The highway they were on had a dirt embankment on one side that led down from the road to open rice fields. Tracy saw a puff of dirt from the embankment fly straight up into the air. Then another, this one just behind their jeep. “I lost all sensation, including fear…. I felt nothing, not even the jarring crash of the jeep’s wheels slamming through potholes. I heard no sounds, not the rush of wind through the open jeep, not the racket of combat, not the shouts of my compatriots. Only curiosity remained. My eyes took in every detail of those mesmerizing puffs of dirt,” she wrote later.
They were driving through what was referred to as a “contested zone”—an area that kept switching from ARVN to NVA control—and a section of road where many reporters had already been shot at. The major pressed his boot down on the jeep’s accelerator. It was impossible to turn off the road. There was one choice and one direction: keep moving, straight ahead. Tracy looked to her right. NVA soldiers were firing at the speeding jeep with their AK-47 rifles.
The ARVN soldiers in the back of the jeep returned fire with their M16s. Tracy was suddenly aware of “a massive hammering” in her head. Her steel helmet was pulled down as far as possible over her head while she hunched her shoulders so that the sleeveless bulletproof flak jacket would also cover her neck. But her arms and lower body were unprotected. She had to think, but she couldn’t because of the pounding in her head.
She turned toward the major. “His left hand was on the steering wheel. His mouth was wide open in a shout lost to the racket of war,” Tracy wrote later. “One word seemed to come faintly through the clamor. Down! I read it on his lips more than heard his voice. Down!”
She finally understood what was causing the pain in her head. The major had been pounding on her steel helmet. She immediately curled up into a ball and squeezed herself into the tiny area between the jeep’s seat and dashboard until they were out of danger.
Tracy had been in Vietnam nearly a year when on January 23, 1973, US president Richard Nixon made his “Peace with Honor” speech. All remaining US forces would withdraw from Vietnam, and North Vietnam would release in stages all American POWs it was currently holding.
EXCERPTS FROM PRESIDENT NIXON’S “PEACE WITH HONOR” SPEECH:
A cease-fire, internationally supervised, will begin at 7 p.m., this Saturday, January 27, Washington time. Within 60 days from this Saturday, all Americans held prisoners of war throughout Indochina will be released. There will be the fullest possible accounting for all of those who are missing in action. During the same 60-day period, all American forces will be withdrawn from South Vietnam….
In particular, I would like to say a word to some of the bravest people I have ever met—the wives, the children, the families of our prisoners of war and the missing in action…. Nothing means more to me at this moment than the fact that your long vigil is coming to an end.
On February 12, 1973, the first group of POWs was released from Hanoi’s infamous Hoa Lo Prison. Tracy was determined to witness the release of subsequent prisoners. But so was every other reporter in Saigon, as well as top international correspondents. Tracy would need inside help. She tried one of Nixon’s old friends whom she knew from a previous UPI assignment. He said Nixon didn’t want reporters and photographers present during the release.
She would have to work with someone in the North Vietnamese government. Delegates from the North were currently being housed in Saigon for the peace process and were only allowed outside for official meetings. As part of her job, Tracy talked by phone to them almost every night, and in most conversations, she managed to mention that she would love to cover the upcoming release of the American POWs.
It worked, and on March 15, Tracy was one of three reporters—she the only American—waiting outside of the Hoa Lo Prison, or the Hanoi Hilton, as the brutalized American POWs referred to it.
Some of the prisoners were standing at the iron-barred windows of their cells, while others were outside. Tracy couldn’t yet see their faces, but “something in their posture made me uneasy,” she wrote. “They were only a day away from freedom, and I’d expected them to be energized.” They weren’t. Both the POWs and the reporters had been forbidden to communicate before the release was final. When Tracy and the other two reporters tried to whisper to the prisoners, they received no response. There had been rumors of torture, of forced statements, but the journalists didn’t know the details. As she watched the prisoners, she was “nagged by something terribly wrong.”
Suddenly, she understood what it was, writing later:
They had no identity.
Even from a reasonable distance, I can identify friends, including those in the military, by the way they walk and hold their shoulders, their general posture.
These men had no posture.
Or they all had the same posture.
They were unidentifiable, taller and shorter, darker and lighter versions of the same man. Their faces had the same lack of expression; they walked the same, stood the same. No one stuck out in the crowd.
Only long practice could have caused that total loss of individuality—practice and a deathly need to be obscure….
This was primitive survival.
Tracy also managed to be present three weeks later when the last American POWs were released from Hoa Lo. The two dozen men seemed nervous, unsure about whether or not they were allowed to acknowledge the many US reporters, photographers, and television crews who had arrived to record the event.
Reporters at the release of the last American POWs from Hoa Lo Prison. Left to right: Keyes Beech, Chicago Daily News; Walter Cronkite, CBS; Tracy Wood, United Press International; Hugh Mulligan, Associated Press. Tracy Wood
A familiar face passed by the window outside.
“Is that really Walter Cronkite?” asked a young prisoner. The beloved and respected newsman known as “the Most Trusted Man in America” had just walked by. As always, Cronkite was quiet, professional, and polite as he talked with the POWs.
