CHAPTER 4

FIRST CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL, SAIGON

THE VIEW FROM INSIDE THE MORGUE

11 JUNE 1972

I do not remember being placed inside the morgue at the First Children’s Hospital in Saigon, but the reality that I was left for dead while still quite alive would haunt me for three decades. I had been comatose upon my arrival, slipping momentarily in and out of consciousness although never entirely coherent. I had been unable to say to the hospital staffer, “No, no, do not take me to the morgue. I am not dead yet! I know it looks like I am dead—or at least on my way to dead—but I am still here! I am in here somewhere.”

If only Ma or Dad could find me.

What I did not know was that Ma, my dad, and Number 5 were frantically searching for me, having no idea where I had been taken—and by whom.

Three days earlier, just after the napalm bombs dropped, my great-uncle had caught up to me and the reporters and photojournalists attempting to come to my aid.

As one of the Associated Press (AP) photographers, Huynh Cong “Nick” Ut, was wrapping a borrowed raincoat around my bloody, skinned body, Great-Uncle approached and hollered, “The children! Please take the children to hospital!”

Despite my undeniable debilitation, I had not been the only child injured that day. Hearing the exhortation, the photographer led me to his AP van, carefully got me and the others inside, and told the driver to rush toward town.

Nick Ut (pronounced “oot”) was only twenty-one years old and had been on the scene somewhat accidentally, having decided to come to Trang Bang on a whim the night before. The battle between South Vietnamese forces and the Viet Cong for control of my village had been raging for three days, and the young photographer figured that perhaps it was ready to come to a head. At 8:00 a.m. he drove to a spot only a kilometer or so from the temple where my family and I were hiding and set up his camera, capturing for several hours shots of smoke rising from bombings in the distance; of military jets overhead; of rivulets of frantic refugees fleeing Trang Bang, trying to avoid certain death.

Uncle Ut, as I would come to call him, had been mostly self-trained in photography, deciding at age seventeen to follow in the footsteps of his brother, an AP wartime photographer who had been killed on assignment in 1965 when communist forces overtook the Mekong Delta. Although Uncle Ut was not an especially skilled photographer, he was teachable. He had worked his way up from being a darkroom assistant to being a field photographer, determined to make his brother proud.

Uncle Ut would later tell me that he had planned on turning back and heading for Saigon just before lunchtime on June 8, that he had enough photos to call it a day. But as he was packing up his cameras and batteries and film, crimson and gold streaks flashed in his peripheral vision. “That is not a bomb,” he said aloud. “That is a signal.”

He dropped his bags to the ground and positioned himself to document what was happening, first capturing the four bombs dropping from the Skyraider; then the wave of fire and smoke; then soldiers and civilians running for their lives; and then, as it turns out, me. As I ran along Route 1, Uncle Ut snap, snap, snapped his camera shutter, wondering as I got closer why I wore no clothes. It was only when I passed him that he could see my body was burned.

“I am dying! I am dying!” he heard me cry, prompting him to set down his camera and come help me. Not only did he save my life that afternoon—he also logged proof of my days. The sum of what I know from that day and the days to follow, I owe to Uncle Ut. His memories became my memories when I fell unconscious.

As soon as the AP van sped away, Great-Uncle went to find my parents and convey to them three terrible truths: Their daughter had been burned; she had passed out from shock; and she had been taken by some stranger to some hospital, somewhere in South Vietnam.

My brother and my parents traveled on foot from our village of Trang Bang to Saigon, joining those refugees who were also running away. Route 1 was a crush of people attempting to escape the inferno that our province had become in the swift moment it took for that single plane to appear overhead. But I have to believe my parents were the most desperate of them all. When Ma and Number 5 questioned the staff at the closest clinic they could find, Bac Ha Hospital in Cu Chi, a town twenty kilometers from where I was located, they were told, “The girl is not here.” When Dad questioned the staff at Cho Ray, Saigon’s largest general hospital, he was told, “The girl is not here.”

Unbeknownst to Ma and Dad, they both were heading to First Children’s Hospital—a journey of just over fifty kilometers that had taken three long days to cover. On June 11, my parents arrived within hours of each other, each one convinced they had finally located their daughter. When the staff there told my ma and brother, “She is not here,” a sense of quiet resignation threatened to overtake them. My ma did not give in, though, instead whispering to my brother, “We look anyway.” And so they did, searching all eight floors of the facility, room by room, determined to find their little Kim Phuc.

