Accidental Napalm Attack and Hegemonic Visions of America's War in Vietnam

Abstract

Through a close examination of the initial dissemination and subsequent reproduction of the iconic Vietnam war photograph, Accidental Napalm Attack, this article indicates how hegemonic cultural/ideological processes have set the parameters for the circulation and consumption of this photograph, enabling this seemingly difficult and challenging image to be brought into line with relatively sympathetic reporting of the war in the early 1970s and to be appropriated by hegemonic revisionist accounts in the 1980s and 1990s. A key aim here is to offer something of a corrective to those accounts that state that upon initial publication the image had a powerful, almost traumatic, impact on the American public and that this impact was subsequently elided by the cultural/ideological work of revision and forgetting. This article argues that the initial shock potential of the photograph must not be exaggerated nor mythologized at the expense of a full acknowledgment of the photograph's centrality to the larger ideological/cultural framing of the event it depicts, a framing that was from the outset limited and limiting in nature. Properly historicized in this way we are reminded that, even though difficult and challenging iconic images such as Accidental Napalm Attack may display the potential to foster a more detailed and critical apprehension of war's costs, they more often than not operate hegemonically to screen out war's horror.

Keywords:

• photography
• Vietnam war
• Cultural memory
• hegemony
• kim phuc

Notes

1. The photograph has a number of different titles, including Accidental Napalm Attack (The New York Times, upon initial publication), Children Fleeing a Napalm Strike (Goldberg, 1991; Orvell, 2003), Napalm Girl at Trang Bang (Buell, 1999) and Accidental Napalm Strike (Hariman & Lucaites, 2003). Each of these titles steers the viewer to understand the image in a particular way and is indicative of processes of reenactment and revision. In order to anchor the photograph as much as possible in the moment of its inception I have chosen to use the title that initially accompanied the photograph when it was first published in The New York Times.

2. Fass recounts this in the television documentary, “Kim's Story: The Road From Vietnam,” (UK, ITV, 1997).

3. It is a signal of changing regulatory regimes that newspapers today would be much more reluctant to publish images of child nudity than adult nudity.

4. The appropriation of the photograph by projects that can be said to be counter-hegemonic was a feature of the antiwar movement and continues to the present day in films such as Rebecca Baron's Okay Bye-Bye (1999) and Sam Green's The Weather Underground (2002). However, in this article I have focused on the photograph and its after-life as it functions hegemonically.

5. Canada's relationship with the U.S. during the war in Vietnam was complex, and it adds a further symbolic dimension here that Kim seeks refuge in a country that also provided refuge to draft-evaders and conscientious objectors.

6. The film footage in particular is extremely disturbing and difficult to watch: the other injured and dead children, the soldiers, and Kim's interaction with the journalists, all serve to import a complex reality back into the photograph. However, this opening sequence is exceptional in its use of this footage and in general the documentary models the ideological trajectory outlined in this article.

7. On rare occasion an image appears that cannot be squared with this default position. I would argue that this is the case with the photographs of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. Interestingly, Hariman and Lucaites suggest that the photographs of Abu Ghraib and Accidental Napalm Attack have a similarly traumatic impact on their viewers (Hariman & Lucaites, 2007, pp. 172–174). However, I would argue that this elides crucial differences. First, the photographs of atrocities at Abu Ghraib prison show U.S. protagonists committing systematic abuse with no mitigation that this abuse is an “accident”. Second, the Iraqi military have no agency within the events shown and therefore the U.S. cannot absolve itself of responsibility. And, third, the photographs were taken for private consumption, thus avoiding the gatekeeping control of the mainstream media. The most important point here is that, as this article has demonstrated, Accidental Napalm Attack was consonant with wider news coverage and reporting of the war in Vietnam, something that cannot be said of the photographs of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Guy Westwell

Dr Guy Westwell is a lecturer in Film Studies at Queen Mary, University of London and author of War Cinema – Hollywood on the Front Line (London: Wallflower Press, 2006)