- 2 months ago
When a napalm attack by American forces hit a church where Vietnamese women and children were sheltering by mistake in 1972 in a case of "friendly fire", the photograph of one girl running naked and burned among other children eventually turned the course of American opinion decisively against the Vietnam War. This documentary traces the story behind the photo, as well as what happened to the girl in the picture, Kim Phut, and how unbeknown to the public she came so close to dying several times due to her wounds. This was a requested video of a documentary that was first broadcast in 2022.
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00:00Vietnam, a living hell for a people caught up in a never-ending war, an apocalypse from
00:21which emerged the photo of a young girl, naked and screaming with pain, burned to the third
00:28degree by a napalm bomb, a vicious weapon, a mixture of jellified flammable gasoline, phosphorus
00:34and plastic, which sticks to the skin and burns the flesh down to the bone.
00:41The picture of this child shocked the world and became the symbol of a chemical, technological
00:46and asymmetrical war that claimed millions of lives.
00:52A war during which images, for the very first time, played a determining role in public
00:57opinion.
00:59Why has this photo, more than any other, become etched in our memories?
01:03Who is the photographer, Nick Ott?
01:10And more importantly, who was this little girl?
01:14And what became of her?
01:19Trangbang, a small town northeast of Saigon.
01:33It was here on April 2nd, 1963, that Kim Phuc, the girl in the photo, was born.
01:41One century earlier, the French had colonized the Indochina Peninsula, starting with this
01:46region, Cochin, China.
01:49But the relatively low number of colonists failed to completely change the country.
01:54And on the eve of World War II, most rural areas continued to follow their ancestral traditions.
02:02Everything changed in 1946, when pro-independence forces attacked French colonialists in Hanoi.
02:09This marked the beginning of the First Indochina War, a war that would last seven years and
02:13culminate in France's defeat at Dian Bian Phu.
02:18As a result of the 1954 Geneva Conference, France definitively withdrew from Indochina.
02:24The country was split in two, at the 17th parallel.
02:29In the north, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, led by Ho Chi Minh, backed by Moscow.
02:33And in the south, the Republic of Vietnam, backed by Washington.
02:38Urged on by the Americans, Diem, the new South Vietnamese president, opposed the holding of
02:43a self-determination referendum on the unification of the country.
02:47His repressive policies were met with growing hostility from the South Vietnamese.
02:54Washington wondered about abandoning Diem, but the United States' absolute priority was
02:58to halt the communist threat.
03:00In 1961, Kennedy sent more than 16,000 so-called military advisors to train South Vietnamese troops,
03:07who were confronted by guerrilla warfare carried out by the Viet Cong.
03:11This indirect yet massive engagement marked a new phase in America's involvement in Vietnam,
03:16and it didn't go unnoticed.
03:18The increasing U.S. military presence soon caught the attention of the international press.
03:26To report on the situation, press agencies also increased their numbers in Saigon.
03:32Hal Buell, then head of Associated Press, remembers the period well.
03:37The American involvement increased.
03:40We had to build up the staff because the story became of much greater importance to the American,
03:47to our American newspapers and to our subscribers overseas.
03:52Hal Buell asked the famous German photographer, Horst Faas, to take the helm of his press agency in Saigon.
03:58Hal Buell was a seasoned foreign correspondent photographer.
04:03He was a superior photographer.
04:06He won two Pulitzer Prizes and a World Press Award.
04:10He was a hard-driving editor when he functioned as an editor.
04:15And he also had an open door to newcomers who would come to Vietnam to cover the war.
04:21Some Americans, some French freelancers.
04:25Horst would always buy a few pictures that he didn't really need,
04:30just in order to be able to help people make enough money to keep doing their trade,
04:36knowing that if they ever got a picture that really mattered,
04:40they would first come to the AP with that picture.
04:42He hired both staff and Stringer Vietnamese photographers,
04:47obviously because they knew Vietnam, they knew the language, they could move about.
04:51We hired a photographer named Nguyen Thanh Mi, who, as it turned out, was the brother of Nick Ut.
