Vietnam Napalm girl

All you have to do is search the above title and the photo of Ms. Kim Phuc will come up on internet - she is running, naked, with burns over her back and arm. I just saw the film "Hearts and Minds" from Netflix, I saw it before at Harris theater in pittsburgh, cried through most of it, second time around it wasnt so bad. In the film Kim Phuc is shown running, and the extent of her burns, and her anguish, is extended. It took over a year for her to recover, lucky to be alive, in a burn center in an American hospital in Saigon. The photographer got her immediate help, probably saved her life. The picture, and the film of her running, is terrifying for me - I wanted to scream the first time I saw the film. As a father.....well, you have to be a parent i guess.

anyway, she is a peace activist now, living in Canada (she received asylum there). She is married, mother of two. Still has terrible scars, pain from nerve damage. But she is UN Ambassador for peace, world traveler talking about help for burn victims.

Its amazing how something so terrible can turn into something sacred.

BTW, the plane that dropped the napalm was Vietnamese. An american pilot was told to hit the village days earlier, he refused, he was familiar with the territory, said that the village was not a viable target. American pilot said maybe the Vietnamese regional chief wanted to punish village, he couldnt figure out why the village was targeted, after he refused and explained it wasnt a target. So who knows why it was bombed, maybe it was just a general fuck up. The point being, that the village wasnt a target, shouldnt have been bombed.