Monday, March 5, 2018

Journal - 3.5.18 - image of Vietnam girl running naked


Susan Molina

I saw that image so many times in high school. I remember the first time seeing it was in my World History class freshman year. Because we were freshman and so many of the kids in my class were immature, our teacher warned us that there would be someone naked. But the image is actually very serious. It was photographed after a bombing in Vietnam. The girl was running naked because she got burned from the napalm, which is what comes from the bombs and burns your skin off. The guy who took the picture, afterwards helped pour water down her body and took her to a hospital so she could be treated, because the hospital she was sent to said that she wasn't going to survive the burns. This image is very impactful because it showed how the war was doing more harm than good. The image was very controversial, mostly because of the nudity and people tried to invalidate the  image. Like President Nixon, who said that the image was fake but the image was proven to be real, and ended up winning awards.



This image reminds me of the reading because they both have to do with the war. I had to read the book for high school and I remember the narrator of the story also describing harsh images like this one, but that he actually lived through. It's just so sad that wars exist in the first place, and that the ones that most get affected by them are the innocents one like this little girl.

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