, fire had crept up my arm, and in the same way you might brush off a pesky bug that happens onto your sleeve, reflexively I reached my right hand over to my left arm and whisked the flames away. Of course I did not know that I was brushing away sticky napalm, which is why today, in addition to the more penetrating scars that run up and down my left side, I still bear on my right hand the searing pain associated with burns of this sort.

Eventually, my stamina ran out. I felt so weary that I had no option but to stop there in the middle of the road, despite everything inside of me begging me to plow ahead. As the distance between the fire and me grew, the smoke cloud surrounding me began to dissipate, and I could see there at my side two of my brothers, two of my cousins once-removed, a group of stunned South Vietnamese soldiers, and various reporters, journalists, and photographers dressed in military fatigues who now were on the scene.

“Nóng quá! Nóng quá!” I shouted, hopeful that someone—anyone—would come to my aid. “Too hot! Too hot!” I was screaming. I was desperately, painfully hot. From the inside out, I was hot. Although no flames were visible on my body, napalm had worked its way deep into my skin, torching everything in its path. I was being cooked down to my bones, and in that moment, I wanted more than anything in the world to escape the torment.

One of the reporters present, a man I would later learn was a Mister Christopher Wain from the British Broadcasting Corporation, reached for his canteen and began pouring small sips of water down my throat, and with each swallow, I hoped that the liquid would snuff out the volcano erupting inside of me. How I longed for the agony to end. And yet it would only get much worse.

Moments after those cherished gulps, kind Mister Wain, hearing my continued pleas for help, for someone to help me not be so hot, then lifted his canteen over my head, tilted it so that the cool fluid could wash over me, could extinguish all my fires, the water raining down my head, my neck, my back, my legs. Neither of us could possibly have known then what we both fully understand today: Because napalm partially combusts oxygen wherever and whenever it encounters it, dousing me with water, whose molecular structure includes oxygen, was the worst possible thing to do. I caught on fire all over again.

There on the main road leading into my beloved village, standing in what was once the place of beauty and abundance I had called home my entire life, surrounded now by well-meaning onlookers desperate to see me survive the type of burn that nobody ever survives, I fainted dead away.