The Columbia History of the Vietnam War

Vietnamese tradition prepared women to fight and resist foreigners. In Vietnam, there has been a history of resistance to a series of foreign invaders. According to a traditional Vietnamese saying, “If the country is invaded by the enemy, the family will be destroyed.”¹ Another adage proclaims that when invaders attack, “even the women must fight.”² Female warriors who had resisted invaders in the past, such as the sisters Trung Trac and Trung Nhi, who fought against the Chinese in 40 C.E., were held up as true patriots and heroines to be emulated. After leading troops that defeated Chinese invaders, the Trung sisters later committed suicide by drowning themselves rather than surrender to the Chinese. Two centuries later, a Joan of Arc figure known as Lady Trieu also led a popular revolt against the Chinese. Stories of these martyrs have been memorialized in Vietnamese legend, and women who bravely fought invaders during the wars against the French and the Americans have been included in this heroic tradition. Although Vietnamese culture defined women’s roles in terms of bearing children and taking care of their homes and family, resistance of invaders who threatened the village’s safety was indeed part of the struggle to protect and save the family. Hence, the war against the Americans in Vietnam, a continuation of the war against the French, became a struggle to preserve the most important Vietnamese institution—the family. Nguyen Thi Dinh, who became legendary for her military contributions to this resistance, proclaimed that “there was no other road to take.”³ A Vietnamese poet captured the feminine and fighting aspects of this exemplar wartime South Vietnamese woman:

Nguyen Thi Dinh:

In the assault you command a hundred squads.

Night returns, you sit mending fighter’s clothes,

Woman general of the South

You’ve shaken the brass and steel of the White House.⁴

Most of the women who struggled, sacrificed, and suffered in the war against the Americans in both the North and the South are anonymous. They served in a people’s war that called for collective resistance for a common goal. The few whose stories were retold and whose names became well known were held up not to glorify them as individuals, but to inspire others to endure hardships and make sacrifices to improve their lives.⁵

Understanding the wartime contributions of the nameless female population of Vietnam is essential to understanding the outcome of the war. Today, the Vietnamese government line emphasizes the victimization of women in the war. They truly were victims. They were wounded, brutalized, imprisoned, and tortured. They lost their homes, husbands, and children. Women were, however, much more than victims; they were key players in the conflict. Vietnamese military historian and veteran Professor Nguyen Quoc Dung contends that women’s contributions accounted for the North’s victory. Statistics alone make a strong argument that womanpower was a significant part of the manpower that defeated the United States in Vietnam. Of the approximately 2.5 million soldiers sent by the United States from 1963 to 1973 to wage war in Vietnam, most served for one year. Of the approximately 2.5 million Vietnamese women who participated in the struggle against those American soldiers in both the North and the South, most served from their coming of age throughout the duration of the war or until their war-caused premature death. Estimates suggest that, altogether, almost 1.5 million women served in the North Vietnamese Army, the militia and local forces, and other professional capacities. In the army’s regular forces, which women could join after 1969, the number of women stayed small—around 60,000. Close to 1 million women were in local guerrilla and militia forces. Untold thousands came from government agencies, hospitals, and educational institutions to support the war effort. In addition, females made up between 70 and 80 percent or more of the 170,000 volunteers in the Youth Corps. The young people in the Youth Corps worked tirelessly to keep open the Ho Chi Minh Trail. In the South, approximately 1 million women participated in the resistance as part of the National Liberation Front (NLF). About 60,000 Vietcong soldiers were women, who composed approximately one-third of the guerrilla units that engaged in fighting.⁶ Besides being statistically significant, what specific contributions did these Vietnamese women make? What functions did they serve? Why did so many participate in the struggle? How did their traditional place in society contribute to their role in the war?

Confucian tradition in Vietnam, imported from China, defined women’s status in society as lowly and their position as one of subservience to men. According to the tenets of Confucianism, males were dominant, and females were to be obedient and submissive. Until marriage, a woman was obedient to her father; after marriage, to her husband; and in widowhood, to her eldest son. Because of the Confucian emphasis on males, childbearing—especially bearing sons—was such an important part of a woman’s duties that a woman who did not provide her husband with male offspring could be divorced, or her husband could take a second wife or a concubine in order to have sons. Families paid reverence to ancestors at altars in homes, but these honored, deceased relatives were the husband’s ancestors. Female subservience stemmed from the Analects, the compilation of sayings attributed to the Chinese sage Confucius on which traditional China’s social practices were based. Ironically, there is only one saying in the Analects that specifically addresses the status of women. In book XVII, number 25, the Master is quoted as saying: “Women and people of low birth are very hard to deal with. If you are friendly with them, they get out of hand, and if you keep your distance, they resent it.”⁷ Later Chinese followers of Confucius elaborated on this passage in commentaries that clearly defined females as lowly in Chinese society. Other passages in the Analects instructed that people should conform to the rules of behavior appropriate to their status in society, and then there would be harmony and order in society—the ultimate goal in Confucianism.

