How Horrible Wars Can Be HONG KONG - "Too hot!" she was screaming. Too hot! It was 40 years ago this week that Phan Thi Kim Phuc was running down a highway in Vietnam, her clothes burned away by a napalm strike, the skin melting on her back. "After a soldier gave me some drink and poured water over my body, I lost my consciousness," she said in an audio essay on NPR. A photograph of the 9-year-old girl, naked, screaming in pain, was taken by Nick Ut of The Associated Press. The black-and-white image won the Pulitzer Prize that year and has since become one of the iconic pictures in the entire archive of war photography. (Nick, who was 21 when he took the photo, will hold a live Facebook chat on Monday at 2 p.m. Eastern time.) The photo "makes me remember all the time," Ms. Kim Phuc told Tom Buerkle of The New York Times in 2000. I saw the airplane. I saw the fire. I got burned. I was so scared and crying and running out of the fire. Christopher Wain, a British journalist for ITN, poured water on her burning back that terrible day, June 8, and Nick drove her to a British-run hospital. Her recovery - physical and emotional - would take years. "My heart was exactly like a black coffee cup," Ms. Kim Phuc, now 49, says in a new A.P. story. I wished I died in that attack with my cousin, with my South Vietnamese soldiers. I wish I died at that time so I won't suffer like that anymore. It was so hard for me to carry all that burden with that hatred, with that anger and bitterness. As her heart began to mend, so did relations between Vietnam and the United States. Pete Peterson, a U.S. Air Force pilot who spent more than six years as a prisoner of war in Hanoi, became the first U.S. ambassador to Vietnam in 1997. The countries also now exchange visits of their defense ministers, and Leon E. Panetta, the U.S. Secretary of Defense, arrived in Vietnam on Sunday for military discussions at the former U.S. military base at Cam Ranh Bay. Ms. Kim Phuc's physical challenges were daunting. She suffered from asthma and developed diabetes, which blurred her vision, my colleague Elaine Sciolino wrote after interviewing her in 1996. She had to give up her medical studies in Vietnam, then also was forced to abandon a pharmacology course in Cuba. But in Havana she met another Vietnamese student, Bui Huy Toan, and they married in 1992. After honeymooning in Moscow, they defected together in Gander, Newfoundland, during a refueling stop on the way back to Cuba. "In front of me I had nothing, but I felt so happy I got free, I got freedom," she told Elaine. No clothes, no money, no family, no friends, no knowledge - nothing at all. But God helped me. Somehow, some way, he prepared the people to help me. The couple was granted political asylum in Canada and had two sons. They now live outside Toronto. And Ms. Kim Phuc has established a foundation to aid children affected by war. Elaine wrote about Ms. Kim Phuc's visit to Washington in November 1996 for an emotional Veterans Day ceremony at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial: She tightly embraced Col. Norm McDaniel, a retired Air Force colonel held as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, who guided her through the crowd so they could jointly lay a wreath of carnations, iris and amaryllis at the wall. She pressed her hand to her stomach and clenched her jaw over and over to keep from crying as taps was played. Ms. Kim Phuc used to dread talking about the bombing and the photograph. "I really wanted to escape from that little girl," she said. But it seems to me that the picture didn't let me go. And she now wants the photo, she told Tom, to be seen by younger generations. Let the world see how horrible wars can be.