04:58In 1962, I moved to Saigon with my brother.
05:07He taught me a lot about photographic techniques.
05:18He wanted me to become a photographer like him.
05:27When I saw the photos taken by American soldiers in Vietnam published in the newspapers, it really inspired me.
05:40Most of my brother's war photos were of corpses.
05:46He hoped that these photos would bring a swift end to the war.
05:53Sadly, he died very young.
05:56He was only 27 years old.
06:00He was only 27 years old.
06:03He was only 27 years old.
06:05November 1963.
06:07Saigon was in turmoil.
06:09Washington, which realized Diem was no longer able to contain either the communist or Buddhist opposition,
06:15did nothing to thwart a military coup by the most radical generals of the South Vietnamese army.
06:21The coup leaders ordered an attack on the presidential palace,
06:26where Diem was captured and summarily executed.
06:38A year after my brother's death, I went back to the Associated Press and asked for work.
06:48Host Faust told me that I was too young and should go back home.
06:54He didn't want me to risk dying on the front line like my brother did.
07:05But I insisted and he ended up hiring me.
07:11But in a dark room.
07:17I didn't want to do that.
07:19Nick became very close to a Vietnamese photographer named Henri Huey and came to Vietnam with the French army.
07:26His pictures had a sensitivity.
07:28They had a sense of composition that a lot of photographers missed.
07:32And he took Nick under his wing and kind of guided him, criticized the pictures he made around the city.
07:39And the third photographer was Eddie Adams, the American photographer, a Pulitzer Prize winner.
07:45He was very demanding of himself.
07:47He always wanted to make the perfect picture.
07:49But he and Nick got along pretty well.
07:51They became friends in later life.
07:53So Nick had these three people who mentored him.
07:55You couldn't ask for a better photojournalism school.
07:58Nick was only 15 years old when he began taking his first photos on the streets of Saigon.
08:07Among the many pictures he brought back to the agency, Horst Faust spotted this one and wired it to the New York office.
08:14When the photo was published, Nick insisted that Faust send him to the front.
08:18Because two years after the military coup, the situation had worsened, as the Viet Cong stepped up their attacks on cities in the south.
08:28President Johnson decided to send his troops to the front.
08:32No more military advisors.
08:33This time, almost 180,000 men were dispatched to Vietnam.
08:38A spectacular number which would only increase.
08:41Over the next decade, more than two and a half million Americans would be sent into combat.
08:57When the military set up in 1965 in Vietnam, they had had a, what they would call an easy relationship with the media.
09:07They were given access to helicopters, which took them to battles almost immediately.
09:12A photographer who had press credentials, which were easy to get, would simply go to the airport and say,
09:18Are you going to Da Nang or Ku Chi or Dong Ha or wherever it was?
09:23And the only restriction was whether the pilot would take you aboard and the pilots always did.
09:28There was a map with the different ongoing operations marked, and you just had to ask to go along.
09:58You took a chopper to an advanced base, and from there, you and the press officer were dropped in the combat zone for an hour or so,
10:06and you left with the wounded when there were any.
10:09Or if not, you stayed in the jungle for a few weeks.
10:12It was very easy, in fact.
10:18In late January of 1968, the Viet Cong took advantage of celebrations for the Lunar New Year,
10:23to launch a massive offensive against major cities in South Vietnam.
10:2880,000 fighters emerged from the jungle and attacked the cities and U.S. military bases.
10:35So by the time that Tet Offensive came along, Nick was pretty well schooled, and he did a very good job.
10:42And all of a sudden, there was a heavy urban guerrilla warfare, and Nick did very well shooting those war pictures.
10:49And the war at that time reached its hottest period.
10:53And the pictures that came out of Vietnam during that period were pictures of war never seen before,
11:03and I believe will never be seen again.
11:05The reasons that the pictures from Vietnam were so dramatic and so unusual and so, frankly,
11:13capturing the horror of war is because photographers for the first time had access very quickly to battle.