During that search, Ma happened upon a man who worked in custodial services for the hospital. “Have you seen a young burn victim, a girl of nine years?” she sputtered out, anxious for any indication of my whereabouts. “She would have been admitted in the past two or three days.”

Wartime burn victims rarely survived, a fact this man must have surely understood. In response to my ma’s plea for answers, he lazily pointed his mop toward a small structure just outside the hospital’s main doors and mumbled, “That room there? That is where they put the ones who die.”

My ma gathered her strength and walked toward the outbuilding, having no idea what awaited her behind the closed door.

In fact, Uncle Ut had tried to find help for me in Cu Chi, but the nurses there had refused to accept me. They did not have the staff to tend to me, they told him, nor did they possess the resources to treat severe burns. Uncle Ut showed them his media credentials and issued to them a not-so-subtle threat: “You will treat this girl today, or else you will find great trouble tomorrow.”

As Uncle Ut pocketed his credentials and turned to rush to the AP office where he would file the day’s stunning shots, the nurses at Cu Chi accepted me at once.

In that hospital staff’s defense, they did their best to address my needs, bandaging my wounds and arranging my transfer to Saigon’s First Children’s Hospital, a larger, more sophisticated facility that in their minds would be better equipped to manage my care. But in the end their actions were a death wish issued on my behalf; the doctors and nurses there in Saigon looked me over, assessed the third- and fourth-degree burns that had seared all three layers of my skin as well as the muscles and ligaments that held together the bones of my small body, and determined I was a hopeless case. They had seen scores of similar situations already throughout the tragic war years, and napalm-burn victims never survived. And so, in my unconscious state and with nobody present to advocate on my behalf, I was left to die.

Inside the hut that had been designated as First Children’s morgue, I lay curled into myself on a small cot. My hair had been singed and was now clumped by pus and blood. My face was swollen to three times its normal size. The bandages that had been wrapped around my neck, arm, and back at Cu Chi were soaked through, the fluids from my wounds gluing them to my charred skin. And my skin was beginning to rot, filling the air with a nauseating metallic stench.

There was a young boy lying on the cot beside mine, and despite my horrifying state, he was worse off still. He had sustained deep burns from firecracker-play gone awry, and his wounds had gone untended for so long that maggots now feasted on his flesh. My ma would tell me later that some of those maggots had made their way to my cot, my face, and my inner organs, now exposed. The sight of creatures devouring her daughter caused her to shiver in disbelief.

Pulling her shawl up to cover her nose, my ma came to my side and lifted my burned body onto her lap. She wept then, knowing nothing else to do. Her little girl was gone, and she had not even said goodbye.

My ma was not alone in the room, for seated next to her was the little boy’s mother, there to grieve the loss of her child as well. After many minutes spent in silence, the woman glanced up at my ma and asked with a whisper, “If I may: Who is Danh?”

A certain darkness came over my ma’s already somber countenance. My precious three-year-old cousin, Danh, the little boy I loved as a brother, had not been fast enough to outrun the fire. In the rush from the temple, mothers and grandmothers had scooped up the babies from our village who could not yet walk. Danh was made to run on his short, chubby legs that were accustomed to toddling about, not moving quickly with balance and grace. Danh made it several feet out on the open road before a tenderhearted soldier caught sight of him and swept him up into his arms. The soldier ran and ran, but could not find his way out of the smoke. The fire overtook the soldier’s entire body, burning him up and causing him to drop Danh to the ground.

By that time my grandmother had caught up to Danh and picked him up from the road. But it was too late; every inch of Danh’s frame had been scorched. As Grandma ran with him toward safety, her bare feet slapping the puddles that dotted the ground, the skin of the little boy in her arms peeled off and flapped in the breeze, giving him the appearance of a molting animal. Danh was dead.

My aunt Anh lost two sons as a result of the napalm bombs—Danh that day, and nine-month-old Cuong, who died two months later. Like me, she had suffered burns, and the scars on her left leg and left hand would be a constant reminder of the horror.

“Danh is my nephew,” my ma replied. “He died in the bombing of our village three days ago.”

The woman looked with sympathy at my ma and said, “Your daughter has been silent except for once yesterday, when I heard her scream, “Danh. Wait, Danh. Danh! I go with you.”