With Chinese conquests of Vietnam and the spreading of the culture of China—known as Zhong Guo, or the Central Kingdom—into Vietnam, China’s smaller neighbor adopted Confucian social practices. Prior to the infusion of Chinese culture, Vietnamese women had had a higher status in society, and even after the inroads of Confucianism, they were not in as lowly a position as Chinese women. For example, the Chinese practice of foot binding, whereby young girls’ feet were tightly bound and kept tiny, thus rendering females crippled and homebound, was not adopted in Vietnam. In both cultures, women owed obedience to their mothers-in-law, a practice that resulted in virtual servitude. Widows were duty bound to serve their mothers-in-law even after their husbands’ death. During the wars against the French and the Americans, many widows continued this traditional custom and did not remarry, reflecting the depth of these traditional family practices. Rural Vietnamese women were typically timid and passive in public affairs, not inclined to be revolutionary. Women’s traditional obedience and submissiveness, however, contributed to making them potentially obedient and dutiful resistance fighters against foreign invaders. Their historic inferior status, under both foreign and Vietnamese rule, made them a potentially revolutionary force that found affinity in the Communists’ revolutionary calls for women’s equality.⁸

Because of the traditional emphasis on family and childbearing, Vietnamese females were naturally reluctant to leave home and family to participate in the struggle against foreign invaders. Being involved in the fight against the Americans might mean being separated from one’s children, especially if one was arrested and imprisoned. Being part of the resistance might even mean not being married and not having children. That so many women would risk or relinquish this most important societal value during the war with the Americans shows the strength of their desire to resist foreign invaders, to protect their homes, and to elevate the status of their sex.

Vietnam’s armies traditionally relied on women to provide essential domestic services. Historically, in addition to occasionally fighting against invaders, women cooked, did laundry, and served as nurses for their husbands, sons, and brothers, who assumed the chief fighting role. Domestic chores performed for the soldiers were considered traditional duties and sometimes necessitated leaving home and following the men to their military camps. In the South, soldiers of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), particularly from 1965 to 1975, often brought their families to camp or had them stay nearby. In addition to providing first aid to the wounded, wives sometimes helped out during combat by passing ammunition to their husbands. Some ARVN wives reportedly relayed messages over the radio to help direct artillery fire after a radio operator had been killed. The role of ARVN wives, daughters, and mothers, however, was primarily domestic, not military.⁹

The Saigon government equated the work done by the women in ARVN camps with patriotism. In one of the pamphlets that the government distributed, women who took care of the soldiers were praised as patriots, and therefore domestic chores were officially characterized as patriotic. In fact, however, these women were motivated more by necessity than by patriotism. Poorly paid and inadequately supplied soldiers needed the traditional services of their female family members in preparing food, doing laundry, and nursing them and their sick or wounded fellow soldiers.¹⁰

Another main reason for this movement of families, besides the work to be performed, was security; soldiers wanted to make certain that their families were secure as the war made conditions less so. As Communist strength grew, the countryside became increasingly unsafe, and families sought the security of being in or near ARVN camps. Soldiers feared leaving their families in villages where they could be harmed—brutalized, raped, or killed—by ARVN, American, or NLF troops and where there was often not enough food, especially if the land had been defoliated by intentional U.S. spraying of herbicides. In addition, if the family’s home, village, or land had been destroyed, the family became refugees and had no where else to go. The soldiers and their families attempted to re-create traditional village life in the camps. Ironically, as Robert Brigham points out, some of these families had not previously been living a traditional village lifestyle but had in fact been following a more modern way of life. Their reverting to a stereotypical traditional village family life gave them comfort and a feeling of security.¹¹

Despite the valuable domestic services and the psychological benefit that relatives in camp or nearby provided to the ARVN soldiers, their presence was also a liability. The need to protect these camp followers was a major concern and in sharp contrast to the military functions carried out by the women of the NLF. Americans were critical of the ARVN soldiers’ having their families in camp because it seemed to indicate that the soldiers lacked a “fighting spirit.” In reality, however, the motivation for the soldiers to fight was that they were fighting for their families. The importance of family and of keeping the unit together is evident in the high percentage of families that stayed intact when they emigrated as refugees in the aftermath of the war.¹²

In 1964, the Women’s Armed Forces Corps was established with 1,800 members as part of the ARVN. Although its size did increase somewhat, as the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) military increased, it stayed relatively small, and only three women achieved the rank of colonel. Members of the Women’s Armed Forces Corps were not supposed to serve in combat, but some found themselves in battle situations, where they performed bravely. Medical and clerical duties were their intended function, although there were some female officers in the RVN intelligence unit known as the Police Special Group.¹³

Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu, President Ngo Dinh Diem’s sister-in-law, recruited a few southern young women into a military unit called the Vietnamese Women’s Solidarity Movement. This uniformed unit marched and trained, and some of the “little darlings,” as she referred to them, did learn to shoot pistols—taught by Madame Nhu herself. This female military unit was very small, was taught to oppose immorality, and was mostly for appearances. It lasted only from 1955 to 1963, and like other efforts by the Diem regime to garner popular support, it did not meet with success. It did not compare at all with the guerrilla female fighting units in the South. Because her husband was President Diem’s brother and political adviser as well as the head of his secret police, Madame Nhu was able to get laws through the Saigon government that prohibited polygamy and gave women certain other rights. These new rights, however, did not match those proclaimed in Ho Chi Minh’s revolutionary rhetoric that was drawing women to the NLF and the Communist Party.¹⁴

Although providing important domestic services, women associated with the ARVN did not contribute to the fighting force on a level comparable to that of women in the NLF in the South and in the Communist forces in the North. In playing only a very minor role in the ARVN’s military mission, women were thus an untapped resource—especially as compared with women on the other side, who left home to resist the enemy in numbers significant enough to affect the outcome of the conflict.

