Ep 5-Two Hands

July 25th, 2022. Lake Forest Hospital. A phone rings in a dying man's room.

Fifty years earlier, a photograph came out of Vietnam. A little girl, on fire, running down a road. You've seen it. Everyone has.

Seven days later, a plane carrying six members of one Wisconsin family went down over that same country.

Two uncles flew to Saigon to bring them home. One of them couldn't just sit and wait.

He held up his hands. I have two hands, he said. Surgical hands.

They let him in.

This is Episode 5. Two Hands.

If this story is part of your story too — I'd love to hear from you. hazyyellowfeeling@gmail.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

I don't know exactly why I'm doing this. If my cousins and my aunts and uncles are listening, and I hope some of you are, that's my honest answer. I just feel like someone should tell this story. And maybe you feel the same way. Maybe that's why nobody has. Because we're all standing at the same edge, wondering who goes first. Well, I guess it's me. This is a true story about a family from a small town in Wisconsin, about a bomb on a plane in 1972, about six people who never came home, and about everyone who was left behind to figure out how to keep living like normal people. A small town grieved and moved on. We did too. Or maybe we just went quiet. I'm Andy Kane, one of the cousins. As I said, I'm not exactly sure why I'm telling this story, but I hope I find out along the way. Lake Forest Hospital. The night of July 25th, 2022. Uncle Randy is dying. His daughter is with him. A phone call comes through, a woman's voice. She spoke in kindness to her friend who was dying. He was 92, it was time to go. He could hear her. The next day, he died. Most of us believe in something bigger than ourselves. Some think it directs us, some think it just watches while we direct ourselves. Me? I think it's a combination of both. It's pre-planned, and we're in on the deal. Call it God, call it the universe, or as my dad said, that's life. It's the same thing. Let's call it fate. Seven days before the Kenny plane went down, there was a road in Vietnam and a little girl. You know the picture. You can't say when you first saw it, but it's there even as I mention it. It doesn't need much conjuring. Once you see it, it's there forever. How is one man on that road at that exact moment, pressing the shutter in the middle of chaos, with an enormous black plume rolling toward him, looking like it will blot out the world? Barefoot children running for their lives. We say things like that, but they were living it. Some of them were dying from it. And behind the children, weary soldiers, just another day's work. And in the middle of all of it, a little girl on fire. The photographer who took that picture, his name was Nick Oot, at least by her own account years later. He took the picture, he put the camera down, picked her up, put her in his car, drove to the hospital and had to talk his way through the door with a press pass just to get somebody to look at her. The picture won the Pulitzer. It changed how people saw the war, all of that. But he didn't know any of that was coming. He was just a kid with a burned girl in his car trying to find a doctor who'd help. She had third degree burns over a third of her body. They didn't think she was gonna make it, but she lived. Pat and Randy got to Saigon and there was nothing to do. The crash site was in the jungle. They couldn't get to it. Every day they went to a school gymnasium with the other families and waited for status updates. Randy was serious, with a cutting humor and a thinly veiled sarcasm that caught you minutes after the conversation had already ended. His stock greeting, how do you do, felt like a mini interrogation, even though I don't think he meant it that way. Then again, maybe he did. He had accolades a mile long, all the trappings this world hands out to people who earn them. He cut people for a living and then he closed them back up. Randy was a surgeon. He couldn't sit in that gymnasium any longer. One morning, he walked out of the Hotel Continental before anyone was up and went to the Bark Sea Center, a hospital in Saigon that took in the war's burn cases. He held his hands up in front of him. I have two hands, he said, surgical hands. They didn't ask for credentials. They didn't ask him anything. He could have been a janitor for all they knew. They had a war, they had burns, they let him in. By family accounts, he operated close to two weeks straight, cleft pallets, burns, children, whoever was on the table. One of the patients was Kim Fuck, the girl in the picture. He performed three surgeries on her, skin grafts on her back, where most of it was gone. Fourteen months in the hospital, seventeen operations, skin that would never quite be skin again. But she healed. Years later, she found the Bible in a library in Saigon. What she read in it changed her, and then she practiced what she'd read about, not the easy parts, the hard ones, the love your enemies part. She and her husband defected from Vietnam in 1992, and they live in Ontario now. She wrote a book, Fire Road, about what it took to get from that road to forgiveness. She started a foundation for kids who get caught in a war they don't want to live in. The United Nations made her a goodwill ambassador. She speaks all over the world. She tells her story and asks people to do the hardest thing a human being is asked to do. Forgive. She forgave it all. The terror, the burned body, the surgeries, the family she lost. I don't know if I could do it. Would you? She is proof it can be done. The ripple from the road outside Trongbang has been running through human beings for 50 years, and it continues. Kim Fuck changed the world. At nine, naked and screaming on a road in a photograph, the object of someone else's frame that helped end a war. And then again, as an adult, choosing what to do with the fact that she lived, not with spectacle or an entourage or a halftime show, that whole conceited circus of celebrity, but with her scars and her story and a decision to forgive instead of hate. Twenty-four years passed. Then Kim Fuck went looking for the surgeons who saved her life. She found one of them in Chicago with a wife, children, a practice at Rush. When they finally sat across from each other again, he told the camera crew it was spectacular what she'd done with her life. She had a husband, two sons, a foundation. But they knew each other through the years, through the distance, through everything life does to move people apart, and that never changed. July 25th, 2022, in Lake Forest Hospital. The phone rang. It was her. I love you. I will miss you. I will see you in heaven. And she called him Daddy. In Vietnamese culture, calling someone by a family name isn't a figure of speech. It's a claim. Like she was saying, You are mine. He could hear her. And the next day he died. I can't know exactly what the rest of the Kenny Cousins believe. They have their own way of remembering the crash and what came after. I'm not telling you they died for a reason. They died because a man put a bomb on their plane. That's the reason. But she's alive, and she spent the next fifty years giving the world something it needed. That's precious little comfort. I won't lie to you about that. What she does goes out into the world, and the world's a better place because of it. But it doesn't quite kill the what if. Six members of the same family got plucked out of the sky, a mother and father and their four kids. We still picture what might have been. None of what she's done undoes a minute of that. Why did they die? Why did she live? Two questions we'll never know the answer to. Ours is not to ask why. But there is comfort there, even if just a little. Kim Phook lived because Uncle Randy was in Saigon. Uncle Randy was in Saigon because the Kenny died. Something was behind it. There has to be. One more thing. That gymnasium. The one Uncle Pat and Uncle Randy sat in every day with the other families, waiting. There was another man in that room with them. His name was Sam Chai. He was the one who put the bomb on the plane. Every day he sat in that gymnasium with the families of the people he'd killed. They grieved near him, waited near him, and had no idea who he was. This podcast is built from a newspaper article by Andrew McGregor Marshall, family letters and emails, conversations with the people who were there, and my own memory of what I was told. I've done my best to get it right. If you knew someone on that flight, or you have something to add or correct, I want to hear from you.