[jjr69] Re: Vietnam'sWomenOfWar
- From: <viet.be@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <jjr69@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, <jjr69@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 21 Jan 2003 21:51:25 -0800
Dzung,
Thank you for the article. I wonder what would happen to Duong Thu Huong
should she be allowed to leave VN. Would she even want to leave? Would she
become disillusioned just as Alexandr Solzhenytsin was? I hope she continues
writing.
>
> From: "Dzung Bach" <dbach@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Date: 2003/01/21 Tue PM 04:43:36 PST
> To: <jjr69@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Subject: [jjr69] Vietnam'sWomenOfWar
>
> 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."
>
>
>
Viet Be
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