[jjr69] Vietnam'sWomenOfWar
- From: "Dzung Bach" <dbach@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <jjr69@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 21 Jan 2003 18:43:36 -0600
Recently there was some discussions of Duong Thu Huong's works on our forum. I
foresee that name sooner or later will be in Vietnam's Literacy Hall of Fame,
or just simply "The Vietnamese Woman" of the last two decades. And perhaps for
many more to come. The reason is plain to see: she is the first Vietnamese
female to mourn the "condition" of her gender after the war, way back in the
1980s, when biting reality stared back at them in cold, bitter, and ugly nudity
of pauperism. Back then, a Vietnamese opens up his/her heart and mind to a
Western foreigner, or a Viet Kieu, but not to his/her fellow countrymen nor
EastBlock comrades. Fear of K9 police brutal retaliation is common sense. Duong
Thu Huong is an exception. She made it a national issue through her articles,
whose acid wit revolt echoed, as far as I know, through out Europe, resulting
in Mme Mitterand's special intervention when she was labeled with charges such
as running antigovernment propaganda in her homeland.
To me, the article below (LATimes, January 10th, 2003) should be the fruit of
her labor almost 20 years later, though the author never mentioned DTH's name
in the works. I doubt that she is not present in his hidden works-cited. To
stand against war is a universal surface value. To embrace the notion goes deep
and beyond the time margin. But what do we humans have, other than a life time,
to suffer?
Vietnam's Women of War
They answered their country's call and fought the Americans. But when peace
came, their own society cast them aside.
By David Lamb
Times Staff writer
Ninh Binh, Vietnam - They were the girls of war, teenage volunteers who took
up arms in one of the largest female armies any nations have put on a modern
battlefield. For years they fought, sustaining themselves with a dream central
to Vietnamese culture: "When there was peace, they would find a good husband
and bear children."
For many of them, it was not to be. When they came home at the war's end in
1975, they were perceived as less desirable, as damaged by the disease,
malnutrition and other hardships they had endured in the jungle. Young men,
themselves just back from the war, did not return their glances on the street.
If love bloomed, parents would often cut it short, forbidding their sons to
marry women who appeared too weak to give birth or raise a child.
"How the jungle aged me", said Vu Hoai Thu, one of 500 women of the town of
Ninh Binh, 60 miles south of Hanoi, who fought in what the Vietnamese call the
American war. "Finally, I did find a nice boy. He asked to marry me, but his
parents would not allow it. He did not want to leave me, but I convince him he
must. I was weak from Malaria and malnutrition. I did not think I would ever be
strong enough to give him children".
Women like Thu are in their 50's now, and when they meet to commemorate their
sacrifices, they speak of loosing the springtime of their youth on the Truong
Son road, or the Ho Chi Ming Trail. They talk of coming home to lives that were
tougher than the ones they had left. Bitterness lingers that for many years
they were forgotten as soldiers in a war that made heroes of the men who
fought, but not the women.
"I thought my life after the war would be simple and happy", said Nguyen Thi
Binh, who came home weighing 85 pounds. "But I let my boyfriend go. I told him
that with my diseases, with my wounded leg, I would be a burden on him." Binh
lived on her own for 17 years, a form of exile in a family-oriented society in
which barren women and childless couples are object of pity. Then, at the
urging of her former comrades in a women's brigade, the 559, Binh "took a
husband for a night" and bore a daughter. She and her child, Lan, now 10, live
together on a rice paddy that Binh farms.
"The good people offer understanding and sympathy", Binh said. "And I
appreciate that. But sometimes bad people will bring their children to my house
and say: "Don't be like that woman." But if the "patriotic call went out" to
fight in a future war, Binh said, she would let her daughter march off to
battle, just as she did. "We have a saying in Vietnam," she said, "that if the
enemy comes, even the women must fight."
Vietnam has a long history of women warriors. Two of the country's most revered
heroes are the Trung sisters, Trac and Nhi, who led an insurrection against
China in AD 05 and liberated Vietnam. One of their commanders, Phung Thi Chinh,
is said to have given birth during the battle and to have continued fighting
with her infant strapped to her back. Another woman, Trieu Au, rode an elephant
into battle against the Chinese in AD 248, leading a force of 3,000. Defeated
in battle, she committed suicide at the age of 23.
