I wrote a story about this:

You were set free on June eleventh of nineteen sixty-three. The key to your last lock was gasoline and a cause.

That day was the right day and you knew it when you pulled up to that busy Saigon street in your pale blue Austin Westminster (though it looks grey in that famous photo.) You were old and wise and the gasoline being poured over you was nothing more or less than anything you had felt before.

You struck the match and the phosphorus called up a little flame. You dropped it onto yourself with the cool fingers of a prophet. The flame ravens swept down on you from high above and your going was quick. The people around you shielded their eyes, or did not, and you were still as you were licked away. And then the oily flames were gone and that photo that shows you solemnly sliding into black-and-white fire had been taken and there was weeping in that busy Saigon street on June eleventh of nineteen sixty-three.

They say that when they took your remains and cremated them again that your heart would not be burned. They say that the sunset that night in Saigon was the face of the Buddha and that he was crying. And I say that you became a phoenix that day. I say what you did was true in a way we do not often see.

I like to think you made a difference.

But even though they killed the men who oppressed your people, you could not solve the bigger problem of the war. People were dying and killing, and there were no good memories, no moments of faith, just endings. You were a firesteel, a modern martyr in the darkness of the jungle. But were you nothing more than an example? It doesn’t matter.

You were set free, and if the time comes again, another will take up your charred mantle and convert mass to energy enough to bring back good memories, moments of faith, beginnings. You were the first burning man. But you will not be the last.