Women in the South who actually engaged in combat fought as guerrillas in the NLF, or Vietcong, against the U.S.–RVN war effort. Established in December 1960, the NLF sought to set up a coalition government that ultimately would be Communist controlled. Two women, Nguyen Thi Binh and Duong Quynh Hoa, were among the founders of the NLF. The NLF’s political agenda called for equality between the sexes in all aspects of society. Some estimates suggest that more than 30 percent of NLF cadres were women, and these women held more than 30 percent of district and provincial committee posts. About 40 percent of regiment commanders were female. The NLF engaged in armed struggle as well as in political struggle and established its fighting force, the People’s Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF), in February 1961. RAND Corporation reports suggest that by 1967 the PLAF may have been inducting twice as many women as men in some units. Some American soldiers confirmed the large number of women in the PLAF.¹⁵

Affiliated with the NLF, the Women’s Liberation Association was established on March 8, 1961, and traced its origins back to the women’s association begun by Ho Chi Minh in 1930. The Women’s Liberation Association was Communist dominated but included other nationalist groups. Its main functions were recruiting, organizing, and training women to oppose both the Saigon regime and the American invaders, as well as supporting the pro-Communist fighters. Its goal was to recruit at least 20 percent of rural women, who would be involved in the struggle at the village level. The local branches of the Women’s Liberation Association operated in the villages and in the markets, where women could meet under the cover of buying and selling produce or fish and carry on secret activities to aid the insurgents. At the market, information could be exchanged and supplies could be obtained for the guerrillas. The Women’s Liberation Association consistently denounced both the historic inequality of women and their exploitation under the South Vietnamese government: “Under the Diem regime they have been savagely violated, massacred, arrested, incarcerated, tortured, debauched, their thoughts poisoned, … and [they have been] forced into prostitution.” Association documents proclaimed that women’s inequality would end with the liberation of society and reflected the beliefs that women made successful revolutionaries and that their participation was essential to the revolution’s success: “Women represent half the population and at least half of the revolutionary effort. If women do not participate in the Revolution, it will fail…. Further, a society cannot progress if female members are retarded.” Any female older than age sixteen could join the association if she agreed “to follow the precepts of the association,” if she took “an active part in the struggle movement aimed at overthrowing the U.S.–Diem clique,” and if she had “a clean past and identity.”¹⁶ With more than 1 million members by 1965—it claimed 1.2 million—the association was one of the larger mass movements and reflected the significance of women’s contributions in the American war.¹⁷

South Vietnamese women who fought against the Saigon government and the American forces during the war were called “long-haired warriors.” This patriotic label has been attributed to Ho Chi Minh, who used it to refer to women who fought for the NLF in 1960, but its origins may be traced back to female porters known as the “long-haired army” who contributed to the key victory over the French at Dienbienphu. Over time, the term came to be used for all southern women in the NLF. Because of a shortage of weapons, the “long-haired warriors” often trained with wooden imitations and then later acquired their weapons by taking them from enemy soldiers. Female guerrillas were particularly difficult for enemy forces to identify. Dressed in the black pajamas typical of Vietnamese peasants, these women could be “peasants by day, soldiers by night.”¹⁸

Although some women in the South did engage in actual military action for the NLF, especially after 1965, by which time a shortage of PLAF soldiers had developed, the Front more typically relied on them for political struggle and for support in the armed struggle. The NLF’s “three-pronged attack” for women called not for combat, but for supporting the fighting forces in the rear: the traditional duties of providing food and clothing for the soldiers as well as nursing them back to health; harassment of the enemy; and political insurgency, which included recruiting others and spreading propaganda. By 1965, the NLF claimed that its membership included more than 1 million women, and as the bombing and killing escalated, and as anger toward the United States grew, more women joined the Front. Communist claims that by 1967 there were 2 million women involved in the armed resistance are probably exaggerated, but they do reflect the expectation that southern women would take part in the struggle. Women, from teenagers to the elderly, participated. Because women and the elderly were less likely to raise suspicion, they were especially valuable to the Front. Teenage girls distributed propaganda leaflets and did recruiting work by talking to soldiers and neighbors to persuade them to join with the NLF and to oppose the RVN. A well-known long-haired warrior, Nguyen Thi Dinh, actually began her work as a teenage revolutionary during the resistance against the French by dropping leaflets. She ultimately became deputy commander in chief of the NLF’s forces and led troops into battle.¹⁹

Even children organization, 30 percent of whose membership consisted of young girls. Those who became involved at an early age tended to continue with resistance activities—a fact known to the NLF leadership. In her autobiographical account, Le Ly Hayslip tells of her activities as a child working for the NLF in her village. She and other village children attended late-night meetings, where they sang revolutionary songs and where cadres instructed them. Organized into committees, the children watched for RVN informers among their neighbors and served as messengers between the village and the Vietcong out in the field. Le Ly and other small children helped the Vietcong with making booby traps and setting them in place and were especially useful in these tasks because they were “smaller and more agile” than adults. Other jobs for the village girls included sewing Vietcong flags and helping to dig trenches that the Vietcong could use to slip into and out of the village unseen.²⁰