Military historians estimate that in the 1950's, nearly a million female
guerillas took part in the war against colonial French forces. In the conflict
with the US, 40% of the VietCong regional commanders were women. One of them,
Nguyen Thi Dinh, was a general. Hundreds of thousands of women, most of them
young and single, served in combat zones in that war. They operated
antiaircraft guns, built road under frequent bombardment and went on patrols
in mixed-gender units. "We lived and slept together but did not touch", said a
woman in the 559 Brigade, who attributed the restraint to cultural
conservatism. "I don't know of a single pregnancy in our unit. We thirst for
love, but only in our hearts."
Other women collected intelligence, spied, and ferried troops and supplies
along riverways in small boats. Mai Thi Diem volunteered to fight after the
US bombed the communal farm where she lived , killing 100 people, including
many of her relatives. "I weighed 35 kilos (77 pounds) when I went to enlist,
and the army said I was too small", said Diem, who still walks with a limp, the
result of a land mine injury. "I told them I would throw myself off the bridge
and commit suicide if they didn't take me. Finally, they said OK." Le Minh
Khue, a Hanoi novelist, has written of the powerful bond gorged by the war
effort. I love everyone with a passionate love, wrote Khue, who lied about her
age and joined the army at 15. It was a love, she said, that "only someone who
had stood on that hill in those moments could understand fully. That was the
love of the people in smoke and fire, the people of war." Phan Thanh Hao, a
journalist and co-author of a book on Vietnam's female warriors, served in the
Truong Son Mountains along the HoChiMinh Trail. "Women tipped the balance
toward victory in the war," she said. "Other than the Soviet Union in WW II, no
countries come close to having the number of women in direct combat roles.
Still, it was hard for us to become normal again, For my generation, our hearts
tighten to this day when we hear an airplane overhead."
The girls of war came home to families that were poor. Having another mouth to
feed was a problem. Emaciated by disease and malnutrition, their skin weathered
by years in the jungle, they were perceived as less attractive than when they
had set out from their villages. In addition, so many young men were killed
during the war that the pool of prospective husbands was reduced. Even today,
there are 97.9 men for every 100 women in Vietnam, one of the lowest ratio in
Southeast Asia. "I was so lucky", said Nguyen Thi Nhong, 51, a veteran of the
559 Brigade. "I met a young man, very handsome, on Truong Son. He was from a
nearby village and we married. But I know so many other who fell in love on the
battlefield and searched and searched after the war but could never find each
other."
Many of the women recovered their health and married. Others who remained
single went to live in Buddhist pagodas or in government housing projects. In
the early 1980s, in a step to ease their isolation, the government sought to
lift the taboo against bearing children out of wedlock. Unwed mothers and their
children, it was announced, would be considered families and eligible for a
grant of land to grow rice. Thousand of women took "a husband for the night."
Though recognition has been slow, women are starting to receive credit for
their contributions to the war effort. A Women's Museum opened in Hanoi in
1995. All schoolchildren now write essays on women's role in the war. A
monument is being built on the banks of the Nhat Le river near the old
demilitarized zone , honoring a woman who ferried men and supplies in her boat
despite bombardment. And the women of the 559 Brigade who went off to war as
teenage volunteers have been given a special medal as "Soldiers of Truong Son."
Three of those soldiers wore their uniforms to a recent reunion in Ninh Binh.
They and half a dozen others gathered at a small restaurant to honor the 40
comrades who didn't come back from Truong Son and the 50 others who returned as
invalids.
They exchanged small talk and memories, and when lunch was served, the brigade
commander, Tran Thi Binh, stood and announced she wanted to share a poem she
had written , "Young Girl's Time." It was long, and she recited from memory in
a singsong cadence, her eyes closed.
I'd like to burn a simple incense stick for the unlucky girls who died.
Though they never come back, we who lost our youth keep waiting.
We are the Truong Son girls, now gray and full of memories,
Remembering our unfound love partners who have gone far away.
The other women at the table look away. A few buried their faces in their
hands. Several dabbed their eyes with tissues. When Binh finished, there was an
awkward silence. Then someone said, "Let's make this a happy day."
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