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Associated Press

Fire Road
by Kim Phuc Phan Thi
Tyndale Momentum
4/5 stars
In many ways, Kim Phuc Phan Thi has never left Route 1 in Vietnam, the highway where Associated Press photographer Nick Ut captured her running on June 8, 1972.
It’s one of the most enduring images of the 20th century. A young Phuc runs naked toward Ut’s camera, her arms flung away from her body. The nine-year-old is screaming because of the napalm searing her back and left arm.

Phuc writes in a new memoir that, for most of her life, she tried to run away from that moment when she became the “napalm girl”. Throughout Fire Road, she explains how she came to see her life instead as a journey towards faith and peace.
Phuc’s survival and the errant bombing of civilians in her village outside Saigon by the South Vietnamese military have been comprehensively explored by journalists in the decades since the war, and in Denise Chong’s 1999 book, The Girl in the Picture, that detailed the war from the Vietnamese perspective.
Fire Road, written with the help of Ashley Wiersma, completes the picture by adding Phuc’s own voice to the story. The book makes a reader hungry with descriptions of the flavours of her childhood in Southeast Asia: her mother’s noodle soups, the guavas and bananas she plucked ripe off the trees outside her family’s home.
Book review: Napalm, by Robert Neer
Equally rich are the details of how war appeared to a child: sandal prints on the ground, where Viet Cong had crossed their property during the night; bright purple and gold smoke that marked bombing targets; and the deceptively soft whump-whump sound of napalm canisters hitting the ground.

Napalm sticks to its victims, burning through layers of skin and muscle. Phuc writes that the Vietnamese government’s use of her story for propaganda stuck as painfully to her as the napalm, interrupting her studies and threatening to confine her until she defected to Canada.
How war correspondents help to shape the narrative during times of conflict
Still, Phuc doesn’t dwell on the war, its aftermath or her efforts to physically distance herself from her government minders. Her focus in Fire Road is her conversion to Christianity – finding a saviour with scars she could relate to – and her persistence in persuading her husband and family to join her religious journey.
Phuc writes in the same soothing tone she has when she speaks in public as a Unesco goodwill ambassador. Even though well-intentioned journalists and doctors may not have helped her move on entirely from her wartime trauma, she seems to have found a balm to ease her pains.


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Review: Fire Road – how Vietnam war’s ‘napalm girl’ learned to stop running away and found religious salvation

Nine-year-old Kim Phuc running from a South Vietnamese napalm attack during the Vietnam war. Photo: Nick Ut

Cover image of the book Fire Road by Kim Phuc Phan Thi. Photo : Handout [FEATURES]

F27WGW Los Angeles, California, USA. 13th Sep, 2015. Kim Phuc Phan Thi, the subject of a Pulitzer-Prize winning Vietnam War-era photo as a child, Napalm Girl, speaks about her life and the power of forgiveness during the main worship service in Liberty Baptist Church, Newport Beach, California, Sunday, September 13, 2015. Photo : Alamy [FEATURES]

Was Ho Chi Minh the reason why the Vietnam War is history, but the wounds of Korea still fester?

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un leads a memorial ceremony at the Fatherland Liberation War Martyrs Cemetery in Pyongyang on July 27, the 64th anniversary of the Korean War armistice agreement. Photo: AFP/KCNA via KNS

epa06055362 South Korea's outgoing Defense Minister Han Min-koo (R), escorted by Gen. Vincent K. Brooks, the commander of US Forces Korea (USFK), inspects an honor guard during a farewell ceremony for him at the USFK's Yonsan Garrison in Seoul, South Korea, 29 June 2017. EPA/YONHAP SOUTH KOREA OUT

People watch a television news broadcast showing a picture of North Korea's test launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), at a railway station in Seoul on July 4, 2017. North Korea proclaimed on July 4 that it had successfully tested an intercontinental ballistic missile -- a watershed moment in its push to develop a nuclear weapon capable of hitting the United States. / AFP PHOTO / JUNG Yeon-Je

Thien Bu,, who makes a living as a designer in the southern Vietnamese city of Can Tho, holds the hand of his four-year-old daughter Tuong anh as she plays in a riverfront park near a statue of Ho Chi Minh on July 12, 2017. / AFP PHOTO / Roberto SCHMIDT

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More than four decades after Kim Phuc Phan Thi was photographed running naked down a highway after a napalm attack, she has written a memoir about how she turned to Christianity to help ease her pain


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