The Girl in the Picture
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| Source of both pictures - during and afterwards |
The book The Girl in the Picture: The Story of Kim Phuc, the Photograph and the Vietnam War is chillingly sad. The book was written by Denise Chong who wanted to get the story behind the famous picture known in the West as "The Girl in the Picture". The girl, Kim Phuc, was nine years old and had known war much of her childhood. One afternoon when out with extended family members, she, aunts and cousins and villagers around her were suddenly victims of napalm splashing from the sky. Friendly allies had napalmed their own side, and people came running and screaming down the road toward and past people, reporters among them, to flee the atrocities. Several who were running had burning skin and Kim Phuc was the worst. Her clothes had been burned off of her and her skin was afire with napalm. The picture taken of the running burning girl hit the the media and brought to world's attention the ugliness of war. The picture became a symbol for anti-war sentiment, but the war was not to be "over" for another three long years. The Girl in the Picture is a story that tells what life was like for Kim Phuc who survived the napalm attack but who was horribly scarred for life, luckily not on her face or arms so on some level she was thought to lead a "normal" life. Denise Chong gathers Kim Phuc's story from among the surviving family members in Communist Vietnam, in Cuba where Kim Phuc received an education and then onward to Canada where she eventually immigrated. Though the Vietnam War has been over for decades, to Kim Phuc she lives with the memories on her scarred mind and body ... and though the music of bombs falling is no longer heard, the silence of the aftereffects rings defeaningly in her ears.
The Tunnels of Cu Chi
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| The tunnels - not the underground 'hospital', sleeping and cooking quarters. Source. |
The Tunnels of Cu Chi: A Harrowing Account of America's 'Tunnel Rats' in the Underground Battlefields of Vietnam is another chilling story, not one of a victim this time but one of soldier survivorship. Cu Chi was one of the most heavily bombed places during the Vietnam War. It was an area fairly near Saigon that was riddled by Viet Cong soldiers who burrowed holes through the ground to infiltrate the enemy's territory. Though few in number, the Viet Cong tunnel rats would pop up and spray the enemy with a machine gun and disappear back into the ground before the enemy even knew their lines had been infiltrated. It was a warfare totally foreign to the Americans (Australians, etc), and as the Allies caught on, they would train soldiers to crawl through the three levels of burrows after the tiny Vietnamese. The burrows were intricately networked, booby trapped and very confined for one-on-one knife fights but that was the kind of "war" that raged underground. And then at times, the Americans were ordered away from the tunnels so bombs and napalm could be smashed down over and over on the fearful ground that held secrets too awful for Americans to approach. Of the hundreds of Vietnamese tunnel rats, only three (or was it four?) survived from beginning to end of the war. Death lurked in the holes from the enemy tunnel rats or from the deadly pounding of the bombs to destroy one of the Viet Cong's most feared areas in the war. Those who experienced being in the tunnels were forever haunted by spooks of the unknown blackness; the locals who survived had their lands and their families destroyed, and were haunted by the years of evil and death particularly rife in the area; and the Viet Cong, the 3-4 who survived, are people living with guilt for surviving while their friends and families were destroyed, often before their very eyes. Cu Chi is a haunted place and for many of those believing in the spirit world, it is a place to fear.
[BTW, I have been to the Cu Chi tunnels and even crawled through an open segment of tunnel, only a first level. The second level segment that was open for tourism was a bit too narrow, especially because I didn't know how far I would have to belly-crawl before being able to come up for light and air. Many people who lined up to go through the first level took one look at the close confines and decided they weren't up for it. Actually, I was able to almost duck-walk through most of the first level tunnel so it wasn't too bad. Also, the segments that are opened for public are rigged with intermittent small lights to give the "adventurer" a guide as to where to go. There are off-shoots to the lighted parts but people are told not to try them ... the guides didn't know if they had been properly explored or not, and of course no one knows what is "around the next corner" in them.]
The Sorrow of War
The Sorrow of War was the hardest of these three books to read - hard because it was written after the war but constantly the story flashbacks to what once was. The story is a progression of flashbacks triggered by memories of after the war or yet another time which is the result of depression. Depression of Kien, the narrator, is caused by guilt of leaving his girlfriend after her gang rape to rush to the army (or face the firing squad) and fight at the front for 11 years, during which time his friends and companies are summarily killed and he always seems to be the one who survives. It is not a story of surviving, but of flashbacks that are triggered by his life as he's trying to pick it up in the present ... rather, it didn't seem like he was trying at all to pick it up, but was just in a state of existence. Eventually however, Kien is living a life of continual flashbacks. His mind has been so ravaged by the senselessness and dehumanizing acts of war that he cannot live to enjoy his gift of survival. The author Bao Ninh uses a style which is most compatible with the reader's inability to track time and easily comprehend a chronological story for the entire book is written as if it were a single chapter, one without headings or clues to organize the changing of topics. But the fact becomes obvious, there is no change of topic for the war is the topic and that is paramount in the shattered mind of war-damaged Kien, the North Vietnamese soldier.