After the war, Tracy worked as an investigative reporter for the Los Angeles Times before becoming the investigations editor for the Orange County Register. Currently, she is senior writer at the online California news organization Voice of Orange County.
Tracy has won numerous awards for investigative reporting and in 2001 was named Los Angeles Print Journalist of the Year by Sigma Delta Chi, a professional journalism association.
In 2002 she and eight other female Vietnam War reporters coauthored a book, War Torn, detailing their wartime experiences.
LEARN MORE
Defiant: The POWs Who Endured Vietnam’s Most Infamous Prison, the Women Who Fought for Them, and the One Who Never Returned by Alvin Townley (Thomas Dunne Books, 2014).
“Spies, Lovers, and Prisoners of War” by Tracy Wood, in War Torn: Stories of War from the Women Reporters Who Covered Vietnam by Tad Bartimus et al. (Random House, 2002).
“A War Correspondent Turned Lifelong Corruption Fighter” by Tracy Wood, Voice of Orange County, April 29, 2015, http://voiceofoc.org/2015/04/a-war-correspondent-turned-lifelong-corruption-fighter/.
KIM PHUC
Running from War
IN THE SOUTHERN VIETNAMESE city of Tien Gang one day in late April 1981, an 18-year-old woman was summoned from her premedical studies classroom. Four men were in the hallway asking for her.
When she came into the hallway, the men just stared at her.
“You are Kim Phuc?” one of them finally asked.
“Yes—I am Kim Phuc,” the girl answered.
“You are the girl in the picture?” the man asked.
“Yes,” she replied. “I am the girl in the picture.”
This woman looked far too normal, too healthy to be the one they sought. The famous photo they spoke of had been taken nine years earlier, on June 8, 1972, during an event that nearly ended the girl’s life.
A few days before the photo was taken, Kim’s family had fled their home because the Vietcong (VC) was pressuring the Phucs to work
for them. The Phucs found refuge in a temple with other South Vietnamese families and some soldiers of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). Though the sounds of battle were far away, the soldiers warned that a “big attack” was coming.
Then the distinct smell of explosives became stronger. The sounds of war—planes, helicopters, bursting shells, and machine gun fire—grew louder.
The villagers heard the soldiers cursing: they had just seen one of their own observation planes trail the colored smoke used to identify the presence of VC. Had the pilot seen the enemy in this area? Or had he just made a terrible error?
“Everybody get out!” the soldiers shouted. “They are going to destroy everything!” The soldiers ran in the direction of the American base, urging the villagers on: “Run! Run fast, or you will die!”
Vietnamese photographer Nick Ut, along with a dozen other international journalists, was nearby waiting behind some ARVN barbed wire. They had heard rumors of an impending battle. Nick watched an ARVN Skyraider plane approach. He took a few photos.
Thinking that nothing else notable would occur that day, Nick was about to leave when he noticed something terribly wrong: the Skyraider pilot seemed to be off course. Then he saw a second Skyraider approach, this one “even more off target than the first.”
Although they could tell something was dangerously off-kilter, the journalists knew better than to run away: American or ARVN soldiers might assume anyone running from them was VC and shoot at them. So the journalists stood and watched as the plane dropped a bomb filled with napalm, a sticky, flammable substance that, once ignited, can reach 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
Nick focused his camera. He was struck with the fierce beauty of the bomb’s colorful explosion, which covered the highway and the fields in smoke. He wished at that moment that his camera contained color film.
Then he felt the bomb’s intense heat, even though he was standing hundreds of yards away. It felt, he thought, “as if a door had opened on an immense brick furnace.”
The next thing he noticed were screams. They came from inside the smoke.
“People have been bombed!” yelled a Peace Corps worker in the group of journalists.
Out of the smoke emerged screaming women and children running toward the journalists, who snapped photo after photo as they approached.
Then came a naked, screaming girl. Her name was Kim Phuc, and she was nine years old.
When the second plane dropped its napalm, Kim became engulfed in flames. Her clothes burned off. Her left arm was on fire. When she tried to brush the flames with her right hand, it became engulfed in the same burning sensation covering her neck and back.
She heard her brother’s voice and tried to follow it. She stumbled through the smoke screaming: “Nong qua, nong qua!” (Too hot, too hot!)
Nick saw her. As she approached with her brothers in front of her, he snapped a photo. Then he tried to help. He heard the girl asking for water. He repeated her request to whoever could hear him. An ARVN soldier held his canteen to her lips. Other ARVN soldiers emptied their canteens over her back. Nick covered her with a poncho, put her in the news van, then took her and another burned woman to a Saigon hospital.
Then he rushed to have his film developed. On the following day, June 9, 1972, the photo of screaming, naked Kim Phuc running down the road with other casualties of war made the front pages of newspapers worldwide. It would win Nick multiple international prizes, including the American Pulitzer.