Women, especially those with children or family responsibilities, typically worked for the NLF in the villages. In addition to growing food, which they shared with the NLF soldiers, they washed the fighters’ clothes and provided them with clothing. They tended to sick or wounded fighters. At great risk to themselves and their children, they hid NLF members in underground pits dug beneath the dirt floors of their huts. They were the village lookouts, stationed on the outskirts of the village to warn of approaching enemy soldiers.²¹

They did not always voluntarily undertake tasks such as hiding guerrillas and serving as lookouts, though. Villagers were fearful of both ARVN soldiers and the NLF. Fear of reprisals from the Vietcong ensured compliance. Those who did not want to work for the NLF might face pressure from others—some of whom might be working as informants for the Front. Another reason that South Vietnamese women sided with the revolutionary forces was social acceptance and connectedness. As one woman later explained, “Life without a husband was possible. Life without relatives was possible. But life without a neighbor was not. I had to find one.”²² In order to survive, even neighbors with opposite political loyalties had to cooperate and protect each other at times.²³

Some women served as surrogate, foster, or “combat” mothers by adopting a particular guerrilla soldier who was in the area and caring for him as if he were a son or relative, thus continuing the traditional female role of nurturing mother. To protect themselves and him, they would say that he was a nephew or a son in response to ARVN soldiers’ queries about him. Women who sympathized with the Front might also serve as substitute mothers for ARVN soldiers. They tried to get useful military information from these adoptive sons. They also attempted to aid the revolutionary cause by helping these enemy soldiers desert and return home. There is evidence that these mothers would pray for the safety of their adoptive sons who fought in both armies. There was no contradiction in doing so because many South Vietnamese women did have birth sons fighting on both sides of the war.²⁴

Southern women carried out a variety of activities that contributed to the ultimate outcome of the American war. Often going out at night, they blocked roads so that the guerrillas could ambush ARVN and American troops. Other typical activities included harassing ARVN and American forces with booby traps, such as boards with nails in them and the infamous punji stakes of razor-sharp bamboo. They retrieved unexploded ordnance and used it to make grenades and mines. They also gathered intelligence. Posing as laundresses, servants, and peddlers, they spied on U.S. and ARVN bases and relayed information to NLF cadres. Because women typically did the marketing, their movement did not arouse suspicion, and they were therefore useful as messengers for the guerrillas. Messages could be memorized, or written messages could be hidden in the hollow bamboo poles of their marketing baskets or mixed in with smelly, dried fish—which police encountered along the way were not likely to search. Despite the villagers’ traditional passivity and the desire to stay out of harm’s way, women demonstrated against the government and the army in increasing numbers as the war continued, particularly after the increase in U.S. ground forces beginning in 1965. Acts by ARVN and American soldiers perceived as cruelty—bombing of villages or crops and killing of family members—prompted resistance activity. Women encouraged others to join demonstrations or to aid the NLF in various ways. For example, in 1966 women succeeded in shutting down the city of Danang by organizing a workers’ strike that lasted for seventy-six days.²⁵

When women participated in demonstrations or engaged in surveillance activities, they often wore several different colored shirts, one on top of another, that could easily be shed. Quickly removing a shirt of one color and suddenly wearing one of a different color served as a simple way to change one’s appearance to keep from being recognized and arrested. Most women remained anonymous, and their anonymity helped to protect them from capture and punishment. But there are also numerous accounts of women who withstood torture and of many who died as martyrs. The Women’s Liberation Association taught women English phrases such as “Don’t shoot” and “Me not VC” to protect themselves from arrest or harm when they encountered American soldiers.²⁶

RVN officials captured and imprisoned women and even young girls who were suspected of guerrilla activities. The island prison of Con Son was the most infamous. There, female prisoners were kept in small open cells called “tiger cages,” exposed to the elements, and had lime dumped on their open wounds. Five shackled prisoners were confined in each tiny tiger cage. They had no sanitary facilities, received inadequate food, and were given only one set of clothing each year, which did not last the year. Survivors, remembering the barbaric conditions they had to endure, recounted how they shared dead birds or a captured gecko with their cell mates who were closest to dying.²⁷

Because many of the southern villages were emptied of men in areas where there was guerrilla activity, it seems logical to assume that women were providing this guerrilla activity. As a consequence, women became the targets when the ARVN or Americans attacked, defoliated, or sought information. In the absence of young, healthy males, women took on more responsibilities in their villages and in the production of crops. Whether the men had voluntarily joined or been taken into the South Vietnamese army or they had gone north to fight or were fighting as NLF guerrillas, the women were often left behind to maintain the home, the village, and the supply of food as well as to carry out revolutionary activities. Historian Douglas Pike describes a woman’s role in the Front:

