IN AD 40 TWO WOMEN, Trung Trac and Trung Nhi, did something that would make them legends in Vietnamese history: they led a military victory.
The Trung sisters, trained in the martial arts and witnesses to the brutal Chinese occupation of Vietnam, were inspired to lead a rebellion after Trac’s husband was beheaded for attempting to do the same; the Chinese had hoped his execution would discourage further resistance.
It had the opposite effect, and a large band of Vietnamese rebel nobles, led by the Trung sisters, eventually captured 65 Chinese-controlled citadels. Trac was then crowned queen of a large territory.
She ruled only three years before the Chinese defeated her. Two hundred years later, Trieu Au, another Vietnamese woman, led an army of 1,000 men into battle against the Chinese. When asked why, she responded, “I want to rail against the wind and the tide, kill the whales in the sea, sweep the whole country to save the people from slavery, and I refuse to be abused.” Her rebellion lasted only months before she too was defeated.
But her words and actions, along with those of the Trung sisters, passed into legend and would inspire generations of Vietnamese people to determinedly seek what these women had fought for: freedom.
Their centuries-long resistance against Chinese domination was eventually replaced by a struggle against the French. When a force of guerrilla fighters known as the Vietminh defeated the French in 1954, Vietnam, part of what the French called Indochina, was temporarily divided in two until nationwide elections could be held two years later. The First Indochina War was over.
But a new war began the following year. Instead of fighting the French, this time the Vietnamese people were fighting each other: the Communist North versus the allegedly democratic South. And the South had a powerful foreign champion: the United States, a nation that by the end of the First Indochina War had been vigorously supporting France against the Vietminh, footing 80 percent of France’s war costs. The new war’s official name was the Second Indochina War. Americans called it the Vietnam War. The Communist Vietnamese whom the Americans were trying to defeat on behalf of the South had a different name for the conflict: Khang Chien Chong My, or the Resistance War Against America. Most North Vietnamese just called it the American War.
These Communists considered the French and the Americans as having exactly the same goals—colonial oppression of their nation—and the two Indochina wars as being two halves of one whole. But the American War was not, as the previous conflict had been, an attempt to retain Vietnam as a wealth-producing colony. Rather, it was a disillusioning and ultimately tragic clash of cultures and ideals.
The United States was in Vietnam because of the Cold War. Communism—by then considered by the world’s democracies to be just as dangerous as the Fascism they had defeated during World War II—was spreading throughout the world. It seemed to American leaders, and to those from the Far East democracies who joined them, that Vietnam was a key place to take a stand against this totalitarianism.
In their determination to stop the spread of Communism, however, these nations—the United States foremost among them—didn’t take the time to thoroughly understand Vietnamese history and its people’s way of thinking, nor did they allow themselves to admit that the South Vietnamese regime they were propping up as a buffer against the Communist North was in no way a democracy, as its leaders claimed. Rather, it was a brutal dictatorship that tortured and killed any of its own people whom it suspected of being Communists.
The culture clash between the Vietnamese South and North was a result of the French occupation. Those South Vietnamese who were educated, urban, and French speaking dearly hoped the Americans would save them from having to forfeit their comfortable lifestyle, which would surely happen under a totalitarian Communist government. For if the Americans couldn’t save them, their own army certainly wouldn’t: these wealthy Vietnamese, and the many corrupt officers of their Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) who had also largely rejected Eastern culture, did little to inspire their fellow Southerners with any sort of patriotism or motivation to fight.
Unlike the wealthy elite, the largest group of Southerners, the farmers, maintained traditional Eastern values, which taught them to respect whichever authority was in power. But when their loyalty was simultaneously demanded by both sides—the Vietnamese Communists (Vietcong or VC) fighting secretly in the South and the ARVN soldiers working with the Americans—these farmers became snared in a war that brutalized their families and destroyed their simple way of life along with their precious ancestral lands.
US leaders hoped they could win a war of attrition; that is, they would cause so much loss and destruction as to make the Communists quit. The Americans measured success in body counts, the number of Communist fighters killed. But by making this their yardstick for success, Americans revealed a dangerous ignorance regarding the sincere and intense patriotism that made their enemies quite willing to risk their lives to see their country unified. So as the war progressed, Americans were increasingly baffled by this tiny nation’s ability to endure and defy the world’s greatest military power, year after destructive year.
Americans grew antagonistically divided over the war, and the US military draft became a lightning rod for that division. While fear drove some young men to either comply with their draft notices or flee the country, others on both sides of the issue were motivated by deeply held principles. But it was a rare individual who credited those with opposing viewpoints for acting on the courage of their convictions.
The very concept of patriotism was hotly debated in the United States during the war. Many in the widely diverse antiwar organizations were convinced they were serving their country by doing whatever they could to end its involvement in a war they believed pointless and immoral. On the other side were those who served in Vietnam out of an equally strong sense of patriotic duty that was often coupled with a desire to emulate the heroism of the World War II generation (which in many instances were their own parents).
Americans holding and implementing these conflicting points of view not only were at odds with each other but also often felt personally betrayed by those on the other side.
The United States did finally pull out of Vietnam, losing, in a sense, its own war of attrition. Within two years, North Vietnam had defeated the South, and the nation was united under the Communist flag. But the new regime was so oppressive—and its economy so depressed—that even many who had fought to unite the country now did all they could to flee it.
Although all memorials to dead ARVN soldiers were destroyed after the reunification, the new government tried to give meaning to the conflict by commemorating, in various ways, the 1.1 million Communist combatants who had been killed during the war. Americans, on the other hand, bitterly disillusioned with their government and the disastrous war, basically ignored their own 2.5 million Vietnam veterans for many years.
Finally, in 1982 the first part of the Vietnam Memorial was erected in Washington, DC, in remembrance of the 58,000 American Vietnam War veterans killed or missing in action. This initiated a nationwide acknowledgment of Vietnam veterans, but at that point, most of the attention focused on the war’s male participants. Why? Perhaps because war is generally waged by men and considered to be their duty.
So when women volunteer to participate in a war, they exhibit a particular kind of courage, to face not only the dangers of battle but also the negative opinions—perhaps even their own—of those who don’t believe them capable of enduring war’s grueling difficulties.
The women whose stories are included in this book represent all sides of the Vietnam War: Northern and Southern Vietnamese; French, Americans, and Australians; military nurses and a peace activist. Through their varied experiences, perhaps we can gain insight into the many facets of this complex and tragic conflict. And because most of these women—each representing thousands more with similar stories—voluntarily put themselves in harm’s way to make their contributions, they deserve our respect. After all, the Trung sisters and Trieu Au are revered not only for their courage in battle but also for being in the battle at all.