A 1972 photograph of 9-year-old Kim Phuc fleeing her burning village in Vietnam — her clothes incinerated from her body and her skin falling from her back and arms — captured the world’s attention. Some say it fanned the flame of anti-war sentiment in the United States that accelerated American withdrawal from the quagmire.
If so, many men and women owe their lives to the pain she has suffered; pain that still “cuts like a knife” when the weather changes and her inflexible scars ache and pull.
Norman Jameson
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Talking with her in a July 4 interview about that era pulled emotions to the surface that I’ve tried to relate to my sons, but have never been able to do adequately. What was it like in the late 1960s and ‘70s for young men facing a military draft to fight in a miserable, brutal obscure corner of the world for unclear reasons and where hundreds died every week? What it was like for your future to hinge on the numbered balls of a lottery and then to wait for a draft notice?
By the time I won the 1971 lottery — my birthday being selected No. 1 — war protesters commanded nearly as much media time as did casualty reports. It was a mess and getting worse. The nation was burning while we sent tens of thousands of our own into the flames of Vietnam.
As an alternative, some 30,000 to 40,000 emigrated to Canada to avoid the draft. At the time, it was assumed such an emigrant could never visit the U.S. again without being subject to arrest.
Yet it was an option for a Christ follower who opposed the war, or any war, based on Jesus’ commands to love our enemies and do good to those who would harm us. How literally does a new, eager Christian understand those words in such a context as the Vietnam War era — with children like Kim Phuc running at us from the front pages of our newspaper? How do I explain to my sons that yes, every option had to be considered.
I’ve tried to relate to them the agony of those years: the soul-searing, heart-squeezing, gut-wrenching, emotionally draining, shoulder-sagging weight of such profound deliberations. Whether to leave the country, to submit to the draft, to seek alternate service or to be injected into a senseless war and be forced to kill people like Kim Phuc — people for whom Jesus died and whom he loves every bit as much as he loves me.
Kim tells how she did the hard work of forgiving those who nearly killed her. She had to change her heart, she said, or die.
One of the men who begged her forgiveness was John Plummer, today a Methodist clergyman, who was involved in coordinating the attack on her village. His guilt after seeing her picture nearly destroyed his life, wrecking marriages and prompting alcohol abuse.
Plummer is both a small reality and a large symbol. He represents the guilt so many feel over their participation in that horrible war, in which by duty and proximity they were forced to kill, maim and burn villages, civilians and soldiers alike with little regard for their humanity. When Plummer heard Kim dangle a rope of forgiveness, he grabbed it like a drowning man.
Kim Phuc travels up to 40 weeks a year reeling out that thread of hope with a smile and Asian-accented English, saying, “I understand. I forgive.”
I grab the thread, too, grateful for absolution offered by a victim who simply takes Jesus at his word: Forgive.
Norman Jameson is a contributing writer for the Religious Herald and is reporting on an intermi basis for Associated Baptist Press.