Vietnamese women were far harder workers than Vietnamese men. Knowing this, the NLF passed the burden of sheer drudgery to the most likely candidates in the name of idealism. The Vietnamese woman grew the vegetables, raised the chickens, and poled the sampans to deliver food to guerrilla bands; she ran the market struggle movement, unmasked the spies, and led the village indoctrination sessions; she made the spiked foot traps, carried the ammunition, and dug the crosshatch road blocks. The woman was in truth the water buffalo of the Revolution.²⁸

The Communists and the NLF were able to portray themselves as patriots fighting against foreigners, as in Vietnam’s past, because the Saigon government was allied with and obviously propped up by Washington. The United States was the foreign invader, and the U.S. ally—the South Vietnamese government—was therefore also the target of resistance. Opposing the foreign invader, Hanoi and the NLF could be seen as being allied with the peasants. Women responded to the challenges presented to them by joining with those who were fighting back—as the familiar, traditional saying admonished: “Even the women must fight.” Younger women, especially those without children or family responsibilities, were the ones to leave South Vietnamese villages to join the NLF in the more remote jungles or mountains, where life was hard and dangerous.²⁹

Although women in combat most commonly fought alongside men, there were some all-female fighting units. One such unit was a guerrilla company known as C3, which was established in 1965 and was based in and operated out of the tunnels of Cu Chi. The Cu Chi district near Saigon was an area known particularly for its guerrilla activity and its hostility toward government and American troops. One member of C3, Vo Thi Mo, joined the unit and led other women in attacks within a year after the Americans had bombed out of existence her family’s home, land, animals, ancestral graves, and village. Only fifteen when that bombing occurred, Vo Thi Mo, like so many others, became filled with hatred for Americans. She stayed with the C3 unit for two years and participated in and led attacks against ARVN and U.S. forces in that unpacified area until the end of the war.

Although the conditions were extremely difficult for the women who operated out of the Cu Chi tunnels, Vo Thi Mo was motivated to endure the hardships and the dangers because of her hatred toward the foreigners who were killing Vietnamese people and destroying the landscape. Among the many horrifying sights she witnessed in the tunnels, she saw a pregnant woman and a nursing mother killed and people napalmed. As was common, she was also motivated by a strong desire for revenge.

In her first battle, Vo Thi Mo led a squad of teenage girls who carried obsolete rifles and some hand grenades in an attack on two U.S. tanks that had been heavily damaged on a mined road. Although the battle was more of a standoff than a victory for the teens, in hindsight it was a telling predictor that a small group of not-well-armed teenage girls hiding on the side of the road could tie down American soldiers in two heavily armed tanks. In being a standoff, the battle was typical. It was also typical in that female fighters generally did not engage in close physical contact with American GIs. There seemed to be an unwritten NLF racial rule—that did not exist for engaging ARVN soldiers—that females should be shielded from hand-to-hand or other close contact with Americans.

In a later assault, Vo Thi Mo commanded a platoon of twenty-four female guerrillas who joined with a group of Vietcong males in a well-orchestrated move against a heavily fortified ARVN military base encircled with eleven fences, four of which were barbed wire. Vo Thi Mo was second in command of the second wave, and her girls advanced through nine fences, while the main group of males got through only five. Although that attack ended in failure when some of the mines, which had been kept in the tunnels and had become damp, failed to detonate, the plan was retried a month later. For the second attempt, Vo Thi Mo was promoted to second in command in the first assault group. She succeeded in getting through the barbed-wire fences and reaching the ARVN base headquarters. The entire mission was a success, but, as she later recounted, she was trouserless when she took prisoners because that item of clothing had been lost on one of the barbed-wire fences that she had crawled through! A short time later, while in the hospital recovering from wounds suffered during the Tet Offensive, she received a telegram awarding the Victory Medal Class Three—the highest—to her female platoon for its accomplishments during its attack on the ARVN base.³⁰

Vietnamese men sometimes had to be convinced that their female compatriots could be useful. According to historian William Duiker, Vietnam was a “society that still reflected the Confucian concept of male superiority.”³¹ Also, women were uneducated and suffered from high rates of illiteracy. Women such as Nguyen Thi Dinh who served in military leadership positions in the NLF were aware that men resented being commanded by a woman. A female guerrilla might disguise herself as a male to keep from alienating men in her unit. Female cadres also faced disapproval from other women. Female guerrillas appeared unfeminine to some village women because they talked, dressed, and engaged in activities that seemed masculine. Despite such disapproval, female cadres were held up as exemplary and feted by the Communist Party. Available statistics from sources sympathetic to the Front suggest that more than 30 percent of NLF cadres were women.³²

To Ho Chi Minh, women could play an important role in Vietnam’s liberation from foreign control as well as in the Communist movement. He instructed women in the revolution that they had three duties: to take care of their household and children, to raise food to help feed the soldiers, and to fight. Although these instructions were more closely adhered to in the North, where all citizens were mobilized, they were also carried out in the South by those who supported the Communist cause. Since the founding of the Indochinese Communist Party in 1930, Ho Chi Minh had come to symbolize independence from foreigners and had successfully led the revolution against the French colonizers. He also came to symbolize equal rights for women in a land where society still considered women to be subservient to men. His declaration of equal rights for women was well known in both the North and the South: “Women are half the people. If women are not free, then the people are not free.”³³ He called for an end to polygamy and concubinage and supported women’s right to vote, participate in government, have equal work opportunities, and earn equal pay. With illiteracy the norm for Vietnamese women, Ho’s promotion of education for women was one more way that his ideology appealed to females in the South as well as in the North. To Ho, “half of society” needed to be liberated in order for national liberation and socialism to succeed. He instructed women not to wait for others, including the party and government, to liberate them. They should liberate themselves.³⁴

