Meet the girl in the picture considered iconic for all the wrong reasons.

Most people don't known the truth of the original story and almost no one knows the rest of the story. 

The Northern takeover caused renewed suffering for Kim herself. It was only after the North took over that she began to have trouble getting medical help for her continued pain. It was only after the North took over that she was pulled from college and used as a propaganda tool, “trotted out to meet foreign journalists” and forced to tell them what the authorities told her to say.

Kim’s life finally improved after many years. The Vietnamese prime minister arranged for her to study in Cuba, where she met her husband-to-be. They traveled to Moscow for their honeymoon, and when their flight stopped in Canada on the way back to Cuba they seized the opportunity to defect. These days she travels frequently to speak to the public, and she has now accepted the photo as a “powerful gift” in her life.

It is wonderful that Kim’s existence has become so much happier. But it is up to us to draw the correct conclusions from her story: what was the real atrocity here, and who were the perpetrators?

Kim is glad to be alive now, but she describes her attitude growing up in Communist-dominated Vietnam this way:

I got burned by napalm, and I became a victim of war … but growing up then, I became another kind of victim. … I wished I died in that attack with my cousin, with my south Vietnamese soldiers.

From her telling phrase “my south Vietnamese soldiers,” it is clear that Kim does not see them as the villains of the piece.

Read the whole thing.