Kim Phuc Phan Thi, famously known as the "Napalm Girl," featured in one of Vietnam’s most iconic war photos, received her final skin treatment at a Miami clinic this week.
It has been fifty years since the Napalm tragedy, but Phan Thi still suffers from those burns. She routinely comes to Miami to get laser treatment.
She was just 9-years-old when on June 8, 1972, an American warplane dropped a napalm bomb in her country during the Vietnam war.
A picture captured by Associated Press photographer, Nick Ut, showed the child running naked on a road after being severely burned on her back.
Phan Thi recalled that she was playing with her friends when Vietnamese soldiers told them to run.
"Of course we as children were just allowed to play nearby the bomb shelter inside of the temple courtyard. Then, I remember after lunch, the South Vietnamese soldiers yell for the children to run," Pham Thi told CBS News.
"And I look up I saw the airplane and 4 bombs landing like that," she said.
She ran as fast as she could, but the napalm had already set her skin on fire.
“Too hot! Too hot!” young Phan Thi screamed while running away from her burning village.
"I still remember what I thought that moment, oh my goodness I got burned then I will be ugly than people will see me a different way."
Nick Ut, who was 20-years-old at that time, stopped to pour water on Phan Thi and then rushed her and several other severely burned children to a hospital. Her burn injuries were so critical that doctors doubted she would survive.
"I hold my camera, I took a picture of a boy one second and he died on the camera, but my eye looks at the pagoda, I saw Kim running with her arms like this," Nick Ut told CBS4.
"Even the doctor said she will die, no way she still alive. I tell them three time and they said no, then I hold my media pass and I said if she dies my picture on every front page on every newspaper. And they worry when I say that and took her right away inside," Nick Ut recalled.
Fortunately, she survived.
"To be honest he saved my life, and he became a part of my family," Phan Thi said.
The horrifying image was printed on the front page of the New York Times the day after the napalm attack and Nick Ut later won the Pulitzer Prize for the same.
Phan Ti lived in Vietnam until 1992 before defecting to Canada with her husband, where she still lives.
While she has recovered from her wounds and has regained her basic mobility, Phan Thi continues to suffer from persisting pain that becomes unbearable in certain positions.
Nick Ut, now 71, joined Phan Thi in Miami this week to mark both the 50-year anniversary of the iconic war image and the conclusion of her skin treatments.
"Now 50 years later I am no longer a victim of war, I am not the Napalm girl, now I am a friend, am a helper, I'm a grandmother and now I am a survivor calling out for peace," Phan Thi said.
Nick Ut still continues to document what happened to the ‘girl in the picture’ even years after the war.
"She looks better, look she so happy, she's always smiling," he said.
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