The Indochinese Communist Party was identified with rights and opportunities for women from its inception. The emancipation of women went hand in hand with class emancipation. The party platform called for women to take part in the revolution and emancipate themselves, and from its beginnings in the 1930s the party recruited women. At the meeting of the Central Committee of the Eighth Plenum on August 16, 1945, the party pledged, among other things, equality for women. A party document in 1961 reaffirmed: “Women are not only equal to men in society, they are also equal to their husbands…. We plan to liberate all women to be totally free and equal in society and in their families.”³⁵ It enumerated some areas in which women would be equal to men: in land and property holding, in elections, and in jobs and wages. It also called for the end of polygamy. Even though the Communist Party espoused equality for men and women, its leadership was in fact male. Despite this patriarchy, the Communist movement, Ho Chi Minh, and the NLF attracted women because of their identification with resistance to foreign invaders as well as their offer of equal rights and opportunities for women. In addition, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) glorified female fighters in the heroic tradition of the legendary Trung sisters. These Communist propaganda themes were more successful in recruiting women than the Saigon government’s attempts.³⁶

The all-out war mobilization of women in the North was in sharp contrast to the role played by the women in the ARVN. In the North, practically all females received military training, including combat training. The DRV did not, however, draft women. The few who served in the People’s Army of Vietnam held noncombat jobs providing medical care, defusing bombs, and handling supplies. They were usually young and childless. Women were responsible for most of the defense of the North, including the anti-airstrike defense. They shot down a number of U.S. aircraft and tended to residents who were injured in the bombing. In response to U.S. bombing raids in August 1964, the Women’s Union launched the Three Responsibilities Movement, which included defense as one of the many duties expected of females: “Women should join in defending the village, and maintaining order and security. They must bring supplies to the combatants, find lodging for them, and look after the wounded. To take direct part in the fighting, they should join the people’s militia and undergo combat training.” Other responsibilities included taking “charge of family affairs in the absence of a husband or a son; giving assistance to the fighters at the front and undertaking, if necessary, combat duties.”³⁷ Women were also called on to increase agricultural and economic production, advance their knowledge and skills to aid the revolution, ensure that their children received a good education, and look after the elderly and the soldiers’ families. The extensive duties called for by the Three Responsibilities indicate that women played a vital role in Hanoi’s official war effort.³⁸

Along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, young women worked arduously under extremely dangerous conditions with old-fashioned hand tools to keep open this main artery for the movement of troops and supplies from the North to the South. The Volunteer Youth Corps, the majority of whom were teenage girls, began in 1965 with the goal of building and maintaining the roadways that soldiers and trucks used at night to transport materials for the war effort. On June 21, 1965, the Hanoi government called for an Anti-U.S. National Salvation Assault Youth Unit. After Ho Chi Minh made a personal appeal on July 16, 1966, numerous youths volunteered. From 1965 to 1968, in response to American bombing, 70,000 teenage girls left home to work on building and repairing the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Unlike army regulars, they generally received no training. Most of the girls were seventeen to twenty years old. The minimum age was supposed to be fifteen, but some were as young as thirteen. The majority were from the countryside and had not gone beyond seventh grade; some were illiterate. The teens felled trees, dammed up streams with rocks, built roads, filled in bomb craters, repaired bridges, defused unexploded bombs, and took care of soldiers passing through. They also occasionally shot down enemy aircraft. One female survivor later recalled: “In emergency situations we worked day and night. If the trail was blocked for just one hour there’d be a terrible traffic jam and that was an invitation to American bombers. Anytime bombs hit the trail, we had to rush out and fill in the craters immediately.” She explained that life in the jungle was “extremely hard,” and “we ate whatever we could find,” including “aircraft vegetables”—fungus and moss scraped off rocks, “the only edible things left after all the bombing.”³⁹ Food went to the soldiers and to the South, and the volunteers often had to learn to live off the land. The back-breaking labor, hunger, and danger were accompanied by malaria. According to another survivor, “Almost everyone got malaria and quite a few died from it.”⁴⁰ The girls witnessed terrible scenes as their fellow workers succumbed to death from disease, bombing, exhaustion, and work accidents. They also tended to the wounded and buried the dead. A bar of soap for washing their hair was a rare luxury, as were dry clothes. Unaware that the work would be as difficult and dangerous as it was, teens volunteered for a variety of reasons—because they were patriotic, because the prospects seemed exciting, because their poor families would have one less mouth to feed, or because others were volunteering. Whatever the reason, most believed that they “had no choice” because the American bombing provoked a desire for revenge and required that they protect their homes. According to scholar Karen Turner, “What the American side did not factor into the equation was the anger of women, who would sacrifice their lives to save what they had—their homes.”⁴¹