11:24On February 1st, 1968, at the height of the Tet Offensive,
11:28American photographer Eddie Adams took a photo that would go down in history.
11:33The summary execution of a man is always shocking.
11:40But this was a civilian with his hands tied, shot by a soldier.
11:44It was really a summary execution.
11:47But that's not the full story behind the photo.
11:49The guy wasn't a civilian at all.
11:50He had done the same thing the night before to an officer's family.
11:54There were two deaths in this photo, the Viet Cong fighter being summarily executed,
11:59and the general, who until then had a good reputation, but who would lose his reputation
12:06and end up working in a pizza joint in a strip mall in a Washington suburb.
12:11It's crazy.
12:12So all of this is broadcast on television back to the United States at the end of January,
12:17to an American public that has just been told that victory is just around the corner,
12:22that there's light at the end of the tunnel, when it obviously doesn't look like,
12:26because the enemy is inside the U.S. embassy complex.
12:29So all of these images were used by the pacifist movement, which was very active on American campuses.
12:38It was basically a student movement.
12:40But even among people with patriotic and pro-war stances, they were very upsetting.
12:46So the Vietnam War became central to the demands of the youth of the time.
12:59Two months after the Tet Offensive, TV viewers were left in shock by acts of violence
13:10carried out by American soldiers in the village of My Lai.
13:20American soldiers entered the village of My Lai and killed everyone.
13:23And it took them four hours. So it was done methodically and in cold blood.
13:31They stopped for a lunch break and then resumed.
13:34Then when the accounts from the soldiers appeared,
13:37it was very difficult for Americans to accept that U.S. soldiers could commit such atrocities.
13:53The Vietnam War is generally described as the first televised war.
14:01It's also called the living room war, because Americans would sit down in front of the TV
14:06every night and watch what was going on in Vietnam.
14:12At a peaceful protest on the campus of Kent State University in Ohio,
14:16the National Guard intervened and shot 67 rounds of live ammo at protesters.
14:25The result, four dead and nine wounded. The shooting lit the fuse.
14:29End the war! End the war!
14:40Four million people protested. A strike led to the closure of hundreds of universities across the country.
14:46One way of protesting against the war, albeit radical, was simply to refuse to go.
14:56My intention is to box, to win a clean fight. But in war,
15:01the intention is to kill, kill, kill, kill, and continue killing innocent people.
15:08Footage of the coffins of soldiers fallen in combat, shown over and over on American TV,
15:13had a devastating effect on public opinion.
15:16You have this rebellion in the form of draft-age men turning in or burning their draft cards,
15:23en masse, all over the country.
15:26There is a movement within the military called the GI movement, questioned the legitimacy of the war.
15:33Many of them feel like the reasons that were given to them turned out to be lies,
15:38and they feel betrayed, you know, by their own country.
15:44The anti-war protesters weren't only the privileged students of Stanford.
15:48They were also people who had been out there, and who would use their war experiences as a way of saying that the war must stop.
15:57When Nixon came to power, the country was exhausted by the quagmire of the Vietnam War,
16:11which had been raging for four years. Faithful to his electoral promise to obtain peace with honor,
16:17he drastically reduced the U.S. contingent in order to Vietnamize the conflict.
16:22So Vietnamization meant that the Americans would begin to withdraw their ground troops.
16:30But the idea is that he wants the Army of the Republic of Vietnam to do the majority of the ground fighting, right?
16:38You know, by 1972, their American commanders will still be in place,
16:43and they'll still be supervising many of the operations that are taking place in South Vietnam.
16:52The North Vietnamese Army used a network of tracks leading to South Vietnam through the jungles of Laos and Cambodia to shift troops and material.
17:03The Americans nicknamed it Ho Chi Minh Path.
17:10On June 5, 1972, Viet Cong units made it as far as Trang Bang and the village of Kim Phuc.
17:17It was here that they set up their advanced base as it held a strategic position on Route 1 from Saigon to the Cambodian border.
17:25The Route 1 is basically the only way that they can escape.
