Heated

a different take on a 100 % true story

it's terrifying really; how quickly your life can change. you wake up, and that morning you have no idea what is going to happen to you that day. I wonder how people can cope with that knowledge; just wake up and go on about your day, each step leading you closer to something you don't know. But I suppose it's all educated guesses, right?
What happened yesterday is most likely to happen today, with slight changes; traffic and weather, the exact milk you put in your coffee, the song playing on the radio when you wake up in the morning, and maybe even the mood you're in when you realize your own consciousness after being asleep. People have become so in love with our routine that we believe it is out God-given right.
It is so frighteningly easy to change the course of your entire life. So horrifically simple to just dramatically alter everything you know and care about that you don't even realize you're doing it. Every time you step onto the street your risk getting hit by a car. If that car hits you, it's a jeopardy wheel of different injuries you could get, the catch is, you're not the one spinning it; fate is.
a broken back? your'e paralyzed from the neck down with no hope of ever walking again.
a broken neck? might be paralyzed, could live the rest of your life as a vegetable, for all you know. And yet, thousands of people a day step off those curbs anyway; hundreds don't step onto the other side of the street ever again.
your life, and every, little, beautiful detail of it, is in your hands at all times, and you try so hard not to break it.
Panic makes you drop your life, or burn it up.
I was nine years old. I had been playing with my brothers. the oldest of the two, which was about six, liked ice cream, and soccer, and was missing his two front teeth from a game of soccer we had played a month before when the ball hit him in the face and knocked his feet loose and he swallowed them. the youngest was about four, and he still cried a lot, but his favorite thing in the world was dirt; he was constantly filthy.
We woke up and had breakfast, though I wasn't really hungry, so I just had a cup of tea, and some rice. I remember it all because it never occured that life could change; sure my country was at war, and people were dying every day, but I was nine and I didn't think about that. I never thought, never dreamed in my holiest nightmare that my tiny village, so peaceful; my village that had not had a thing to do with this war, would be attacked for no reason. we had gone outside to play soccer in the street. my youngest brother was running ahead of me, catching up to the older brother. I jogged behind them. the air was clear and crisp and the wind was warm and dirt was hitting my face. Asphalt under my feet, and dirt crusted under my fingernails, I saw plane fly low overtop of me and my village. nothing ever registers that quickly; you don't react fast when your'e nine years old jogging after your family members to play soccer. You don't think about war and death and what to do when you see the low flying planes. You don't think to grab your brothers and run. You just continue what you were doing with confusion muddling your brain a little bit.
until a gallon of napalm hits you square between your shoulder blades, and even then your'e still confused, just now you're confused and desperate and scared.
I remember not thinking of decency or shame as a teared at the polyester and cotton clothing that was burning, melting into my skin. I remember watching my neighbors and friends, people I'd glanced at the market, familiar faces I'd seen through out my entire nine years run by me with looks on their contorted faces I'd never seen before.
I ran as fast as I could, but flames encompassed both my brothers right in front of me as I tore the clothing from my back, and it burned. Even through the ridiculous pain their death was just as cruel as the sizzling flash on my body. Burning does not give this feeling justice. Excruciating does not cover a quarter of what it is like to feel your skin melt from your muscles, to watch it fall off of you in giant black, mushy clumps and to smell yourself roasting alive. I can't even tell you if I was crying, because I couldn't concentrate on anything else but the overly intense heat, but I'm sure that if that pain had come slower; that had I been fully aware of what was happening to me, I would have puked.
But as it was, all I saw was a half-second of a camera flash, and then i fainted.
tiny tidbits, momentary lapses in consciousness. the sounds of cars and screaming. The constant screaming, the noise and the chatter. urgent voices and muttered curses. helicopter blades.
hours later, minutes later, time means nothing when you have fully realized what it's like to feel like you have a bonfire in your lungs; your skin is raw; pink and red and black and bleeding, and falling off in chunks. the outline of a man, his muttered blasphemy of "Jesus Christ", and I was under again.
months passed, and I was awake for most of it. I turned ten and I was standing in my hospital room's bathroom in San Fransisco, United States of America. At first, it felt like i was surrounded by the enemy, but then I realized; these people, these men and women who fixed me up as best they could were not responsible for the monsters their country had sent out into the rest of the world, they were just cleaning up the mess. I stared into the mirror, as I lifted my shirt up and over my head, and looked at my pack the reflection. skin, red and puckered and ugly ran down my back, up my neck, into my hairline and down both my arms. I knew what pretty was; and this certainly wasn't pretty in any sense of the word. I pulled my shirt back on and pulled a sweater over that, hiding my arms and the scars as best I could.
I remember that day like it was yesterday. but not the bad and the horrible, so much as the surreal happiness moments before those planes became part of my nightmare. it's like a dream that is good, and then something horrible happens, and suddenly, you're in a nightmare; and this place you thought was perfect is suddenly filled with screams and fire and brimstone. And all over again I'm nine years old. nearly a year later I had almost forgotten what my brothers looked like without fear and fire engulfing their faces.
The worst thing is; remembering that flash; half-second of the flash of a Camera, and someone had taken a picture of my agony. The entire time I was dying and recovering and trying so hard to live my life, people knew me as a disturbing photograph of a girl running down a highway, completely naked, crying, and on fire. And the man who took the photo won the Pulitzer Prize for it.
The scars do not disturb me as much as the photo does. scars are what is left of the tragedy, they are written on your body to show that you survived. But the photo of my flaming body falling to pieces is not how I survived, but the actual entirety of when my childhood stopped... Something fell off of me when my skin did. I shed my skin in jellied gasoline, and with it went my childhood and all feelings of what it was like to be a nine year old.
Five minutes ago, I was playing soccer with my brothers.

Author's Note

This is my own writing, but the inspiration is one hundred percent real. The girls name was Kim Phuc and she was the poster child for Vietnam War. Everything I said was one hundred percent true; her brothers did die in front of her, she was set on fire at the age of nine by napalm, and she did go to a hospital in San Fransisco, and yes, someone did take a photo of her, and it did win the Pulitzer prize. This is just what I think of when i think of how she must have woken up that morning, in her little hamlet of Trang Bang, with no conceivable idea that, that day she would watch her brothers die and be set on fire. This is what I thought she might have done that day, but this is pretty much what happened to her. You can see the famous photo of her if you search her name on google images; it's black and white, you'll recognize it, I'm sure.