Like the lucky photograph by the AP catching the Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima in the Pacific in World War II came to symbolize American involvement and patriotism during that war, the iconic photo of that young child running down the road screaming because napalm has burned her clothing off, was one of thee such photograph's which helped turn the American public opinion against the Vietnam War. The other two were a montage of a South Vietnam officer in uniform, shooting a suspected Viet Cong member in civilian clothes on a Saigon street through the head, published in Newsweek Magazine, the other was the Life Magazine issue, containing no advertising whatsoever, printed with nothing but the high school graduation and / or military enlistment photographs, all in black & white, of the 700 plus American boys killed the previous week in Vietnam. So forever young.
Although the war allegedly was broadcast into our homes on the 6:00pm news nightly, when Vanderbilt University, the largest repository for television records in the world, did a survey of what was actually being shown during that era, very little combat or gore was on the tv, unlike the two photos and the Life magazine issue. What we normally saw were choppers leaving the ground, no combat fire at, or from them; wounded smoking cigarettes laying on the ground as they were awaiting evacuation; soldiers running, and shooting occasionally off into the jungle, but no footage of what they were shooting at; aircraft roaring in and dropping napalm and fire bombs on jungles, again without human victim's being shown, and villages going up in smoke in the background of the reporter, announcing where the military had attacked. It became such a regular thing, that people got the impression that we were seeing a war in our living rooms nightly, when in fact, we were not being shown anything controversial at all. However that little girl; the cold blooded murder on a city street montage, and the Life Magazine issue did much more than anything else, including the hippie war protester's marching in the street, to turn American public opinion from a 56% favorable rating for our involvement there, to less than 40%, and it happened almost overnight. Magazine, periodicals and newspapers were giving way to television news during Vietnam (actually since about 1959 they were losing their popularity), however, this photographs had the shock value that tv never could have to galvanize American public opinion against the war.
BTW, German author Kurt Vonnegut, of "Slaughterhouse Five" was a steadfast war protester in America during Vietnam - he was a 7-year old child who survived the American-British destruction fire bombing of the city of Dresden in Germany, hiding in the underground sewers during World War II. He was particularly vocal and active against the use of Agent Orange and napalm by America's military................