17:30And so the American commanders and their South Vietnamese counterparts begin bombing Route 1 to take out all of the military,
17:40materiel, soldiers, and civilians.
17:51Napalm carpet bombing burned the region's roads and villages.
17:55Terrified villagers left their homes and formed long lines of refugees along Route 1.
18:00The town of Trang Bang was the scene of violent clashes between the South Vietnamese army and Viet Cong commanders.
18:21These stories are beginning to follow a familiar pattern.
18:28A small but determined group of North Vietnamese dig in in a village like this and can cut off the whole road.
18:36They've done it on Highway 13, they've done it on Highway 14, and now apparently they're intent on doing it here on Highway 1.
18:42The situation was chaotic. Although the South Vietnamese had control of the town during the daytime,
18:49once night fell, the Viet Cong guerrillas left the jungle and their underground hideouts on the edge of town and occupied it once again.
18:57June 5th, they came to our village. Then they occupied the village. They wanted to stay and then they started to
19:13dig the tunnel under the ground and they hiding in there. And then they chose my house as the
19:23headquarter. So my mom knew that the war will happen.
19:34Over the next three days, fighting in Trang Bang and its surrounding villages became increasingly violent.
19:47While most people fled their village, Kim's mother was reluctant to leave her house behind.
19:54But when Viet Cong soldiers captured the village on the night of June 7th,
19:58she and her entire family sought refuge in Trang Bang's Cao Dai Temple.
20:03My mom woke me up and I thought that she left for the restaurant. I say, Mommy, why you are still here?
20:15And she said, just be quiet. And I saw, I remember that I saw many soldiers,
20:24many soldiers around. Then finally, I hold her,
20:29her hands and we left the house. My mom wanted to move to the Cao Dai Temple because she thought that
20:43it is the holy place and the safe place so we can hide refuge in the temple.
20:49We had been told by the manager at UPI that there was fighting going on in Trang Bang.
20:58On June 8th, 1972, I neared Trang Bang early in the morning.
21:09I saw hundreds of refugees on Route 1.
21:14As we approached the temple, we could see a lot of civilians.
21:24They had come as temporary refugees out of their houses and they were in the temple.
21:30And I went in to the temple to have a look at it. And it was very photogenic. It was packed
21:37with women and children and old people, lots and lots of people in there in this, this temple.
21:44There were some, like about eight and seven families from neighbors, right? Our neighbors.
21:52And we stayed there with the South Vietnamese soldiers and they were there to protect us.
22:00Everyone in our family was there. We not allowed to play far away, just nearby the bomb shelter.
22:09I remember there was a black bird. It just go down and then he just stay there. And then
22:20we just chasing the bird. It had been raining, but the weather had started to clear. And the first of
22:33several airstrikes came in. There was a little airplane. It released two bombs.
22:43I heard a burning noise outside of the temple area,
22:47The commander of the South Vietnamese army decided to napalm bomb the area due to the presence of the
22:58Viet Cong. We were probably six or eight hundred meters outside of the town. You could hear that a
23:06battle was going on. We were like all the other press people who were up there that day. We had just
23:11parked our car and kind of walked down the little road that went from the highway into the village.
23:17And the second plane came in and dropped bombs.
23:27And the smoke, we realized, was coming up from behind the temple. And so we knew straight away that
23:35there had been a mistake in the targeting. The soldiers
23:39the soldiers yelled for the children. We have to run fast, right? And first, that's why they tried to help
23:47children run first. I ran in the front of the temple. Then I just about to get into the highway one.
23:57And of course, everybody running. I saw the airplane. Two words to me, very fast. I heard the noise.
24:11I said to the cameraman, Alan, plane at your two o'clock, Alan. And he said, got it. And he pulled open the zoom
24:21on his lens. I should run, continue to run. But as a child, I just stood right there. And I turned my head.
24:30And I saw the airplane and I saw four bombs just landing like that. Then I heard the noise.
24:40Boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. And I turned away because the heat.
24:52The fire was everywhere over me. All my clothes was burned off by the fire. Then I saw the fire
25:06fire above of my, you know, stick in my arm. And I used my right hand. I web it up. I remember that.
