Napalm photo girl from Vietnam turns 40.

07:15 AEDT Sat Jun 2 2012.
Margie Mason.
http://news.ninemsn.com.au/world/8477340/napalm-girl-photo-from-vietnam-turns-40

In the picture, the girl will always be nine years old and wailing "Too hot! Too hot!" as she runs down the road away from her burning Vietnamese village.

 She will always be naked after blobs of sticky napalm melted through her clothes and layers of skin like jellied lava.

  It only took a second for Associated Press photographer Huynh Cong "Nick" Ut to snap the iconic black-and-white image 40 years ago. It communicated the horrors of the Vietnam War in a way words could never describe, helping to end one of America's darkest eras.
  "I really wanted to escape from that little girl," says the subject of photo, Kim Phuc, now 49. "But it seems to me that the picture didn't let me go."
  It was June 8, 1972, when Phuc heard the soldier's scream: "We have to run out of this place! They will bomb here, and we will be dead!"
  Seconds later, she saw the tails of yellow and purple smoke bombs curling around the Cao Dai temple where her family had sheltered for three days, as north and south Vietnamese forces fought for control of their village.
  The little girl heard a roar overhead as the South Vietnamese Skyraider dropped canisters like tumbling eggs.
  Then fire evaporated her cotton clothes and searing pain bit through skin and muscle.
In shock, Phuc sprinted down Highway 1 behind her older brother. She didn't see the foreign journalists gathered as she ran toward them, screaming.
  Then, she lost consciousness.
  Ut, the 21-year-old Vietnamese photographer who took the picture, drove Phuc to a small hospital. He was told the girl was unlikely to survive, but he flashed his American press pass and demanded that doctors treat her.
  "I cried when I saw her running," said Ut, whose older brother was killed on assignment with the AP in the southern Mekong Delta. "If I don't help her - if something happened and she died - I think I'd kill myself after that."
  Back at the office in what was then US-backed Saigon, he developed his film. When the image of the naked little girl emerged, everyone feared it would be rejected because of the news agency's strict policy against nudity.
  But veteran Vietnam photo editor Horst Faas took one look and knew it was a shot made to break the rules. He argued the photo's news value far outweighed any other concerns, and he won.
  A couple of days after the image shocked the world, another journalist found out the little girl had somehow survived.
  After multiple skin grafts, Phuc was finally allowed to leave, 13 months after the bombing. She had seen Ut's photo, which by then had won the Pulitzer Prize, but she was still unaware of its reach and power.
  She just wanted to go home and be a child again.
  She worked hard and was accepted into medical school to pursue her dream of becoming a doctor. But all that ended once the new communist leaders realised the propaganda value of the napalm girl in the photo.
  Then suddenly, once again, the photo that had given her unwanted fame brought opportunity.
  Phuc travelled to West Germany in 1982 for medical care with the help of a foreign journalist. Later Vietnam's prime minister, also touched by her story, made arrangements for her to study in Cuba.
  She was finally free from the minders and reporters hounding her at home, but her life was far from normal. Ut, then working at the AP in Los Angeles, travelled to meet her in 1989, but they never had a moment alone. There was no way for him to know she desperately wanted his help again.
  "I knew in my dream that one day Uncle Ut could help me to have freedom," said Phuc, referring to him by an affectionate Vietnamese term. "But I was in Cuba. I was really disappointed because I couldn't contact with him. I couldn't do anything."
  While at school, Phuc met a young Vietnamese man. She had never believed anyone would ever want her because of the ugly patchwork of scars across her back and arm, but Bui Huy Toan seemed to love her more because of them.
  The two married in 1992 and honeymooned in Moscow. On the flight back to Cuba, the newlyweds defected during a refuelling stop in Canada. She was free.
  Phuc contacted Ut to share the news, and he encouraged her to tell her story to the world. But she was done giving interviews and posing for photos.
  "I have a husband and a new life and want to be normal like everyone else," she said.
  The media eventually found Phuc living near Toronto, and she decided she needed to take control of her story. A book was written in 1999 and a documentary came out, at last the way she wanted it told. She was asked to become a UN goodwill ambassador to help victims of war. She and Ut have since reunited many times to tell their story, even travelling to London to meet the Queen.
  "Today, I'm so happy I helped Kim," said Ut, who still works for AP and recently returned to Trang Bang village. "I call her my daughter."
  After four decades, Phuc, now a mother of two sons, can finally look at the picture of herself running naked and understand why it remains so powerful. It had saved her, tested her and ultimately freed her.
  "Most of the people, they know my picture but there's very few that know about my life," she said. "I'm so thankful that ... I can accept the picture as a powerful gift. Then it is my choice. Then I can work with it for peace."

Grr! I am starting to get really fed up with personal maintenance.

 There was a time when all a woman had to do to get ready in the morning was have a wash and pop on a bonnet. These days, the time required for personal maintenance could qualify as a full time job. It’s impossible to keep up with the list of demands, and I for one, am about to revolt.

 I accept that one’s crowning glory requires considerable time and care, what with all the cutting, colouring, blow-drying and styling. However, the irony is that the look of the moment is ‘natural’, so women are lining up for a treatment known as ‘balayage’. It might sound fancy, but it’s essentially paying a hairdresser $300 to give you dark roots – something you’ve spent thousands of dollars over the years trying to avoid.

 Then there are those pesky fingernails that only give you a few good days out of a manicure. That perfectly buffed-and-polished look requires a fortnightly commitment to the nail technician’s chair.

