Phan Thị Kim Phúc Napalm Girl, Part 1

A waifish Vietnamese girl, stark naked, runs crying down the street amidst a smattering of soldiers and other children; behind her the sky is lit with the hell of war. It is an iconic, Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph, taken in 1972 towards the end of the Vietnam War. Its centerpiece, nine-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phúc, had, moments before, been caught in the explosion of a napalm bomb which had incinerated her clothes and seared her entire back and left arm.

She was not supposed to survive. Third-degree burns covered 30 percent of her small body. Every morning at the hospital, where she remained for over a year, the nurses would draw a bath to peel off her dead skin. There was always a point when the pain became too severe and she would pass out. Seventeen surgeries later, Kim was still alive and released to go home.

Several years later, the war had ended, and she now lived in a unified Communist country. Two of her cousins who were caught in the same blast had died from their injuries. Why was she the one who had survived? Oftentimes, she wished she had not. She contemplated suicide. The pain was constant, unbearable at times, and there was not enough money for medication. The scars were horrible, disfiguring.

But Kim knew one thing from her experience in the hospital: She wanted to be a doctor. At 19, she began medical school but was abruptly pulled out by her own government and subsequently paraded around to foreign reporters. Her new life as a Communist propaganda tool was filled with fabricated scripts and strict supervision. She loathed it. Already trapped in her body, she was now fast secured in a political web, her one dream vanquished in a puff of smoke.

Her one question was: Why? Why had she been spared to become this shell of a person? What was the point of it all? One day, she found the answer in a pile of library books.

Reflect: Does your life at times seem purposeless? Do the trials you go through seem meaningless and cruel? Ask for spiritual eyes to see God’s specific calling for you.

Key Bible Texts

But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him. (1 Corinthians 2:9 KJV)