During the battle of Dienbienphu in 1954, female porters had made important contributions to the defeat of the French by hauling extremely heavy loads of munitions and provisions on shoulder poles to resupply the Vietminh fighters. Half of those who carried the supplies were females. During the American war, females made similarly significant contributions by carrying massive loads of supplies on their backs to the battlefields. The women’s political activism and guerrilla activities against the French were preparation for the war against the Americans. By the time of the American war, some women were veteran fighters. They gave up their youth and their lives to contribute during the national emergency, and their experience, determination, and dedication made them a valuable asset in the victory over the enemy.⁴²

As bombs fell and the Vietnamese worked tirelessly to keep supply routes open, America’s war in Vietnam dramatically altered the country’s landscape and society. Vietnamese women in both the North and the South left home and family to save home and family—to defend traditional values. They waged war for the goal of peace. Girls who suffered but survived and returned home at the conclusion of the war had been sustained not just by their commitment to the cause of national liberation, but also by their dreams of returning home to normal family life. At the war’s end, however, many of these women were no longer young, healthy, and able to bear children. One woman reported that when she came home, her health, ruined by malnutrition and disease, was not good enough to have a family: “Living in the jungle for so many years made us look terrible.” She explained, “After the war we came home hairless with ghostly white eyes, pale skin, and purple lips.”⁴³ As Turner discovered in talking with survivors, “stress, back-breaking labor, malnutrition, contact with death and blood had eventually robbed these young girls of the very future they sought to defend when they left home in the first place.”⁴⁴ One northern woman who volunteered after members of her family were killed by American bombs recounted: “The hope that I could raise children in a safe place one day kept me alive. It was what I was fighting for. And I was lucky. I survived when so many died. I have children when so many stay alone.”⁴⁵ In the aftermath of the war, those who were able to give birth suffered high rates of stillbirths and abnormalities in their babies due to the chemical defoliants used during the war. Some women who knew that their bodies had been exposed to chemicals that potentially cause birth deformities avoided pregnancy.⁴⁶

Fighting the Americans and the French before them, Vietnamese women embodied traditional Vietnamese Confucian values that emphasized their duties to family, home, and husband. This tradition of female subservience would seemingly have precluded women’s leaving home and fighting against the Americans, yet they did in significant numbers in both the North and the South. Defeating America meant removing that threat to the family, home, and village. Ho Chi Minh and the Communist cause therefore provided a way of saving the traditional Vietnamese way of life in the face of assault from foreign invaders.

Although many women departed from home and family to resist America’s invasion and to flee untenable conditions, leaving home often meant a departure from traditional values as they took on new roles and new positions of responsibility and authority. In the North, the number of women in the workforce grew from 170,000 in 1965 to 500,000 by 1969, and all professions were open to them, including medicine and engineering. Even though women were officially equal in the North prior to the American war, equality was not the practice. Anecdotal evidence reveals that during the war, attitudes changed, and North Vietnam became “gender neutral,” even though all of that progress was not maintained in postwar Vietnam. Those who returned home were changed. Many had learned to read and write in the jungles. They were more confident and to varying degrees were liberated. Some who found wartime village life in the South untenable fled to the cities, where they supported themselves by working for and entertaining the troops. Many became bar girls. Saigon, in particular, became notorious as a city of brothels. Others sought survival in the cities by taking positions as nannies, housekeepers, or anything else they could find. While providing womanpower in the resistance, women also assumed, in the absence of males, the responsibility for feeding the population of the country in both the North and the South. Those who stayed in the villages took on more responsibility for running the village as well as filling positions of authority in the Front. Thus the war accelerated the process of modernization and ultimately weakened some traditional values.⁴⁷

In today’s Vietnamese society, however, female veterans who are husbandless and childless are the most pitied because women who are wives and mothers, especially mothers of sons, are still at the top of the social ladder. In the postwar society, a woman’s role continues to be defined within the family, and in that way the traditional female role is unchanged.⁴⁸

During the American war in Vietnam, Vietnamese women typically were unseen fighters—their significant numbers and contributions unnoticed by American military planners. Military strategists focused on regular forces, and, in ignoring or discounting the irregulars, they overlooked the role played by the female half of Vietnam’s population.⁴⁹ Among the problems associated with the U.S. attrition strategy, in which enemy soldiers were to be killed at a faster rate than they could be replaced, was that it ignored the large number of Vietnamese women who substantially strengthened the DRV and NLF’s ability to withstand U.S. military pressure. Vietnamese women had historically participated in resisting enemy invaders to protect their homes and family, and the continuation of that traditional practice was a critical factor in America’s defeat in the war in Vietnam.

1. Sandra C. Taylor, Vietnamese Women at War: Fighting for Ho Chi Minh and the Revolution (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999), 35.

2. Karen Gottschang Turner, with Phan Thanh Hao, Even the Women Must Fight: Memories of War from North Vietnam (New York: Wiley, 1998), 5.

4. Quoted in Turner, Even the Women Must Fight, 37; see also 5, 83, 95. And see Taylor, Vietnamese Women at War, 19, 73; Tom Mangold and John Penycate, The Tunnels of Cu Chi (New York: Berkley Books, 1986), 229; and Elizabeth Urban Alexander, “Vietnamese Women in the War,” in Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War: A Political, Social, and Military History, 3 vols., edited by Spencer C. Tucker (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 1998), 2:824.

