In most professional settings today, or any public place for that matter, it would be frowned upon to look at an image of a naked girl. Most may think you as a disgusting pedophile for looking at such pictures, with one exception: Napalm Girl. The Vietnam War was one of the most bloody and frustrating conflicts of the twentieth century, and its purpose and impact remains a heavily contentious issue. Napalm Girl perfectly encapsulates the horrors and tragedies the war wrought upon the world, and especially the thousands of innocent civilians of Vietnam. Southern Vietnamese forces unintentionally bombed a group of civilians made up of mostly children with napalm gas, burning a good number of them. Phan Thi Kim Phuc was one of those burned by the gas, and this picture shows her after the attack. The photographer of the picture reported that Phuc was screaming "Too hot, too hot," and had severe third-degree burns all over her body. This picture still is able to strike a very emotional chord in audiences today, and it certainly did in me. It stands as a reminder that war is never pretty, and is wrought with amoral actions. It is the grim and inevitable truth that the innocent will always be one of the first to see those actions, and Napalm Girl will always be there to remind us of that.
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