Many Americans were moved by the Vietnam-era Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of 9-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc (pronounced fuke), naked and horribly burned, running from a napalm attack. But for John Plummer, minister of Bethany United Methodist church in Purcellville, Virginia, that picture had special significance.
In 1972 he was responsible for setting up the air strike on the village of Trang Bang--a strike approved after he was twice assured there were no civilians in the area. In June of 1996 he saw a network news story about Kim Phuc and learned she was not only alive but living in Toronto. Plummer found out she was speaking at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. He invited members of a Vietnam helicopter flight crew to attend the speech with him. As Kim Phuc addressed the crowd, she said that if she ever met the pilot of the plane she would tell him she forgives him and that they cannot change the past but she hoped they could work together in the future. Plummer was able to get word to Kim Phuc that the man she wanted to meet was there.
"She saw my grief, my pain, my sorrow," Plummer wrote in an article in the Virginia Advocate. "She held out her arms to me and embraced me. All I could say was, 'I'm sorry; I'm so sorry,' over and over again. At the same time she was saying, 'It's all right; it's all right; I forgive; I forgive.'" Plummer learned that Kim Phuc became a Christian in 1982. -- Evangelical Press News cited in Beacon (4/97). Leadership, Vol. 17, no. 4
Acknowledgement to Pastor Dennis Marquard