25:18And I remember my thought at that time. Oh, my goodness. I got burned. I will be ugly.
25:28And of course, I was terrified. And then I, I just ran out of that fire. At that moment, I didn't see
25:39anyone around me. Just me and the fire. I saw the American correspondent and he was holding his head
25:49in his hands and he shouted, holy and he said to his cameraman, did you get that? And his cameraman had
25:58his camera on his shoulder and he slowly shook his head. He was looking down the road.
26:05And the thought that went through my mind as a journalist was that we have got this because it was,
26:12we knew that this had been a, a friendly fire disaster. And we saw these people, these figures
26:20coming towards us. They were making no sound at all until they saw us. Nick and Alex, who were just
26:27standing right next to me, just understood what was happening and just took off down the road.
26:34And it was probably in, in those next, uh, you know, 30 or 40 seconds as the kids came running out.
26:40And Nick and Alex ran that direction. When I took the photo, I had actually been focusing on the pagoda.
26:50Then I saw this little girl running, shouting, so hot, so hot, help me.
27:00My brother, he yelling, he, he, uh, he's scaring. And me, I just keep running.
27:10As she passed me, I saw her burned back in arms. Skin was starting to come away from her left arm.
27:22And so I gave her a drink of water.
27:24He poured out the, uh, his, uh, canteen, uh, and then he poured the water over me.
27:37And that I remember. And after that, I lost consciousness. I didn't remember anything else.
27:44This was kind of the definition of news. It's when things happen that were absolutely not expected.
27:59Kim needed urgent treatment. Nick Ut loaded her and her brothers into the Associated Press van
28:05and headed to the nearest hospital.
28:10Koochee Hospital was 25 kilometers from Saigon.
28:14In the van, Kim Phuc kept repeating to her brother,
28:18Brother Tam, I'm going to die. I'm so hot.
28:21When we reached the hospital, I screamed out for help.
28:31I was told that they had too many wounded, so I'd have to drive Kim to Saigon.
28:38I told them that if I did that, Kim would die.
28:40If this child dies, I'll publish her photo in tomorrow's newspaper.
28:51The nurse said,
28:53we have no hope of saving her.
28:55When I got to the AP office in Saigon, everyone was very worried.
29:09They asked me what had happened.
29:14After the film was developed, Jackson discovered my photos.
29:19When he saw the one of Kim, he joked,
29:21why did you take a picture of a naked little girl?
29:33I said, Jackie, you need to look at the whole roll again.
29:38There's one photo where you see napalm bombs exploding and some different ones.
29:44And then the one with Kim running.
29:48Then I asked him to do a print of it on five by seven inch paper.
29:52And everybody's kind of crowding around looking at it because it was the first print of this thing.
29:56And even then, Nick didn't know, I didn't, no one knew what the pictures were going to be like, really.
30:01I mean, I think, and I remember looking at the picture for the first time thinking like,
30:06yeah, I don't have anything like that.
30:08All I'm thinking is, that picture's better than mine.
30:11When Horst Fass and Peter Arnett came back from lunch, Horst asked, who took this photo?
30:20I remember Horst Fass saying to Nick, and this is my impression of Horst, but it was like,
30:28you do good work, you do good work today, Nick Gott.
30:33I mean, that very Horst way of saying it.
30:40Horst said, what's this photo doing here?
30:42Why hasn't it been wired to New York?
30:48And then that's when all the discussion started about,
30:52well, we can't send this on the wire because it's,
30:55she's nude and there's a whole thing at AP about we can't do nudity.
31:00I was part of the team that wrote a directive to our staff that we do not want to carry full
31:06frontal nudity on the AP wire.
31:10So we had the picture in New York and we had to decide what to do with it.
31:13In my mind, the instant reaction to the picture, there was no negativity to the nudity.
31:19It just didn't look bad to me.
31:21The nudity here makes us understand that her clothes have been burned off
31:29as a result of the extremely noxious weapon that napalm is.
