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unhappycamper

(60,364 posts)
Tue Oct 27, 2015, 07:14 AM Oct 2015

Girl severely burned in 1972 Vietnam napalm attack aided by new laser therapy

http://atimes.com/2015/10/girl-severely-burned-in-1972-vietnam-napalm-attack-aided-by-new-laser-therapy/



Girl severely burned in 1972 Vietnam napalm attack aided by new laser therapy
By AT Editor on October 27, 2015

It’s an image from the Vietnam War that many people still can’t get out of their heads — immortalized in black and white and in color to personify for all time the limitless brutality of war.

For 9-year-old Kim Phuc (watch video), June 8, 1972 became the first day of the rest of her life — a traumatic era unknowingly set off by a South Vietnamese pilot who nearly killed her with an errant napalm strike in her hometown of Trang Bang and literally sent her screaming into the countryside.

Forced to tear off her burning clothes, a naked Kim was captured fleeing her village moments later by a still photographer and news cameraman — images that shocked the world and revealed the grave threats faced daily by Vietnam villagers caught in the middle of two warring forces, each trying to wipe the other from the face of the Earth.

What Kim did not know at the time, though, was that the images of her severe burns would also sear themselves onto the world’s collective conscience — through a black and white Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph and color video footage that for decades afterward stood as garish reminders of how horrifying war can be.



Now in her 50s, Kim Phuc lives in Toronto and has created an organization to promote peace.
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