Did Nick Ut [who won a Pulitzer for the photo] know when he took the photo how extraordinary it was?

The image that Nick is left with is the whole sequence -- it burns in his mind the color of the napalm. That's what he cannot forget. When I talked to him, he cannot forget. All that he sees is the red of the napalm. He has none of that "coming to terms" that Kim has had.

Why do you think that is?

This is the peculiarity of the picture itself turning Kim into an icon of war. And she has to reconcile herself to that, come to terms with that status. There is no similar process for others involved with that picture.

Were Kim's parents and relatives hesitant to talk to you in Vietnam?

No! And this again made me steel my nerves to say, "This story has to be told." Because it was very dangerous for them to meet me in Vietnam. Although I took care with the meeting times and places and kept on the move, I always made sure that we met in windowless rooms. It was brave of them to meet me. Although they've been living in silence and keeping their heads down for all these years, they want to tell.

You really slow down everything around the moment of the bombing that wounded Kim. You round out everyone's perspective, from Kim to the photographer to the nurse in the burn ward -- seeing it omnisciently, in a way the people involved in the incident can't.

I did this very deliberately.

There's so much in that description to absorb. I'd always thought it was American planes that had dropped those bombs. I was surprised to read they'd been dropped by South Vietnamese planes.

That's very understandable, because America introduced the horror of that weapon into the Vietnam War and put it to widespread use. When Kim Phuc defected to the West [in 1992] the Vietnamese regime was very bitter because it was the Americans who had made the napalm.

Even though they were South Vietnamese planes, were the strikes still ordered by Americans? I was unclear on that.

Yes, I was deliberately unclear on that. Because of course I couldn't get to the bottom without digging up Pentagon records.

The Americans were very thin on the ground at that point ... and this was a very localized airstrike, but the point I tried to establish with John Plummer [the captain whose job was to coordinate air support under joint American and South Vietnamese military command] ... again you're returning to looking at that picture and the torment that end of war brings, the torment that doesn't ease. When people like John Plummer look at that picture, they see inside themselves ... and out comes guilt. It doesn't matter that it was South Vietnamese planes and that it wasn't a direct operation. It's guilt that they can taste. And that torments him.

I included Plummer in the book because I think it's important. It doesn't matter that I wasn't able to dig through all the Pentagon records to establish whether he was exactly in that chain of command.

It's more about what's in his mind?

Yes. I'll tell you another example of that guilt. I had hours of conversation with a helicopter pilot who described how he alighted on the Highway Route 1 [where the incident happened] and picked up the burn victims, and picked up Kim and took her to a field hospital. He had it in exact detail: the village, the attack, the aerial view of the village. This was hours of conversation. I saved my important question for the very end. I asked him when he served in Vietnam. And it doesn't overlap. It's guilt, you see. He's tormented. The picture provokes that ... it doesn't have to be personal, it can be a sense of collective guilt. It doesn't matter whether it's "your" war, or "our" war, because it's what one human being does to another.

You came of age in Vancouver, British Columbia, during the Vietnam War years. Were young Canadians outraged about what America was doing in Southeast Asia?

It didn't rip apart the social fabric in the same way as it did in the United States. There was a sense of relief that it wasn't "our" war, though I've read stories about Canadian companies sending munitions through American companies.

Did you see the photo when it first came out?

Oh yes, yes.

I wonder if your being Canadian allows you to tell the story and let the facts and images speak for themselves. I wonder if that would have been harder for an American to do.

I've often thought that. It's still so palpable: the feeling of the war, the horror of it, the loss and the tragedy and those who are still tormented by nightmares of it. It's hard, therefore, not to want to look inward or outward for blame. Even just discussing the war, when there's an American in the crowd, the discussion takes on a rawer passion.

Both you and [veteran New York Times correspondent] Henry Kamm make the point that to most Westerners, Vietnam is a war, not a country.

After the moment when that helicopter lifts off from the rooftop of the American Embassy [in Saigon], Vietnam just slips below the radar screen.

In Kamm's recent book "Dragon Ascending," he notes that those who felt anguished for what the Vietnamese had gone through during the war were "strangely silent during the next period of their suffering when hundreds of thousands felt their best choice was to entrust their lives and those of their children to tiny, unseaworthy boats on the treacherous South China Sea." We did see those pictures of the boat people, but we didn't have much information about what life was like in postwar Vietnam.

It's rare in daily news coverage that you go in afterwards and examine the havoc that the end of war brings. The picture of Kim comes late in the war, although people often think it comes earlier. American public opinion had already crystallized at that point. They just wanted the war to end. You can document the exact hour and minute when the war does end with the helicopter lifting off, but the torment of war doesn't end so easily.

Note: In 1997, UNESCO appointed Kim Phuc a goodwill ambassador "to spread a message of the need for reconciliation, mutual understanding, dialogue, and negotiation to replace confrontation and violence." Kim Phuc has also established a foundation to help child victims of war.

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