6. Turner obtained these North Vietnamese statistics from Professor Dung; see ibid., 20–21, 35. See also Taylor, Vietnamese Women at War, 6, 60; and Karen G. Turner, “‘Vietnam’ as a Women’s War,” in A Companion to the Vietnam War, edited by Marilyn B. Young and Robert Buzzanco (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002), 94–95.

7. The Analects of Confucius, translated and edited by Arthur Waley (New York: Vintage, 1938), 216–17.

8. Sandra C. Taylor, “The Long-Haired Warriors: Women and Revolution in Vietnam,” in The Vietnam War: Its History, Literature, and Music, edited by Kenton J. Clymer (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1998), 101; Douglas Pike, Viet Cong: The Organization and Techniques of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1966), 176–77.

9. Robert K. Brigham, ARVN: Life and Death in the South Vietnamese Army (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006), 112–15; Alexander, “Vietnamese Women in the War,” 826.

14. Ibid., 824; Taylor, Vietnamese Women at War, 35, 94; Taylor, “Long-Haired Warriors,” 99.

15. Taylor, Vietnamese Women at War, 16, 36–38, 123; Taylor, “Long-Haired Warriors,” 98; Alexander, “Vietnamese Women in the War,” 824; Christian G. Appy, Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides (New York: Penguin, 2003), 465.

17. Ibid.; William J. Duiker, Sacred War: Nationalism and Revolution in a Divided Vietnam (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1995), 144–45.

18. Taylor, Vietnamese Women at War, 2, 7, 70, 72, 77; Duiker, Sacred War, 87.

19. Taylor, Vietnamese Women at War, 37–38, 47, 59–60, 71–72, 76, 78; Duiker, Sacred War, 153; Mangold and Penycate, Tunnels of Cu Chi, 229.

20. Le Ly Hayslip, with Jay Wurts, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places: A Vietnamese Woman’s Journey from War to Peace (New York: Plume, 1990), 39–42; Taylor, Vietnamese Women at War, 97, 100.

22. Heonik Kwon, “Co So Cach Mang and the Social Network of War,” in Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars: Local, National, and Transnational Perspectives, edited by Mark Philip Bradley and Marilyn B. Young (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 205.

23. Ibid., 204–7; Hayslip, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, 69; Taylor, Vietnamese Women at War, 39; Duiker, Sacred War, 145.

24. Kwon, “Co So Cach Mang,” 205; Alexander, “Vietnamese Women in the War,” 824; Taylor, Vietnamese Women at War, 48; Duiker, Sacred War, 66–67; Taylor, “Long-Haired Warriors,” 102.

25. Taylor, Vietnamese Women at War, 38–39, 59, 61, 69; Taylor, “Long-Haired Warriors,” 97–101; Alexander, “Vietnamese Women in the War,” 824.

26. Taylor, Vietnamese Women at War, 48, 51, 69–70; Taylor, “Long-Haired Warriors,” 106.

28. Pike, Viet Cong, 178. See also Taylor, Vietnamese Women at War, 43; and Taylor, “Long-Haired Warriors,” 101.

32. Ibid., 145; Taylor, Vietnamese Women at War, 38, 40, 47, 69; Turner, Even the Women Must Fight, 37–38.

34. Sheila Rowbotham, Women, Resistance, and Revolution: A History of Women and Revolution in the Modern World (New York: Vintage, 1972), 216; Taylor, “Long-Haired Warriors,” 95, 102; Taylor, Vietnamese Women at War, 9–11, 23, 58.

36. Ibid., 13–14, 24, 32, 54–55; Alexander, “Vietnamese Women in the War,” 826; Duiker, Sacred War, 145; Rowbotham, Women, Resistance, and Revolution, 209.

41. Turner, Even the Women Must Fight, 83; see also 3, 33–35, 73–75, 81–83, 97–98, 103–9, 141; and Appy, Patriots, 103–6.

42. Turner, Even the Women Must Fight, 31, 42, 59; Taylor, Vietnamese Women at War, 27–28; Duiker, Sacred War, 87.

46. Ibid., 1, 58; Turner, “‘Vietnam’ as a Women’s War,” 108; Appy, Patriots, 106.

47. Turner, Even the Women Must Fight, 20, 58–59, 117, 124, 135; Taylor, Vietnamese Women at War, 66; Hayslip, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, 111–22.

Hayslip, Le Ly, with Jay Wurts. When Heaven and Earth Changed Places: A Vietnamese Woman’s Journey from War to Peace. New York: Plume, 1990.

Taylor, Sandra C. “The Long-Haired Warriors: Women and Revolution in Vietnam.” In The Vietnam War: Its History, Literature, and Music, edited by Kenton J. Clymer, 91–112. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1998.

——. Vietnamese Women at War: Fighting for Ho Chi Minh and the Revolution. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999.

Turner, Karen Gottschang. “‘Vietnam’ as a Women’s War.” In A Companion to the Vietnam War, edited by Marilyn B. Young and Robert Buzzanco, 93–111. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002.

Turner, Karen Gottschang, with Phan Thanh Hao. Even the Women Must Fight: Memories of War from North Vietnam. New York: Wiley, 1998.