31:39It's a little girl running naked and we wonder why she's running.
31:45Then we realize she's running from hell.
31:47The innocence of this little girl could be the innocence of a child emerging from the mother's womb.
31:58But here, she's emerging from the womb of war.
32:01And just behind that, there are soldiers who seem to be out for a stroll without a care in the world for the children.
32:13A little boy on the left turns around to see if there's an adult who can help.
32:18But he's all on his own.
32:23Then, on the right, we spot a photographer reloading his camera.
32:30And you think, what's going on here?
32:33It's like a show with guys taking photos who seemingly don't fear a thing.
32:44And behind them, soldiers out for a stroll just behind some terrified kids.
32:50Four photographers, three cameramen, two dozen reporters.
32:57The scene clearly heralds the advent of a kind of photojournalism where sensationalism outdoes objectivity.
33:04Of a press where everything becomes a show, even the suffering of children.
33:08Photographically, it was a simple picture to understand and read.
33:16You just looked right across it.
33:18The center of the picture, the girl.
33:21We cropped out the soldier at the end, or the man in the uniform, because it was a distraction.
33:26What's that all about?
33:28It pulled the reader over here.
33:30We wanted to keep them on the center of the picture.
33:32The small children on the side, and the boy on the left screaming, and of course, Kim screaming.
33:39Beneath front page headlines like End This Horror, Nick's photo was published across the globe.
33:46It caused a media explosion that resulted in mass protests to denounce the use of napalm and Agent Orange against civilian populations.
33:55Intellectuals and Hollywood stars joined the protest movement.
33:58And when Jane Fonda went to Hanoi to show her support for the North Vietnamese,
34:03things reached new heights, as did controversy.
34:06More than ever, the fate of this war would be decided in the media.
34:10So we know that Nixon speculated
34:29that the photograph of Kim Fook was staged, that the whole thing was made up, you know,
34:35to make the United States look bad.
34:37Later, William Westmoreland, who was the commander of the US forces at that time,
34:43said that nobody could have escaped life or death by a napalm bomb.
34:48And that burning that she suffered came from a cooking fire accident.
34:52The reaction was twofold.
34:54First of all, they were very pleased.
34:57They were pleased that we had got the incident on camera.
35:00So it put Nick Utz's photo, which by that time was on every front page, into context.
35:08But the second question they were asking was the question that all the viewers were asking.
35:14What has happened to the little girl?
35:15Well, we needed to find out where she was.
35:19In the children's hospital, the room itself was totally dangerous,
35:27in the sense that it's not a place to have a burns victim.
35:31And there was a woman sitting on a stool and she was fanning the child.
35:39And there was Kim Fook.
35:40She was very heavily bandaged.
35:45And a nurse came past and she looked at her and she said,
35:50Oh, she'd die maybe today, maybe tomorrow.
35:53And she walked away.
35:55So we went to see the director of the hospital.
35:57Is there anywhere that she could get better treatment?
36:01And he said, yes, you could try the Barsky Hospital.
36:06Barsky was an American-funded hospital with a special burns unit for children.
36:11But to transfer Kim there, Wayne needed permission from the South Vietnamese authorities.
36:17We went in to see this Vietnamese official.
36:20He said to us, what is so special about this child?
36:23In Vietnam, we have many burned children.
36:26And I said, yes, but this one has been burned on camera.
36:31And then he said, I think this would show the Vietnamese people in a bad light.
36:38And I said, well, it was the Vietnamese air force that dropped these bombs.
36:43I would have thought that anything you can do now would improve the image of the Vietnamese people.
36:50And he looked up, did this.
36:54And then he said, I am sorry, I cannot help.
37:02I said, is that your final word?
37:05And he said, yes.
37:06And I reached into my pocket and I had a knife.
37:11I offered it to him and I said, well, in that case, will you do me a favor?
37:17Will you go around to the children's hospital and cut her throat?
37:21Because that is kinder than letting her suffer.
37:27Christopher Wayne finally obtained permission to transfer Kim to Barsky's special burns unit.
