Phuc started her lecture by asking the audience how many of them had seen her picture, which Ut took on June 8, 1972. She found that most had seen the photograph.
Phuc went on to tell her personal story of the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001. "All my memories of fire and war came back to me," she said. At the time she was in the Toronto Pearson Airport waiting to board a plane to Washington, D.C. where she was scheduled to attend a meeting at the White House. "It took a while before hope and peace came back to me," she said. "It took a while to smile again."
Phuc took the audience on a journey back to Vietnam during the war. "You remember me as a little girl from another time, another war and another airplane" she said. Phuc said she had always been happy as a child growing up in South Vietnam. "We had everything. We had fruit trees and a big yard," she said. "I felt safe and loved. Before the war I was never afraid."
On June 8, 1972, at age nine, Phuc and her family were hiding in a temple with the rest of her village in a temple when suddenly the soldiers guarding them yelled for everyone to run: the South Vietnamese airplanes were coming and had accidentally dropped napalm on the temple.
"I saw fire on my body. I felt so scared. I kept running and running and crying," Phuc said in a clip of a documentary about her life that she showed to the audience.
Phuc explained that the children on either side of her in Ut's photograph are her brothers and her cousins. All of them, with the exception of one brother who passed away three weeks ago, still live in Vietnam.
Phuc then explained that Ut, who took the photograph, actually saved her life-he was the person who drove her to the hospital.
"Sometimes, a terrible thing can happen in our life," she said. "Sometimes if we are very lucky we can learn from our experiences. They can make us stronger. That was my first lesson. I learned to be strong even when it hurt so badly."
At only nine years old, Phuc had experienced the most terrible pain of her life. Napalm generates a temperature of 800 to 1200 degrees Celsius. "It is burning gasoline under the skin," said Kim.
The soldiers who tried to help Phuc on the road were unaware that water would only make the Napalm burn deeper. She lost consciousness after they poured water over her. Phuc said that when her parents found her in the hospital three days after the bombing, she was lying unconscious in the death room; hospital officials had left her to die.
One doctor then made the decision to transfer Phuc to a clinic in Saigon, where she would get the treatment she needed to survive.
Phuc explained that dwelling on her suffering was not her objective. "I don't want to talk a lot about the suffering tonight," she said. "Let me just say the pain was unbelievable. I would pass out every time the nurses put me in the burn bath to cut the dead skin off." Phuc underwent 17 operations in 14 months.
Phuc also said she was able to deal with her suffering by taking life only one day at a time. She sang a song in Vietnamese to the audience that she used to use to distract herself from her pain. "Facing that pain was harder than any challenge that would happen to me ever again," she said.
From her struggle, Phuc learned the importance of love. "Love helped me recover," she said. With the help of her family, Phuc recovered. Her siblings took turns pounding on her back to get her blood moving.
She said she remembers feeling sorry for herself. Her dream was to be able to wear short sleeves again, but she was too embarrassed by her scars. "I would always ask, 'why me,'" she said.
"The lesson I learned is that you can lose everything, but if you have family love and God's love you have everything," she said. She recounted that, as a little girl, the hardest part of her recovery was staying home from school.
When she finally left the hospital she dreamed of becoming a doctor, but Phuc said that it was still extremely difficult to go to school because of the constant fighting that went on in and around her village.
Phuc went on to explain that when she was 19, the Vietnamese government decided to make her a symbol of the destruction of war. She said officers would come and pick her up from school for interviews.
"I really wanted to be left alone to study, but they didn't care what I wanted," she said. "In my country we were not free to make our own choices."
Soon after a particularly long period of interviews, the prime minister of Vietnam arranged for Phuc to study for six years at the University of Havana in Cuba. "I was determined to get an education," said Phuc.
In Cuba, Phuc met her husband. In 1992, she and her husband defected to Canada on their way back to Cuba from their honeymoon in Moscow.
One of the most important lessons Phuc said she has learned is to trust in God. In 1982, she found a New Testament in while at a library. That Christmas, she said she accepted Jesus in her heart. "My Christian faith has been essential to my happiness," she said.
For Phuc, the most difficult lesson was learning to forgive. At first, she had trouble accepting the Christian teaching to love her enemies. "I asked God to help me to learn to forgive," she said. "The more I prayed for my enemies the more my heart felt softer."
Today, Phuc and her husband are happily married and have two children. Phuc said she does not blame anyone for what happened to her. "I forgive, but I do not forget," she said.