The Girl in the Photograph: The Vietnam War and the Making of National Memory

Abstract

The photograph of Kim Phuc, the so-called Napalm Girl, that appeared in newspapers during the last years of the Vietnam War?June 9,1972 to be precise?shocked the world and still stands as one of the war's central icons. The horrifying image of a nine-year-old South Vietnamese girl running naked down a road away from an American napalm strike, her child's body on fire, her arms outstretched, her face contorted in pain, captured international attention. The photograph, which won a Pulitzer Prize and made the wounded child a symbol of the human capacity for atrocity, belongs to a small number of iconic images that have come to represent the horrors of the war's casualties?and, indeed, of war itself. Kim Phuc, however, survived the devastating burns inflicted by napalm. More than two decades later, living in Canada, she became famous again in the mid-1990s through a second photograph and a speaking appearance on Veteran's Day at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in 1996. This new photograph of Kim as the mother of an infant son, as well as her own repeated commentary on it, relocates her in the culture of trauma and testimony that has grown more and more powerful in the United States