Kim Phuc: I wished I died in that attack with my cousin, with my south Vietnamese soldiers.

Via What BUbba Knows

If you are of a certain age, you almost certainly remember Kim Phuc vividly, even though you may not know her name. She was the nine-year-old South Vietnamese girl who was burned by napalm on June 8, 1972, and whose image in a prize-winning photo taken by South Vietnamese AP photographer Nick Ut became an iconic and influential force that helped end the war.

The picture of Kim running down a road near the village of Trang Bang screaming in agony and terror, her clothes torn off and her body badly burned, shocked and outraged an America that had become profoundly weary of the war and its horrors. The photo was Picasso’s Guernica come to life, even more horrific because it was not just an artist’s imaginative and stylized rendition of the bombing’s effects, but the real thing.

As familiar as the photo has become, the story behind it is less so. For example, if the introductory paragraph of this essay had read: “She was the nine-year-old girl who was burned by napalm dropped by American forces in South Vietnam,” how many readers would have caught the error?

In fact, it was the South Vietnamese who were doing the bombing, but the idea that Kim was burned at the hands of Americans persists. That is only one of several common misconceptions about the attack, because the incident has been widely misrepresented and misunderstood through errors of omission and commission.In many accounts — up to and including this recent AP story in honor of the photo’s 40th anniversary — the crucial role of the North Vietnamese is downplayed. The AP article’s only mention of their role in the battle is in a sentence that states Kim and her family had taken shelter in a temple for three days “as north and south Vietnamese forces fought for control of their village.”The phrase almost makes it sound as though the claims of the two sides were about equal. But in reality those North Vietnamese forces were invading the South Vietnamese village of Trang Bang that Kim and her family called home, and the South Vietnamese forces were defending it from them (by 1972, the vast majority of Communist forces fighting in the South were Northerners).

More @ PJ Media