THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, February 22, 1997 TAG: 9702210052
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Larry Maddry
LENGTH: 93 lines
ON NOV. 17, the Rev. John Plummer preached one of the most compelling sermons ever heard in Virginia.
He began by telling his congregation - Bethany United Methodist Church in Northern Virginia - that he was going to share something that would ``knock their socks off.''
And he delivered.
His biblical text was from St. Matthew, the part where Christ preached the Sermon on the Mount, telling those who had given injury not to place gifts on the temple altar until reconciling with the persons injured.
Plummer himself had recently asked forgiveness of a person he had wronged, he confided. The minister's reconciliation was with a Vietnamese woman who had been 9 years old when a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of her running - naked and terrified - down a road had been flashed around the world.
The Vietnamese child was Pham Thi Kim Phuch, a girl who had been hiding with other children in a South Vietnamese pagoda that was hit by a napalm bomb. An everlasting testimony to the horror of war, the photo showed Kim fleeing the scene screaming in pain. Running with painfully scorched arms extended, she had ripped the clothes from her body to stop the burning.
In the sermon, Plummer recalled recently, ``I told them I was the one who had ordered that air strike.''
On June 8, 1972, Plummer was an Army captain coordinating air strikes for the 3rd Regional Assistance Command. When he learned that Viet Cong and North Vietnamese had infiltrated an area around the village of Trang Bang, about 25 miles west of Saigon, he ordered an air strike by planes of the South Vietnamese air force.
That raid led to the accidental bombing of the pagoda and the napalming of innocent children.
``I asked the Vietnamese, because they had aircraft slow enough to be more accurate with the bombs,'' he said.
The minister said he had not known that Kim and others were in the Buddhist pagoda and had been assured - twice - that no civilians were in the village.
The morning after the raid, Capt. Plummer was shattered when he saw, in the Army newspaper Stars and Stripes, that famous photo-graph.
``As I read the caption, I discovered, to my horror, that she was from Trang Bang,'' he recalled. ``My knees nearly gave way as it suddenly began to dawn on me that she had been hit with the napalm I had directed the day before.''
The photograph was reprinted many times in publications around the world.
``It was hard to avoid it, because it was in so many magazines and papers,'' he said. ``Each time I saw it, the pain and regret I had was renewed. It seemed at times as though that photograph was following me around.
At times he had wanted to scream: ``It was an accident. I didn't mean to do it!'' he confided.
Discharged from the Army in 1974, he spent 10 years working in a defense-related job before marrying his wife, Joanne, a Christian who led him to the church.
Seven years ago, he realized, he said, that he was ``playing games'' with God. The memory of his part in the air strike that injured Kim and the other children was part, but just a part, of his decision to enter Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C.
``I don't think what I felt was guilt but simple remorse,'' he said. ``The analogy I have used has been that it's like getting out of a car and slamming a door on the hand of a child. Even though it was unintentional, you feel it yourself.''
Plummer took a step on the path of reconciliation last fall when the 49-year-old minister learned from a friend that Kim, now a grown woman, was living in Canada. He also learned that she was going to appear and speak at the Veterans Day program at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
Kim, now 33 and a mother, still bears scars on her back, chest and left arm from the napalm.
The minister found her at the memorial that day, told her what he had done and asked her forgiveness. And she gave it.
``All I could say was: `I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm 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 recalled.
He had been eager to share with his congregation his good fortune in finding Kim. He delivered his sermon about the reconciliation the next Sunday.
``I had never told anyone except my wife and a few close friends what had happened until then,'' he noted.
The congregation shared his joy when he told them the story that Sunday in his sermon, the Rev. Plummer said. He told of the experience in the Jan. 30 issue of Virginia United Methodist Advocate.
He will never forget the moment Kim forgave him, he said.
``It was as though I had been pinned down by a huge boulder, and she lifted it off my back and set me free,'' he remembered.
Kim lives in Toronto. Plummer and she are friends now, the minister said, and talk by phone about twice a month. ILLUSTRATION: NICK UT
Nine-year-old Pham Thi Kim Phuch, center, was burned by napalm
dropped on her South Vietnamese village in 1972.