A Beautiful Serendipity for Chinese New Year

This photo was taken June 8, 1972, as children fled the napalming of their village by South Vietnamese forces trying to oust North Vietnamese occupiers.

Feb 11, 2021

Something really neat happened two days ago. I was pawing thru a desk drawer looking for some paper clips. I found there an old, yellowed article about an incident dating back to the Vietnam War. Most of us of a certain age recall the iconic photo of Phan Thi Kim Phuc, a nine-year-old female running naked toward a camera. She was screaming in pain from being hit with napalm, a fiery chemical meant to destroy the vegetation that the northern enemy hid beneath.

She was 33 at the time of the article. I googled the event. It was November 11, 1996. This news clip has been in this desk drawer for 25 years. I have no memory of saving it, and I haven’t seen it since I put it in the drawer. I don’t even know why it was in this particular drawer, but it was right where I could easily see it.

Anyway, she was in Washington DC to lay a wreath on the Vietnam Memorial there on Veterans Day. From the article:

“I have suffered a lot from both physical and emotional pain,” Kim Phuc, speaking in English with a heavy Vietnamese accent, told the audience of several thousand people who greeted her with two standing ovations. “But God saved my life and gave me hope and faith. Even if I could talk face to face with the pilot who dropped the bombs I would tell him we cannot change history, but we should try to do good things for the present and for the future to promote peace.”

I thought this statement was special, so I tweeted it. That day, I ran into another tweet that talked about our current ambassador to Vietnam doing a rap with another man to wish everyone a happy “Vietnamese New Year.” I googled that, too, and Vietnamese/Chinese New Year is tomorrow, but actually today because they are a day ahead. Is that a coincidence? I find a 25-year-old article about a new relationship between those two nations just a couple of days before Chinese New Year?

Here is a snippet from Wikipedia. (The Wikipedia links work):

"After snapping the photograph, Ut took Kim Phúc and the other injured children to Barsky Hospital in Saigon, where it was determined that her burns were so severe that she probably would not survive.^[10] After a 14-month hospital stay and 17 surgical procedures, including skin transplantations, she was able to return home. A number of the early operations were performed by Finnish plastic surgeon Aarne Rintala.^[11][12] It was only after treatment at a special hospital in Ludwigshafen, West Germany, in 1982, that Kim Phúc was able to properly move again.^[13]"

Kim Phuc and her husband defected to Canada and are still living there. She still undergoes treatment for her injuries and acknowledges that the psychological trauma is deep, but she found faith in Christianity along the way and has expressed forgiveness for the South Vietnamese soldier who dropped the napalm on her village, killing two of her cousins.