It’s one of the most notoriously disturbing photographs ever taken. It’s a June day in 1972. The camera is pointing down a grass-lined road in Vietnam. In the distance, a curtain of dark smoke obscures the horizon. South Vietnamese soldiers are walking toward the camera, some carrying machine guns in their hands, all with helmets on their heads. A couple of photographers walk with them, one replacing the film in his camera. But none of that is where your eye is drawn. It goes immediately to the children. They run down the road before the soldiers. A boy holds his sister’s hand as they flee. A toddler looks back toward the smoke on the horizon. A boy in the foreground cries, his mouth an open, black, despairing hole. And in the middle of them all: a girl, naked, running down the pavement with bare feet, crying, her arms outstretched, raw with pain as her skin burns from the napalm that was just dropped on her town.
The Pulitzer Prize–winning photo appeared in newspapers around the world. In the United States, it was published on the front page of the New York Times and gave even more momentum to the rapidly mounting peace movement, as protestors took to the streets demanding an end to the Vietnam War. The picture became a thorn in Richard Nixon’s side; the president privately wondered if the whole thing had been staged just to erode his support. Finally, in 1975, nearly three years after the photo was taken, he reluctantly withdrew the last American troops from Vietnam.
Phan Thi Kim Phúc was nine years old when the photo was taken. She lived in Trảng Bàng, a town in South Vietnam, which had been invaded by the Communists in early June. Their troops dug in, waiting for the inevitable American and South Vietnamese retaliation, while Phúc and other civilians took refuge with some South Vietnamese soldiers in a nearby temple.
Two days later, a pair of South Vietnamese bombers appeared in the sky above the town. They circled and then dove, using eight napalm bombs to turn the ground below into a hellscape of liquid fire, mistakenly attacking their own troops and civilians fleeing from the temple. Phúc’s clothes were burned completely off her. Her back and one of her arms were turned into a mess of blisters and peeling skin. Third-degree burns covered more than half her body. She ran, along with her brothers and the rest of the survivors, down the road out of town, naked, screaming, and burning.
That’s when Nick Ut, a photographer with the Associated Press, snapped his infamous photo. He was standing a few hundred metres down the road with a handful of foreign journalists. When Phúc got to them, they gave her water to drink and poured some over her wounds. She passed out. Ut gathered her and some of the other children into his car and rushed them to the nearest hospital, in Saigon. He was sure she was going to die. So were the doctors. It would take fourteen months and seventeen operations before she was finally well enough to head back to a home that had been destroyed.
And her suffering wasn’t over. When the war ended a few years later, Phúc found herself growing up in a communist country. She started studying medicine at university, but the government pulled her out of school so she could use her time to give interviews and pose for photos, used as a propaganda tool for the state. She hated it with a passion; thought about suicide. It took years before she finally convinced the government to let her continue her studies abroad. And even then, she was only allowed to move to another communist country. She attended the University of Havana in Cuba. While she was there, she looked for her chance to escape.
It would come on her honeymoon.
Phúc was convinced she would never find love. Before the bombing, she’d spent her childhood reading tales of romance and marriage, giggling with her best friend as they imagined their future husbands, playing “wedding” with cobs of corn as the bride and groom. “Together,” she later remembered, “we dreamed of the moment when we would meet our long-awaited princes — oh, what beautiful brides we someday would be!” But after the bombing, scarred and in pain, she was sure she’d spend the rest of her life alone. Even that childhood friend shunned her.
“I made an agreement in those moments when the napalm scorched my clothing and … my skin and then the fat and muscle and other tissue,” she wrote in her autobiography, “that because I would now and forever be seen as ‘different,’ I was unfit to be loved.” It echoed as an endless refrain in her head. A vow. I am unfit to be loved. Even in the moment when the doctors told her she would be scarred forever and suffer from chronic pain for the rest of her life, what she heard was “You are unfit to be loved now, Kim.” And as she grew older, the idea only became more firmly embedded in her mind. “After all,” she worried, “who would desire a woman with a tragic past, with buffalo-hide skin, and with the inability to conceive?”
His name was Bui Huy Toan. She met him there at the university in Havana. He, like her, was a visiting Vietnamese student — one of four who volunteered to act as her assistants, doing the simple physical tasks she still found hard. They first met in a school cafeteria; he complimented her beautiful smile and carried her lunch tray for her. From then on, they saw each other every day, going for long walks together, sharing in their homesickness and their worry about what was happening back in Vietnam. He was an exuberant, gentle, and generous man. Within a few weeks, she realized she had fallen in love.
It wasn’t always easy. He drank and smoked and didn’t share her passionate belief in Christianity. She worried her family would reject him because he’d grown up in the Communist North. She was scared of rejection and scared of what he’d think when he finally saw her scarred body. She refused to let him do anything more than hold her hand or kiss her cheek. She turned down his first marriage proposal. When the subject came up again, she spent days deep in prayer. When he asked for a second time, she knew her answer. This time, it was yes.
Ten days later, they were standing before each other in the house of the Vietnamese ambassador, surrounded by flowers and friends as it poured rain outside, promising to spend their lives together. When they kissed on their wedding day, it was for the first time.
For their honeymoon, they were only allowed to visit another communist country. Even that was a concession: at first, they said only Toan could go; that she would have to stay behind as her husband went on their honeymoon alone. In the end, they chose Moscow, which turned out not to be the most romantic of destinations — it was cold and grey, and they were never allowed to be alone. Vietnamese officials monitored them at every turn.
That made it awfully difficult to discuss her plan. They were on the flight back home before they could really talk. On the long journey across the Atlantic, their plane would have to refuel. It would make a brief stop in Gander, Newfoundland — one of the most strategically placed airports in the world, there on the very edge of the North Atlantic. It would one day become famous for sheltering stranded passengers after 9/11. She told her husband that when their plane landed there, she would be getting off and never getting back on. She might have promised to spend the rest of her life with him, but she refused to do it in a communist country.
At first, Toan resisted. “Think of my family, Kim! And also of yours.” It wasn’t until they were sitting in the terminal at Gander, waiting for the plane to reboard, that he gave in and handed her his passport. “Do whatever she says to do,” he told himself. “Do whatever you have to do in order not to lose this girl.”
Before long, they were on a train to Toronto.
It was the name that originally attracted her to the city; it reminded her of the Spanish word for grapefruit — toronja — and she loved grapefruit. Plus, she was told it was a multicultural place, a big city with a strong job market and a relatively moderate climate by Canadian standards. They spent their first nights at Henry’s Motel on Kingston Road, amazed by the room service while watching reruns of I Love Lucy; she laughed so hard she cried. There were hard days ahead — they had little money and refugees weren’t allowed to work — but they eventually made a new home for themselves in an apartment in Riverdale, in Toronto’s eastern Chinatown.
At first, Phúc led a private life in the city, not wanting to relive the memories of the bombing and the shocking photo that changed her life. She avoided the journalists who waited outside her window, hoping to grab their own photograph of the famous “Napalm Girl.” But when they finally did get that shot, and the Toronto Sun splashed it across the front page, she decided to use it as an opportunity to re-enter the public eye and do some good.
In the years since she’s moved to Ajax, where she runs a foundation helping to find medical treatment and psychological counselling for children affected by war. She’s given speeches and interviews, and has worked for the United Nations as a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador. She even spoke to Vietnam War veterans at the Memorial Wall in Washington, DC, to let them know she forgave them all. Once, she was unfit for love. Now, she spreads it wherever she goes.
“Love,” according Phan Thi Kim Phúc, “is more powerful than any weapon.”