37:33But Kim's suffering was far from over.
37:36Napalm is a terrifying weapon, which at high temperatures sticks to its victim's skin
37:41and burns them to the third degree.
37:52It was so painful.
37:55I remember every day at eight o'clock the nurses came and then they put me in the burn bath
38:07to clean up all the dead skin off.
38:10The pain was unbearable.
38:14I was so scared.
38:16I didn't want to do that.
38:18I hated it.
38:20Yeah, I didn't want it.
38:22But they have to do that.
38:23Now I'm so thankful because if they don't do that, they didn't do that to me,
38:29maybe cause infection.
38:32How can I survive?
38:35Kim would undergo 14 months of intensive care and rehabilitation
38:39at Barsky Hospital before obtaining sufficient autonomy to return to her normal family life
38:44back in Trang Bang.
38:52I'm so thankful.
39:01My mom saw a strong woman.
39:05She just working hard worker day and night to rebuild her business.
39:12Even they destroy almost, right?
39:14And then that is how we survive.
39:19That is how we survive now.
39:21He has to go down to the central security of the international conference of Vietnam.
39:28In 1973, the United States and the North Vietnamese finally settle on a peace agreement.
39:48So, in effect, you know, the Americans needed to withdraw.
39:51Within 60 days, they would get their prisoners of war back, and that would be the end of American military intervention in Vietnam.
40:04On March 19, 1973, less than a year after the photo of the napalm girl, the flag on the last U.S. military base in Vietnam was lowered.
40:14Ten days later, the last U.S. soldiers on Vietnamese soil flew out.
40:18For Americans, more than a country, Vietnam was a war that came at an excessive human cost.
40:25After nine years of fighting, 58,000 of their fellow citizens had lost their lives, and 300,000 were wounded.
40:33But at the end of the conflict, Hanoi released nearly all of its 6,000 prisoners of war.
40:38For the Vietnamese, the cost was even higher.
40:40Between three and three and a half million dead, two million of whom were civilians.
40:44The American public finally realized that the war was not a purely military conflict, but had been motivated by politics.
40:52For an American public that, particularly during the Cold War, had grown to embrace this idea that the United States never lost wars,
41:04this is a terrible change in the narrative.
41:08There was no peace, and there was no honor.
41:10Two years after the departure of U.S. troops, the Viet Cong were victorious on all fronts.
41:18And in January 1975, Hanoi decided to launch the final attack on Saigon.
41:28Immediately, panic spread among the foreign community in the South Vietnamese capital.
41:32On April 29th, the United States began airlifting out its embassy's personnel.
41:39The Associated Press had Nick Utte evacuated.
41:44It's a kind of ignominious end.
41:47Film famously shot those images of the helicopters taking off with too many people trying to climb on from the roof of the U.S. embassy.
41:56People being pushed off of the helicopters.
41:59And it looks like the final kind of humiliation for the United States and the Republic of Vietnam.
42:07On the morning of April 30th, the city's sirens rang out three times to signal the approach of enemy forces.
42:14Within hours, the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong had taken Saigon.
42:19North Vietnamese come rolling through the gates of the presidential palace, take down the South Vietnamese flag, put up the Democratic Republic of Vietnam flag.
42:29When I knew that no more war in my heart, I was so happy because I know that no more bomb, no more gun, no more fighting.
42:45We will have peace and we will enjoy.
42:49I was so excited.
42:51Even I still was very young, but I know enough how horrible war it was.
42:57Yeah.
42:59But Kim Phuc's ordeal didn't end with the return of peace.
43:04Barely had she recovered from her wounds, then the new communist government tracked her down with one aim in mind, to turn this photo into a propaganda tool.
43:12It's a pretty standard propaganda exercise to show this image of Kim Phuc, a nine-year-old child, one of the most iconically photographed victims of the Vietnam War,
43:25to demonstrate the character of the Vietnamese people.
43:29who have endured and persevered to survive this war.
43:33The Vietnamese government found me.
