50 years on, 'Accidental Napalm' still fills us with horror

Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Nick Ut's 'Accidental Napalm', taken 50 years ago on June 8, became the defining image of America's war in Vietnam. (Photo by David Hume Kennerly via Wikimedia Commons)

“Photographs cannot create a moral position, but they can reinforce one” — Susan Sontag

Only in America the anniversaries of terrible and indescribable destruction are celebrated with a zest that perhaps equals, in the huge space and big pile of bytes wasted in the media, the fury and madness of the sordid original act. Some years from now, America, in whatever shape it survives the divisions and discord that is pulverising its society, will, in photo galleries and on websites, raise a toast to what the country’s follies and foolishness wrought in Afghanistan. Instead of building a liberal society—Americans think of democracy as a takeaway pizza shop where, once the joint is set up, you can come and carve out slices according to your appetite and take them home and happily burp like a kid after consuming them—the greatest power on earth left the whole place in ruins as it left in a hurry that even its arrogant and confident mandarins could not explain. And the world, which was aghast at the American show of spinelessness, was gifted a bulging trove of agonising and gruesome photos. These documents chronicled, in their framed despair, the missteps and misery of the Great American Exit from Afghanistan. Harried people milling around military jets; weary and tired families waiting for an American passage; hapless kids being thrown over barbed wires against grim and ominous skies. Photos full of distress; photos that told depressing stories of human erosion and societal loss. Photos, not for the first time, that captured in telling and sorry detail how American hubris—and its Disneyland fantasy that in Foggy Bottom spiel is called a democracy-spreading project—can wreak incalculable destruction and spoil human life. “For years now," said Michael Herr in his Vietnamese reportorial masterpiece Dispatches, “ there had been no country here but the war.” That’s how those photos from Afghanistan looked. As if they were travelling to us from a country that had known nothing but war. 

An AP representative accepting the Golden Eye Award in 1973. 'Accidental Napalm' can be seen to the right. (Photo via Wikimedia Commons)

Fifty years ago, the world had witnessed the same American vanity, which came out hideously bloated in a Nick Ut photo of a young and naked and frightened Vietnamese girl running in the middle of the road from her village that was being targeted with napalm. “You're never more alive than when you're almost dead,” says Tim O’Brien in The Things They Carried, perhaps the best book on Vietnam. The girl in Ut’s photo has escaped death by a whisker and has lived to tell her story—through a photo.

Labelling is another American passion, and that photo—of the shocked and crying and intimidated girl—was labelled Napalm Girl. The innocuous label introduced a soulless element of American consumerism into the photo, but its power—despite its grotesquely simple labelling—to shock has stayed.  “The connection, that's what's important—that through this medium we can, perhaps understand and touch each other," says Paolo Pellegrin, arguably the best photojournalist working currently. That Ut’s photo still touches us is a testament to its tremendous power.

The background is blurry and smoky and there are other people, running away scared from the terribly thick smoke, but the girl—elemental in her raw grief—becomes the focus. “In a world myriad as ours, the gaze is a singular act: to look at something is to fill your whole life with it, if only briefly,” says Ocean Vuong, the Vietnamese-American writer. Ut’s photo fills you with a horror that is difficult to discard. It just sticks.

Nearly three decades earlier, before this photo came into being, American hubris had destroyed two cities in Japan through atom bombs. Entire cities were eviscerated, and many people were just incinerated within seconds. Poof. The photos were too grim to become iconic. Sometimes, the scale and immensity of destruction becomes too big to be captured in a photo. Devastation perhaps can be chronicled, but it is difficult to document apocalyptic annihilation. There is a direct line that can be drawn from the total destruction in Japan to devastation in Vietnam to the despair in Afghanistan. The American Arc of Immoral Unjustness. That can be the American label for it.

“We had a military and political leadership at that period which was genuinely deluded,” said Neil Sheehan, who wrote the most authoritative book on Vietnam called A Bright Shining Lie.

(via Wikimedia Commons)

Lyndon Johnson, while building his Great Society, stepped up American military presence in Vietnam. The dismantling of Johnson’s civil rights project started with the dog-whistling of Richard Nixon. Henry Kissinger, the president’s consigliere, roamed the world looking for new territories to woo and conquer while the wretched war in Vietnam raged on. America, riven by race, somehow carried on. Cold War warriors Nixon and Kissinger found a new perch in Maoist China and they embraced it with unbridled passion to spite the big communist superpower Soviet Russia. A project to extend their hegemony has ultimately ended up in reducing it. China, meanwhile, struts around the world with its newfound power and if some squalid photos emerge from places like Xinjiang, the blame again can be easily farmed out to hubris. This time, it will be Chinese hubris, not American. That immoral arc would have jumped geographies. That’s the way of the world. “All wars are fought twice,” says the Vietnamese-American writer Viet Thanh Nguyen, “the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” The Nick Ut photo has kept the war and its inestimable sordidness locked in our memories.

The world will keep getting more and more of such grisly photos if America refuses to rein in its Rambos. On how many frontiers will it fight? On how many countries will it sprinkle the stardust of democracy? Into how many regions will it inject its sweet syrup of hollow liberalism? And how many people will it bore to death with its sanctimonious lectures of vacuous morality? And how many kids will it orphan with its useless wars? Even John Wayne got tired, America. In the twilight of your hegemony, it’s time for you too to call it a night.