 Spray-tan devotees enjoy a week of flawless, golden glow before they need to scrub off the streaky brown stains and book another application. And I haven’t even touched on the subject of body hair yet – all I’ll say about that is, let’s hope we never enter an ice age, ladies, because we won’t have any insulation…

 You’d think personal grooming would have been simplified for modern women whose lives are busier than ever. Instead, we put more pressure on ourselves to be perfectly turned out. I was falling so far behind with my personal maintenance recently, I snapped. With split ends and no time to visit the hairdresser, I had what can only be described as a hair breakdown. I fixed it up nicely for a party with way too much gel, and, when I got home that night I decided not to wash it and went straight to bed. The dishevelled do stayed the way it was for three days simply because I didn’t have the energy to deal with it.

 Although this is behaviour not seen since pioneer women disembarked the First Fleet in Botany Bay, it was strangely liberating (albeit itchy). Lacquered with so much hairspray it was more a helmet than a hairdo. I didn’t have to give it a thought for ages. It was only when I started to resemble a bird’s nest that I finally released my locks from their lacquered strangle-hold.

 I had so much more time to do other things during the whole hairdo experience, I’m now making a determined effort to decrease my maintenance in all areas to free up some ‘me time’. I have to say though; it’s not easy for a woman who’s been a slave to these rituals. Even as I write this, my attention is drawn to a wayward cuticle…It’s taking all my willpower to leave it alone.

HOT CHOCOLATE FOR THE SOUL.

 I am not sure who wrote this, so I have no-one to credit. It was sent to me this morning and just spoke to my heart. It is a delicious metaphor and I wanted to share it with you and wish you a lovely weekend with lots of sweet, warm hot chocolate…

 A group of graduates, well established in their careers, were talking at a reunion and decided to go visit their old university professor, now retired. During their visit, the conversation turned to complaints about stress in their work and lives. Offering his guests hot chocolate, the professor went into the kitchen and returned with a large pot of hot chocolate and an assortment of cups - porcelain, glass, crystal, some plain looking, some expensive, some exquisite - telling them to help themselves to the hot chocolate.

 When they all had a cup of hot chocolate in hand, the professor said: “Notice that all the nice looking; expensive cups were taken, leaving behind the plain and cheap ones. While it is normal for you to want only the best for yourselves, that is the source of your problems and stress. The cup that you’re drinking from adds nothing to the quality of the hot chocolate. In most cases it is just more expensive and in some cases even hides what we drink. What all of you really wanted was hot chocolate, not the cup; but you consciously went for the best cups…And then you began eyeing each other’s cups.

 Now consider this: Life is the hot chocolate; your job, money and position in society are the cups.  They are just tools to hold and contain life. The cup you have does not define, nor change the quality of life you have.  Sometimes, by concentrating only on the cup, we fail to enjoy the hot chocolate God has provided us. God makes the hot chocolate, man chooses the cups. The happiest people don’t have the best of everything. They just make the best of everything that they have. Live simply. Love generously. Care deeply. Speak kindly. And enjoy your hot chocolate.

The 80’s ripped us teenagers off!

 The longer I live, the more convinced I become that my generation got severely ripped off as teenagers growing up in the mid to late'80s. Compared with the '60s and '70s with their almost compulsory drug use and free love, or the late '90s and '00s where girls dressed like porn stars and oral sex was "the new pashing" - the '80s was a friggin' disaster!   "Girls wore baggy sweaters to cover their rear ends, drugs were evil and everyone was terrified of AIDS," US sports columnist Bill Simmons writes. A girl's idea of sexy was a Billy Idol haircut, cage-fighter fingerless gloves, a pair of those poop-catcher harem pants, grandpa's fisherman jumper and Doc Martens that took longer to unlace than some relationships lasted.
  Blokes got around with the famous "Flock of Seagulls" haircut, eyeliner, winklepickers and cheese-cloth singlets. Androgyny reigned - and ain't that a recipe for good times, eh - when you can't tell the boys and girls apart? Was it any wonder? Half our rock stars were gay men, singing about gay sex, but we didn't know it.
  When George Michael enthused about making it big and Depeche Mode sang Just Can't Get Enough, well, we should have known better. We did with Boy George, but it didn't help our confusion. I asked another female veteran of the '80s what was going on with the shoulder pads and Rupert Bear tartan jodhpurs so favoured by her peers and she described them as "man repellers". "If guys were cool enough to get it, then they were in," she said. Not that "in" counted for much in the first paranoid years of the AIDS "epidemic".
  Simon Reynolds and his Grim Reaper ad might have woken us up to the spread of the disease but it pretty much ruined the rooting years of millions of Aussie teens. Seriously, this was a time when Michael Jackson was a sex symbol, so you can imagine how much chance a bloke had for intimacy prancing around in white socks and kung Fu shoes.
  Gen Y should get on their knees and thank the whimsies of culture that they've come of age in an era in which women consider see-through leggings as pants and sex is often a precursor to an introduction. Still, there were a few saving graces being a teen in the '80s.
  There was no photo ID - you could get into a bar at 15 with a photocopy of your best friend's cousin's mate's birth certificate. Responsible service of alcohol meant that when a 16-year-old schoolboy collapsed on the dance floor after nine tequila laybacks, the bartenders would high five each other.
  Midnight Oil cranked out albums such as Bird Noises, Place Without a Postcard and 10 to 1, one-day cricket was chock full of Aussies you actually liked and Greg Evans's rise to fame gave short men hope all over the country. Still, I'll always be filthy about those baggy jumpers.

What did you love and hate about the 80s?