43:36They talked around and the news coming out and almost every foreign journalist came to Vietnam and they wanted to interview that little girl.
43:49I was so happy, but later on, there was so many interviewing, filming, and they interrupt a lot my time to study, to stay in school.
44:02One of the things that the American policymakers never understood is that the Vietnamese have been fighting outside aggressors for thousands of years.
44:16But for the Vietnamese, the idea that the Vietnamese, the idea that they would ever give in or give up is unthinkable.
44:23And so the photograph for the government that unifies the country after the war is all over, the value of the image is that it shows Vietnamese perseverance.
44:33I had the opportunity to return to Saigon when Horst Fass invited the Associated Press team that had covered the war to make a trip together, a kind of pilgrimage.
44:55Someone said to me, you know Christine, young Kim Phuk is in Ho Chi Minh right now.
45:04How about interviewing her?
45:10She very kindly agreed to see me, and I asked her to tell me about her ordeal.
45:20She mainly spoke about her pain.
45:24She said, you know Christine, still today, when the air is damp, like today, because it often rains in Saigon during the evening in monsoon season.
45:39She said, when it rains and it's humid, the pain in my back is terrible.
45:46As I was about to leave, I remembered that I was not only a reporter, but a photographer.
45:55And I said to her, I need a photo of your back, just one, and I'll be very quick.
46:02And she turned her back to me and showed me her burn scars.
46:09I met the Prime Minister Pham Van Dong, and I shared my story with him.
46:17Then I really urged him, please send me somewhere to study, to finish my study, because I need that.
46:29And he really, you know, loved me.
46:32Then he tried to help me.
46:34He decided to send me to Cuba.
46:38I was in Cuba to study for six years.
46:42Then I started to study pharmacy.
46:45But unfortunately, my skin didn't agree with all kind of chemical.
46:51So allergy come along.
46:54So I have to change it again.
46:57I met Uncle Ut after 17 years in Cuba.
47:02He is my hero.
47:04He was there with a dangerous moment.
47:09Taking the picture as a career, as a photographer, but he put down his camera, and he rushed me to the nearest hospital, as he told me.
47:22Then that is beyond extra work, extra mine.
47:30And I'm so, I tell Uncle Ut, I owe you.
47:35I love you.
47:36And that's why I call him Uncle Ut.
47:39My dream in Cuba, I just wanted to escape, to have freedom.
47:45The best thing in Cuba, I met my friend, best friend, Tawan.
47:51Now he's my husband.
47:54After their wedding, Kim and Tawan flew to Moscow for their honeymoon.
48:00On the flight back to Cuba, Kim told Tawan about her intention to take advantage of their stopover in Canada to seek political asylum.
48:09The couple settled in Toronto, and Kim gave birth to two children.
48:13In 1996, she visited Washington and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial to attend a commemoration ceremony.
48:21If I could talk face to face with the pilots who dropped the bombs, I could tell him we cannot change history, but we should try to do good things for the present and for the future to promote peace.
48:42Surprisingly, it included John Plummer, the guy who had called in the napalm strike on her village, and they had this moment of reconciliation that was important to both of them.
48:56Kim Fook is hereby designated UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for the Culture of Peace.
49:05Since settling in Canada, Kim has dedicated her life to promoting messages of peace and reconciliation between peoples.
49:13tsong istrout and intolerance.
49:15My life right now is presented in Canada as a hope.
49:21As a peace as a joy.
49:22Therefore that everyone in this earth needs that.
49:27that and i just really have a dream it one day that all people individual level can learn how to
49:40live with love with peace and forgiveness if that little girl the napalm girl can do it
49:50so everyone can do it too at u.s army headquarters many believed that they had lost the vietnam war
50:00due to the photos taken by nick utt and his colleagues whether true or false this belief
50:06brought an end to the natural goodwill shown by the military towards the press in future conflicts
50:12it would exercise much stricter control regarding the presence of war correspondence
50:17and as for politicians since the vietnam war they have learned never to underestimate
50:24the impact of images in forging public opinion
50:47so
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