Unwitting icon of Vietnam War brings message of forgiveness

You recognize it when you see it, this iconic photo from the waning years of the Vietnam War.

A 9-year-old girl, naked and screaming, runs down a road with other scared children. A wayward napalm strike by South Vietnamese planes had burned much of her body.

Nick Ut, a photographer for The Associated Press, won a Pulitzer Prize for the June 1972 picture. He also helped get the girl to a hospital, where she spent the next 14 months and, against odds, survived.

The horrific image helped further sour American support for the war. And the girl, Kim Phuc Phan Thi, now a 45-year-old mother of two living outside Toronto, has taken her unsought fame and put it to use over the past decade to help other children victimized by war and terrorism.

All miracles, she said by phone Monday.

"The first picture, yes, it is a symbol of war, and I have no choice," she said. "But the second picture is my life right now, is a picture of love, of hope and forgiveness. And it is my choice."

Kim Phuc - pronounced "fook" - will speak at Old Dominion University tonight, giving the Marc and Connie Jacobson Raoul Wallenberg Humanitarian Lecture at 7:30 p.m. in the Mills Godwin Jr. Life Sciences Building auditorium. Her talk is free and open to the public.

She laughs easily now, talking about blessings in her life. But she was seriously burned over 65 percent of her body when the planes bombed a pagoda in her village north of the former Saigon where she was hiding with her family; two infant cousins were killed. She remembers much of it; changing weather still causes her pain.

The miracles began immediately, the later Christian convert said. Her feet weren't burned, so she could run. Her face wasn't burned, either; the other scars she can cover with clothes. The photo's fame helped her get better care.

Back in her village by war's end, Kim Phuc was closely supervised by the now-ruling communist government and put in propaganda films as a "national symbol of war."

She later studied in Cuba, where she met a fellow Vietnamese student. They married in 1992 and, returning from their Moscow honeymoon, defected to Canada when their plane stopped to refuel in Newfoundland.

Another miracle: Praying for help to escape, an airport terminal door literally opened, she said.

The next miracle was tougher: learning to forgive. She could share and understand people's pain, but it took time and prayer to lose her bitterness.

Now, she said, her experience has given meaning to her life: helping children.

Kim Phuc was invited to speak in 1996 at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. She told thousands about her trek to happiness. She met and forgave the American pilot who helped coordinate the South Vietnamese airstrike that injured her, found some closure for herself and birthed the idea of the Kim Foundation, which she founded the next year.

She saw the foundation as a way to give back for the help she had received, by raising awareness and money around the world for charities that provide free medical care to young war victims, and to promote peace and forgiveness.

Also in 1997, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization - UNESCO - named her a goodwill ambassador for the culture of peace, and she sits on other child-welfare boards.

"I cannot change the history of what happened to me," she said. "But I can change the meaning of it."

That's what she'll tell the ODU audience tonight, she said, along with the importance of education, love, cooperation, freedom, patience, "and the most important lesson of all that is about forgiveness."

"Now I can be grateful for that picture," she added. "I can work it for good."

Matthew Bowers, (757) 222-3893, matthew.bowers@pilotonline.com