The Girl with the Gun...A tribute...

 

There are these pictures that captivate you even though you the only glimpse that you have got of them has been only fleeting

I saw this picture long long ago,it would be easily 15 years or more, in a documentary being shown on TV about the Vietnam war. This picture was a part of a slideshow and it was on the screen for barely a couple of seconds, but it had a strange effect on me. I have never put it in words.

It took so long because I simply could not find this picture. Searching with all possible combinations on Google images did not yield much. Searching for Vietnam images from that period just brought up the regular images - mainly the world famous images - the napalm image of the children of the bombed out villages running with their clothes simply torn off by the Agent Orange chemical and the image of the US controlled South Vietnamese captain shooting a POW in cold blood. The image of My Lai massacre came up along with some images of the Tet offensive

It was as if no 'non-violent' or 'beautiful' images of the war were put up. Wars and 'beautiful' images seem contradictory but they are not. These are the images when the human spirit comes forth in the midst of a human-made hell.

I went through quite a lot of images before I atlast found this image. Even then, it was a part of an animated gif and I had to isolate the frame. But the difficulty and the wait was worth it.

Today I can pay my tribute to the Girl with the Gun.

I can stare at the girl, fascinated, for hours on end and the only thing I can be absolutely sure of is that the beauty that I see cannot be simply expressed in words, no matter how long I try. But try I must.

To me, its both an image of the absurdity of war and its power to play carnage with life and of the indomitable image of the human being in facing and fighting back even when faced with impossible odds.

Sometimes, I think we are so enmeshed in our daily chores of existence that we forget about the human spirit that resides in us - the spirit that would rage, rage, rage against the dying of the light, as Dylan Thomas would have said; the spirit that led us to conquer icy wastes and dry deserts alike. Its looking at picture like these that helps me to discover that spark.

Without the war, the girl would probably had found choosing between which which dress to wear on a date to be one of the most important decisions in life; would have been perhaps a beautiful, dreamy girl having regular crushes and planning big-small plans for the future. Here, there is an unmistakable feminine charm in the freeze-frame which neither the Vietcong uniform nor the gun, nor indeed the war, can hide.

The easy gait with which she carries the gun slung across her back is at the same time, both pitiable and extraordinarily terrifying. We would perhaps never know how or why she took up the gun - whether it was a split second easy or an agonizing decision. But the gun having become a part of her body lends a strange, terrible beauty - a beauty that cannot be shaken off easily maybe because its a beauty that we are privileged to see so seldom and in our own lives, maybe never.

I find her gaze arresting. The half glance that gives us a part view of her face reveals a face that seems beautiful because and inspite of a severity - a baby faced soldier with soft edges to the face that nevertheless seems to have acquired a glint or a sharpness that a guerilla warfare would bring. What is she looking back at? It could be just a casual glance to someone who has called from behind or maybe its a glance of introspection. The beauty of the picture is enhanced by the fact that we would never know what was it she gave a backward glance to. Its almost a symbolic look back at the devastated country that she is fighting for; a glance of reaffirmation of faith. Maybe it is also a glance of solitude. War invades privacy like no other pestilence. Maybe its a look she allowed herself when she felt herself unobserved, a glance that allowed her glance to soften for a bit.

An easy question to ask with a sigh and a wonder is "Will we ever know what happened to her". It would be a good thought to believe that she survived the war and led a full life. But then, she might have been killed an hour after this photograph was taken. But does it matter? She probably proved herself much more to her own self than many of us can even aspire to. When it mattered, she did not take cover and run; did not whimper and plead for mercy from the heavens; did not bemoan her fate to be born during a time of war; was not paralyzed with the tragedy of the possibility of her youth never reaching maturity, fully aware of the possibility of her life being extinguished any instant; she probably kept on walking inspite of facing the possibility of the fact that that no one might survive who would remember she even existed - the loneliest feeling of all. 

Instead she fought back knowing fully well it was not a fair war (is it ever?), knowing that her rifle would be useless against a B-52 bomber. Yet she chose to fight. I think it was this thought cumulating in a split second that marked me forever when I saw this picture.

Maybe we would never be able to put a name to the face. But its just as well. Let her be a symbol of every unsung and unhonoured hero that has fought in every war of resistance - resistance perhaps being our only inalienable right in life.

Let her also be a symbol against every kind of stereotype and limitations that we accept easily around us, stereotypes that allow us to neatly draw boundaries between what each of us can and cannot do.

In the end, I would just end my tribute to you by repeating a lyric that seems to have been sung just for you. In his song 'Unknown soldier', David Rovics sings in the end - "In all the trials of my life, I could only hope to be as beautiful as you".

Because of you, my heart has grown.

Rest in peace wherever you are.

END OF POST