The Napalm Girl’s Journey through the Horrors of War to Faith, Forgiveness, and Peace; Translated by Ashley Wiersma
You’ve likely seen the picture, the grainy photo from Vietnam of children fleeing a bombing, one naked little girl crying in terror as she runs down the dirt road. What you maybe didn’t know about that iconic photograph is that the young naked girl had just been dowsed with napalm and the flesh on her back was eating her alive as she ran. The look on her face speaks of more than just the fear and terrors of war. This girl felt hell, and for decades following that horrific moment, she’d suffer physical and emotional pains that few of us could fathom.
Fire Road is the story of that little girl, her growth into adulthood as a propaganda tool for the North Vietnamese, her ultimate escape to freedom, and her faith in Jesus that kept her going throughout it all. Kim Phuc Phan Thi miraculously survived the bombing and deadly napalm, when the medics mistook her for dead and wrapped her body for burial in such a way that the oxygen couldn’t reignite the burning chemical. In this account, she shares the fear and terrors of war, but also recounts the redemption, healing, and marvelous grace she experienced in the years following the incident.
I picked up this book in anticipation of my visit to Vietnam a few weeks ago. Although I’ve traveled there before as a tourist, I still have very little knowledge of the country or its history beyond the long and bloody war, so this time I wanted to go with a bit more understanding. I have a few more books about the nation on my shelves that could have given me more detailed information about the nation’s culture and history (definitely from different angles than this!), but this memoir is Christian, and I wanted to try it out first.
Reading of Kim Phuc’s recovery, conversion, and escape from Vietnam to Canada is like reading a terribly sad novel, yet it’s also terribly real. And she doesn’t lollygag in this memoir! She introduces us briefly to her family, religion, and way of life in her small Vietnamese village in the early ’70s before launching us almost immediately into her recollections of the attack. While the whole village had viewed their GaoDai temple as a refuge even from the bombers which swept in from above, this particular day proved that their trust in the temple was invalid. The entire region was bombed, the temple was destroyed, and little Kim Phuc was sprayed with napalm, the chemical that assured their generation that the world hadn’t yet exited its history of barbarism.
A Vietnamese journalist happened to be in the area and took many shots of the fleeing villagers, yet this one captured not only the terrible moment for these few children but also the horrors of war globally. The shot spread across the world, and when the Communist authorities realized that the girl behind that screaming face survived, they jumped at the chance to use her story to strike out against American involvement. Kim Phuc would undergo decades of painful surgeries and skin grafts to bring her closer to physical recovery, yet such pains could not compare to the emotion and social damage that the politicization of her injuries caused. Her education was stripped away in favor of traveling and public appearances meant to shame the Americans, and year after year she grew to despise the government that would abuse her this way.
Ultimately, readers get an insight into Kim Phuc’s faith in Jesus, the unexpected romance she enjoys in Cuba, and her decision to seek political asylum in Canada. We watch her slow growth as an advocate for peace—in spiritual terms and otherwise—and yet through it all, we can only begin to sympathize with the woman who’s borne these scars and pain now for half a century.
As sad memoirs go, this is not an easy book to read, yet it’s also hard to put down. I’m glad I read it, but terribly sad it ever happened at all. I can’t say this book gave me insight into the Vietnam of today, but it did give me insight into the light and darkness behind the eyes of those Vietnamese folks I met who are now in their 50s and older. In fact, one man I spoke with talked of how the Communists murdered his father by striking his neck with the butt of a rifle and tossing his body into the river. This man thereafter committed his life to repay those same soldiers, life for life, but himself was also rescued by the love and sacrifice of Jesus and is now a faithful servant of God who prays daily for the salvation of his nation’s leaders.
It’s of course this theme of redemption in Jesus that makes this memoir different than most others you’ll find about the war, yet it’s in no way preachy, and this faith in Christ is really just the backdrop to Kim Phuc’s story, the reason she’s still traveling the world speaking and the reason she was able to recount her many horrors in this book. Whether you’re a Christian or not, you’d do well to read this with an open and sensitive heart. In fact, these aspects of suffering, hatred, redemption, and forgiveness remind me of Corrie Ten Boom’s The Hiding Place. A different time and place, certainly, but a very similar story of God’s goodness in pain.
It’s hard to fathom such a world where death and pain surround one daily, and yet there are so many people alive today who have endured it in the past. There’s children and adults enduring it right now in Africa, Ukraine, Myanmar, and elsewhere. This world is an evil place, and we soft Americans with our Netflix and mocha Frappuccino’s could take a shot of reality every once in a while, by reading more books like these.
©2023 E.T.