'You either surf or you fight'
Posted Monday, October 31, 2022 06:31 AM
 Written a few years ago....

"Hit, tuck and roll!" my friend shouted as I pushed by the last boarders, threw out my small shoulder bag, and leapt from the open carriage door of the slow-moving train to the sloping bank just past the Nha Trang station platform planks, both feet landing and bull dozing through a pile of loose gravel, leaving me on my rear, and the departing train now pulling away rapidly down the smoky track, an added adventure for a late snoozing "travel expert."  Taking two handfuls of pebbles and letting them fall through my fingers, I looked up at my bemused friend and smiled.  "I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” I said.
 
The war in Viet Nam is far from over.  Charlie is still present in the eyes of young men and women whose wives, husbands, parents, children, brothers, and sisters died by the thousands.  Hard to get a motto driver to work out a deal for you at the local market--vendors look disdainfully at him when he tries.  But the Vietnamese fought the Americans for only a short time; they fought the Chinese for hundreds of years, so as one man told me, "We move on." 


I guided my motto through the countryside, into the deep green lushness of the fertile rice fields and fruit orchards-- dragon fruit, longan, lychees, pomelos--everything seems to grow in Vietnam--and could only wistfully wonder--how could we have done such a thing?  One smiling face after another...
 
'Smells like Victory.'
 
 Dan (From Nha Trang) 

 

Little Kim (the Napalm Girl)--Whatever happened to her?

 
Vietnamese children flee from their homes in the South Vietnamese village of Trang Bang after South Vietnamese planes accidently dropped a napalm...
 
 
 
Trang Bang, South Vietnam: Children run along Highway 1 June 8, 1972 in an attempt to escape an accidental napalm attack on Trang Bang, 26 miles...
 
 
 
 
 
 
Vietnam war icon Kim Phuc Phan Thi poses at the Unesco headquarters in Paris on October 4, 2019. - 47 years after making the international media...
 
 
 
Phan Thi Kim Phuc, known as the napalm girl, arrives to a meeting with the Dresden lord mayor on February 11 in Dresden, Germany. Kim Phuc Phan Thi...
A happy ending for our poster child.  :-)
 
The End
The Doors