In an earlier diary by Mary Scott O'Connor there was a picture, actually THE PICTURE, "Vietnam Napalm" by Nick Ut. (Crossposted at
The Next Agenda)
The picture that haunted the world, showing a nine-year-old Vietnamese girl naked, horribly burned from napalm, fleeing down a road screaming. Kim Phuc tells her story of that photo to the BBC in the link. She could have become a meaningless statistic to those who account for the progress of war.
I was so scared because I did not see anyone around me. Just fire and smoke. I was crying and I was running out of the fire and the miracle was my feet were not burned. I kept running and running and running.
My parents could not get past the fire, so they turned back to the temple and they sheltered there. My aunt and two cousins died. One was three years old and one just nine months - two babies.
After that I passed out.
A comment by oblomov was an attempt to correct a factual error about MSO's use of the photo.
First, the famous picture of the burned girl running naked down the road was taken on June 8, 1972 after a VNAF aircraft dropped some napalm. The incident was never secret, and US forces were not directly involved.
But oblomov may have been correct but still got it all wrong. Atrocity is usually defined as
"... a politically or ethnically motivated killing of civilians.
In international law, more precise terms are war crime and crime against humanity."
Wikipedia: Atrocity
For those of who remember the Vietnam War the picture captured the war but it meant much, much more. It was the existential scream of our time.
It is reminiscent of an 1893 piece by Edvard Munch, the Scream.
Munch described his inspiration for the image thus:
I was walking along a path with two friends - the sun was setting - suddenly the sky turned blood red - I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence - there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city - my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety - and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.
The Scream
Mary Scott O'Connor herself uses a similar image for her own daily rant.
But what comes after the scream?
In Kim's case she has used her own experience to "help other children who were victimized by war." Kim Foundation
When a war ends, it leaves many children in need of immediate treatment as well as ongoing care for wounds, burns, and broken bones suffered during the conflict Children are robbed of their innocence and childhood, and they become the greatest victims of war.
The Kim Foundation's mission is to help heal the wounds suffered by innocent children and to restore hope and happiness to their lives, by providing much-needed medical and psychological assistance.
And so as we discuss the relative merits of smart-bombs to Qana versus Katyusha rockets to Haifa let us not forget that the vast majority of victims in war are civilian non-combatants, often women and children. To the victims it doesn't matter whether the munitions were napalm, phosphorous, plutonium, smart or dumb, big or small.
Let us not forget this on the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, August 6, 1945. Nor forget this fourteen-year-old schoolgirl (below) and others who have paid the ultimate price of war simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Peace. Now.
(edited for grammar and spelling)