By Eric San Juan, La Prena Latina
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, June 8 (EFE).- Used as a propaganda symbol against the brutality of the United States Army, Kim Phuc, the so-called “Napalm Girl,” is an uncomfortable image for Vietnam’s regime 50 years after the iconic photo of her running nude because of how she fled the country in search of freedom.
The photo of little Kim Phuc crying in pain from a napalm strike in Jun. 8, 1972, can be seen today at the Ho Chi Minh War Museum, where atrocities committed by American soldiers are exhibited, but for 20 years, the conflict’s most iconic image was missing.
The photo was in the museum in the 1980s when, according to Canadian writer Denise Chong in the book “The Girl in the Photo,” Kim Phuc herself was surprised to see it exhibited, but disappeared after she fled Vietnam and sought asylum in Canada in 1992.
The image took more than two decades to return to the museum: it did so in 2013 at the hands of author Nick Ut, who donated it on one of his many trips to his native Vietnam.
The text accompanying the photograph in the museum shows Vietnamese authorities’ discomfort. It speaks of the 9-year-old girl Phan Thi Kim Phuc “hopelessly burned” by napalm by a US attack on the village of Trang Bang where she lived, and the awards received by Ut. It says nothing about the woman that girl became.
Vietnamese press, which barely mentions the 50th anniversary of the photo in recent days, usually goes a little further by saying Phuc, 59, lives in Canada with her family, without mentioning her departure from the country or suffering from having become the regime’s propaganda weapon.
Related news :
‘Napalm Girl’ at 50: The story of the Vietnam War’s defining photo
Vietnam memories still strong a half-century later
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