Friendly Fire...
by - Written: Oct 08 '07
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Educational
Cons: Hearthbreaking
The Bottom Line: A harsh but essential read on the political turmoil of the era
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| helencbradshaw's Full Review: Denise Chong - The Girl in the Picture: The Story ... |
“The Girl in the Picture” is the story behind the subject of one of the Vietnam War’s most shocking images; that of nine year old Kim Phuc, who was badly burned, and was captured on film running naked from her village back on 8 June 1972. the picture itself was shown around the world and won a Pulitzer prize for its cameraman. There were in fact many pictures of this terrible war, but this picture more than any other around the world, made people realise that this war simply had to end.
Kim Phuc lived in the village of Trang Bang, north of Saigon in South Vietnam in 1972. She was the middle of nine children, born in 1963 to parents Nu and Tung. It was widely reported that she lost two brothers in the napalm attack, although the two boys in question were in fact cousins.
Kim’s life was never to be the same again, not only for the injury and the devastation on her country and family, but for the fact that she was an unwilling celebrity, being wheeled out whenever government took its fancy, despite the significant upheaval to her life and her further education. She was only nine when the incident happened and despite this being a face that shook a world, the war was to fight on for another three years, with the Americans pulling out a full 12 months later. Napalm itself was manufactured in America and was first used in the Vietnam War, although the attack on Kim was from her own side. Kim finally defected to the west some 20 years later, in 1992, and settled in Canada, and news of this was actually broken to the world by the UK’s Mail on Sunday Newspaper some three years later.
Kim had been born into war in 1963, with the division having started long before and the first battle between the communist north and capitalist south taking place in 1963. However in her village, in her early years the war was as distant to villagers as it was to Americans and it was the Viet Cong who dominated.
Kim’s family were certainly middle class; her mother owned a noodle store which had expanded and expanded until the family were able to build their very impressive home. However the family the family’s celebrations were short lived when the war moved to Saigon in 1968.
The author, Denise Chong covers what happens to Kim and her family in the intervening years between the time of the attack and the almost present day. In many ways Kim was a lucky one, with some of the assistance that she received, due to her unfortunate fame, although she was almost left for dead in the hospital immediately after the attack and has had to endure several operations and bears pain.
What really happened were that there were no winners in the Vietnam War. The family like so many others lost their home, and were forced to pay horrendous taxes on their earnings; years of hard work was to be built up time and time again, only for it to be knocked down again.
And for Kim, a desire for university, but a lack of funding, and in Hanoi a government who would continually pull her from classes to suit their own agenda and force her to speak out in public against a capitalist society. . The number of times Kin had to re-start her education, even in different countries, must have been simply soul destroying for her, and frustrating even for the reader. What is equally difficult is the unfortunate way that families were separated for years on end, and ultimately for Kim she had to move to the West to escape the events of her home country.
This was not the easiest book to read, and I think that was in part due to the frustration I was feeling for Kim and the treatment which she was receiving at the hands of Hanoi as a young adult. It is also heartbreaking as a reader to learn that everything that one close family in South Vietnam had worked for was to be bombed to pieces, and they are never again allowed to re-create that ‘wealth’, which was a fraction of western Wealth. The picture did do something for the war, in that it told the world that innocent children were dying at the heart of all this mess.
On the positive side, as you read through Kim’s childhood and adult years and gain an appreciation of the challenges that she had to overcome, both physically and in her own wellbeing, you begin to get an understanding of the depth of character, and courage, which allowed her to forgive.
The photograph was almost never taken, as the journalists in question were about to finish for the day before the attack happened. It is difficult to ascertain how different Kim’s life would have been if she had not been pictured across the World’s media; in some ways she would have been left to recover and build her own life, and in others, she is grateful to the cameramen who saved her that day and have done what they could for her since then.
Recommended.
ISBN 0-7432-0703-3 my copy was 830 Baht, but available on Amazon from £6.39 New or from £4.00 used.
Recommended:
Yes
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