The stories behind the pictures that defined the Vietnam War

Gerard Jackson
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 28 January 2008

History for the left is just a means to libel their enemies, and that's why the left do not hesitate to mix fact with fiction and fiction with fantasy. Melbourne’s Age once again demonstrated the truth of this bleak fact when it republished the “famous photograph of children fleeing a napalm attack,” adding that Phan Thi Kim Phuc (the naked child) still carried the scars from the attack.

Obvious, isn’t it? Another damning indictment of American brutality and the futility of the Vietnam War? Except that it’s a lie. As Nick Ut, the man who snapped this Pulitzer Prize winning photo, said: “If the Communists had only stayed in North Vietnam” he said,“this never would have happened.” But our leftwing journalists’ Orwellian memory effectively filtered out Ut’s observation, leaving the picture to speak not for the victims of communism but for the left.

Despite the photo’s insinuations and claims by the left, these children were not victims of an American napalm attack. North Vietnamese troops and some Viet Cong units had launched an attack on Trang Bang, successfully cutting the road that ran through the village, forcing South Vietnamese troops to launch a counter attack. The use of napalm was delayed until the third day of the battle so as to give civilians a chance to escape the battle zone.

A South Vietnamese pilot spotted a number of South Vietnamese troops on the outskirts of Trang Bang. Mistaking them for enemy troops he bombed them, killing ten soldiers and civilians and wounding a number of others, of whom Kim Phuc was one. American forces were not involved in anyway, not that a trifle like that would bother our leftwing journalists.

What our media also didn’t report is that the North had deliberately targeted non-combatants in what they risibly called a “people’s war”. The key to their strategy was turning heavily populated areas into battle fields, knowing, no doubt, that the majority of Western journalists would blame the resulting casualties on the Americans, which is exactly what happened at Trang Bang. There was also the belief that the local population would blame the Americans and Saigon for the casualties and turn against them. They didn’t.

Let us now return to Kim Phuc. Why didn’t The Age tell its readers that the Viet Cong murdered more than 30 people in her parent’s restaurant when they deliberately bombed? But then again, The Age has never been keen on reporting communist atrocities, especially when committed by Castro, Hanoi, Saddam, North Korea, Islamofascists, etc.

Once the leftwing dominated US Congress cut off military supplies to the South it was quickly overrun by communist troops. Kim Phuc became a liberated citizen of a communist utopia, the lucky little devil. However, she was so evidently dissatisfied with the socialist paradise that the Hanoi thugs had imposed on her country that in the 1980s they cancelled her speaking tour of the US for fear she would defect.

Then in 1992 they made the mistake of putting her on a flight from Moscow to Cuba that had to stopover in Canada where she did defect; she became a Canadian citizen and now lives in Ajax, Ontario. The communists rendered Kim Phuc’s family utterly destitute, turned her into a symbol of anti-Americanism, even terminating her medical studies in the interest of state propaganda. She summed up life under the regime when she declared that: “Life is nothing in Cuba or Vietnam!”

Eddie Adams, another Pulitzer Prize winning photographer in Vietnam, expressed well his understanding of the political power of the lense when he said: <>

Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. . . People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths. <>

This is something our leftwing journalists also understand and that is why they and their intellectual allies never ask one question: If we were right about the Vietnam War why did Kim Phuc, a person upon whom the state bestowed a privileged status, defected at the first opportunity?

Defenders of The Age can argue that the paper was only reproducing an AP story. That the story came from the AP story news service doesn’t change the fact that The Age willingly reproduced it and by doing so gave the story its approval. This is not the first time The Age has pulled a discreditable stroke like this. On 9 March, 1968, the paper published a book’s claim that after the Battle of Long Tan an Australian soldier shot every wounded civilian he could find. The story was later shown to be a vicious fabrication.

Kim Phuc was not the only one to be viciously exploited by leftists journalists. A favourite photo of theirs shows General Loan, commander of the South Vietnamese National Police, shooting a captured Viet Cong infiltrator on the street, in the aftermath of the Tet Offensive. (You remember the Hanoi's Tet offensive, the result of which was the utter destruction of the Viet Cong and a devastating defeat for Hanoi's troop). Just as journalists lied about Kim Phuc they lied about General Loan.

General Loan's so-called innocent victim was in fact the leader of a Hanoi assassination team that was given a death list of leading members of the Vietnamese government, General Loan among them. Unable to find Loan they went to the house of a Colonel in the National Police and murdered him instead. They then set about cutting the throats of Colonel's wife and his six youngsters. (By the way, this is the kind of dirty deed that gives our diseased leftists a vicarious thrill).

General Loan dealt out summary justice to that animal. I would have done the same.

Gerard Jackson is Brookesnews' economics editor.