The young woman poses for the photographer on the low wall of the esplanade in Havana, with racing clouds as a backdrop. It's obvious she loves the camera, and the camera loves her. She's a Vietnamese Marilyn, wrinkling her nose, giggling and tugging at her skirt. She flirts with the photographer, wants to pose rubbing her cheek against his, giggles and tosses hair caught back by an orange and silver flower.
Seventeen years ago there was a different picture. Then, in , the scene was the war-torn Central Highlands of South Vietnam, and the billowing clouds in the background were the black smoke from a burning, napalmed village.
The young woman -- Phan Thi Kim Phuc -- was a 9-year-old child running naked down a road, screaming in agony from the jellied gasoline coating her body and burning through her skin and muscle down to the bone. The same photographer, Nick Ut -- at 21 already a seasoned combat photographer for the Associated Press -- raised his camera and squeezed off several frames. One of those frames flashed around the world and came to symbolize, more than any other photograph taken in Vietnam, the atrocity of war.
But Kim Phuc, like Vietnam, has outlived that savage image. Now a student in Cuba, she has been invited to visit the United States, the country that brought both the napalm that almost killed her and the doctors who saved her. Seventeen years later, now that she can speak for herself, her message is simple, its antiwar theme the same as the photograph's. But its spirit of reconciliation -- for Americans and Vietnamese, for warriors on all sides -- is radically different.
For the moment, however, the message must wait. It is time for a reunion between the photographer and his subject. There are new pictures to be made. She and her two sisters and six brothers grew up in the hamlet of Trang Bang in Tay Ninh province, about 30 miles northwest of Saigon. Kim Phuc's father was a rice farmer, and her mother ran a little soup shop on the nearby national highway, Route 1, which linked Saigon and Phnom Penh.