Two days after the attack, reporters Christopher Wain and Michael Blakey tried to track Kim down. They found her unconscious at the First Children’s Hospital in Saigon. When they asked a nurse how the girl was doing, the woman answered, “Oh, she die, maybe tomorrow, maybe next day.”
Clearly no one was fighting to save the girl’s life. Christopher and Michael called the American embassy and asked if Kim could be transferred to an American hospital. Yes, said the embassy official, but only if the South Vietnamese foreign ministry gave the OK.
But the official at the foreign ministry hesitated. The transfer might make his government look bad, he said.
Christopher couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “The entire world has just seen the South Vietnamese air force bombing the hell out of their own people, and this would make it worse for you?” he said.
The official agreed to the transfer, and from that day on, Kim received better care.
She had suffered severe burns over 30–35 percent of her body and remained in critical care for a month. The treatment to save her life—daily cleansing in a burn-case bathtub—was horrifically painful to the wounded little girl. Her father stayed at her side night and day; he wanted to be there when she died so he could take her body home.
But Kim didn’t die. After a 14-month stay at the American hospital, she was finally strong enough to return to her war-ravaged home. The Associated Press Bureau in Saigon was inundated with gifts and money intended for “the little girl in the picture.” Nick Ut did what he could to make sure Kim’s father received his daughter’s gifts.
Kim with Nick Ut in 1973. Associated Press
In January 1973 German photojournalist Perry Kretz was under house arrest in a Saigon hotel. His crime? Photographing an ARVN soldier asleep at his post. But before Perry’s visa expired, he was determined to get one more story. He bribed his guard and walked two blocks to the Associated Press office. There he spoke with Peter Arnette, a New Zealand journalist who had won the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for his war reporting. Perry asked Peter if he had any ideas for a good story.
“Kim Phuc is a good story,” said Peter.
“Who’s Kim Phuc?” asked Perry.
“She’s the girl burned by napalm.”
Perry was incredulous. “She’s alive?!”
Perry traveled to her house and took photographs of her. When they walked to the spot where Kim had been hit by the napalm, her smile faded. Was she experiencing bad memories, Perry wondered. No, she told him. It was the heat. The damaged portions of her skin—which now contained no pores or sweat glands—had just overheated.
They returned to the house, and while the little girl cooled off with a shower, Perry, with the family’s permission, took photos of Kim’s scarred back. Then he returned to Germany, and his article was published. But he couldn’t get Kim out of his mind.
And Kim couldn’t get free of the war. There were still occasional incidents during which she had to run for her life because of shelling. In recurring nightmares, she was always running, running, running away from danger. She just wanted the war to end.
On April 30, 1975, it finally did. That morning her uncle Thieu “called for silence” as he tried to hear the news broadcasting from his transistor radio. General Duong Van Minh, Thieu said, was surrendering to the Communists. All South Vietnamese soldiers were to lay down their weapons.
“It’s over,” said Thieu. “The war is over.”
The children cheered. The adults wept. “We lost, we lost, we lost,” they said. Their sorrow was justified: Kim’s father and uncle were soon sent to so-called reeducation camps because the new government had decided they needed to be indoctrinated with Communist ideology. They were released several years later and, like thousands of others Southern Vietnamese people who survived the reeducation camps, returned mere ghosts of their former selves.
The years passed, and during Kim’s final year of high school, she decided on a career in medicine, partly because she remembered the kind doctors and nurses who had worked to save her life. But when she took the pre-entrance university exam, she came two points short of the standard that would allow her into medical school. She would have to take a six-month course in Tien Giang in order to prepare for university work.
On the day in April 1981 when Kim was ushered out of her math class to assure four important-looking men that she was the famous girl in the picture, they seemed surprised. “But, you look very—normal!” said one.
Kim understood. She drew up the sleeve on
her left arm. It was covered with scar tissue.
The men left, apparently satisfied they had found the right girl. Kim returned to her classroom, slightly amused but also puzzled. Why the search for her, and why now?
Two days after Kim completed her premedical course and returned home, she began to understand. The same men appeared at her home in a van. They said they were taking Kim to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon’s new name since 1976) to see their “boss.” They didn’t give her a reason.
When they arrived at their destination, the Information Ministry, an official and writer for the Communist Daily gave Kim an explanation. A German journalist had been looking for her, he said, and had requested the assistance of the Vietnamese government. “He met you 10 years ago and could not forget you.” The government decided to help the journalist and ordered a search for Kim.
A Vietnamese official escorted Kim to a hotel, where she met with three foreign journalists. They asked her what she remembered of the napalm attack and what she had been doing since. Then she was treated to the most extravagant meal she had ever eaten.
Kim was invited to two more interviews with foreign journalists that summer. She didn’t understand why she was being treated like a celebrity, but she enjoyed the attention, even though talking about the napalm attack brought on vivid nightmares.
She was more than ready to put it all behind her, especially when she passed the entrance exam for medical school and moved to Ho Chi Minh City in October to begin her studies. She was thrilled to have a good future ahead of her, unlike many young people in the South: children of families who had served the Southern government in any way were not allowed to attend professional schools.
Courageous Women of the Vietnam War Page 16
