Vietnamese napalm girl Kim Phuc speaking for peace in Belgium

Belgian daily Het Laatste Nieuws wrote in February 2007 (translated):

The scars of the napalm girl of Vietnam still hurt

Kim Phuc, who, during the Vietnam war, became known as the “napalm girl”, still hurts at the scars she got from the US American air attack with napalm bombs on 8 June 1972.

“It hurts especially when the weather changes”, Kim, today a 43-year-old woman, says.

Now that Ms Phan Thị Kim Phúc is an adult woman, as the second photo shows, her body still bears the terrible scars of the napalm war crime. However, that does not stop her from campaigning for peace everywhere in the world; so that other children won’t have to suffer what she suffered.

As the site of the Belgian peace movement reports, on 30 August she will be in Brussels, at a meeting of the Belgian Women’s Council. Ms Magda De Meyer, Women’s Council chair, will interview her there.

As Kim Phuc fled the aftermath of a napalm attack – her face agape in terror and pain – the nine-year-old unwittingly became a living symbol of the horrors of the Vietnam War. Some forty years later, the 52-year-old is receiving medical treatment for the wounds she suffered after the South Vietnamese military accidentally dropped napalm on civilians in Trang Bang village near Saigon: here.

In an article, Kim Phuc, immortalized by Nick Ut’s famous cliché, discusses the treatments received forty-three years after the napalm bombardment of her village: here.

Related articles

• What was Rush Limbaugh talking about?

• AP ‘napalm girl’ photo from Vietnam War turns 40 (3quarksdaily.com)
• Fire Zone (arjay.typepad.com)
• Random Excellence: Steve Russell (theonlinephotographer.typepad.com)