Kim Phuc, the 9-year-old Vietnamese girl seen running naked from an accidental napalm strike in the iconic 1972 photo, is finally getting treatment for the burns that still cause her intense pain four decades later.
Phuc met Dr. Jill Waibel of Miami Dermatology and Laser Institute through Waibel's father-in-law, who heard Phuc telling her story in a church in Canada, where she now lives.
Associated Press photographer Nick Ut, who shot the photograph, immediately tried to save her and covered her with a poncho. She was left for dead in a hospital morgue, but eventually was saved through a long series of surgeries.
"At 9 years old, I remember I thought, 'Oh my goodness, I got burned and I became ugly. And people will see me different way,'" Phuc told Jane Pauley for a report aired Sunday on
"CBS Sunday Morning."
Thinking no one would want to marry her because of her disfigured body, she tried to study medicine, but ended up being used as a propaganda tool by the government.
She became a Christian when she found a New Testament in the library.
After a chance meeting with Prime Minister Pham Van Dong, she told him she no longer had time to study, and he sent her to Cuba to continue her education. There, she met her husband, Toan Huy Bui, and they honeymooned in Moscow.
On the return trip, she decided to defect during a stopover in Canada. Toan joined her, and they have lived there ever since.
It was during a talk in a church telling her story that she met the man who would introduce the now 52-year-old Phuc to the doctor who is working to end her pain.
The scars on her back did not heal properly, which causes the pain, and Waibel uses a laser to burn off parts of the scar tissue so it will heal in a more controlled fashion.
The treatments are expected to take a year.
"Maybe it takes a year, but I am really excited – and thankful," she told an AP reporter.
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