Unwitting icon of Vietnam War brings message of forgiveness

[struggle4progress]

By Matthew Bowers
The Virginian-Pilot
© April 22, 2008

... A 9-year-old girl, naked and screaming, runs down a road with other scared children. A wayward napalm strike by South Vietnamese planes had burned much of her body ...

The horrific image helped further sour American support for the war. And the girl, Kim Phuc Phan Thi, now a 45-year-old mother of two living outside Toronto, has taken her unsought fame and put it to use over the past decade to help other children victimized by war and terrorism ...

Kim Phuc was invited to speak in 1996 at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. She told thousands about her trek to happiness. She met and forgave the American pilot who helped coordinate the South Vietnamese airstrike that injured her ...

"I cannot change the history of what happened to me," she said. "But I can change the meaning of it" ...

http://hamptonroads.com/2008/04/unwitting-icon-vietnam-war-brings-message-forgiveness

[Raven]

1. That picture of her changed my life...literally, absolutely. I cannot

imagine what kind of a person I would be if it hadn't been for that young girl.

[acmavm]

2. That picture affected the lives of people all around the world. I've often

wondered what happened to her. Her experience, and the pictures of the dead of My Lai lying in a ditch, turned the hearts and minds of millions of people against the way. Once they saw what our military was doing to innocents like her, the end of the war was inevitable.