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“When the enemy comes, the women must fight” WOMEN IN THE WAR

by ELIZABETH WINDSCHUTTLE

Late last year, four Australian women visited Vietnam to reciprocate an earlier Australian tour by Vietnamese women. We went via Bangkok and Vientiane to Hanoi. Before we left, we were told we would probably not go to Saigon. Few westerners had been in the South since the war ended, and we didn’t think any special exception would be made in our case. There was only one plane a day from Hanoi to Saigon. It was a DC-4 which carried no more than 30 passengers. So, when our delegation of four, plus a guide and an interpreter were offered the flight, it came as a surprise. Not only were we to be among the first to visit Saigon since the end of the war, but we were taking up six coveted seats in a plane at a time when the first major conference on reunification was being held in Saigon. We were being treated in a far more privileged way than we had expected.

We were in Vietnam as guests of the of the quite different role of Vietnamese Vietnamese Women’s Union but we had women, we were still not prepared for the brought with us western concepts of what surprises of Saigon. When we arrived at the such an organisation would be and had under­ central offices of the Women’s Union in estimated how influential it was. Inourfirstten , a beautiful cream-painted, days in , however, we had come green-shuttered French colonial building, our to realise that the status of women there was hosts announced off-handedly that it had been far better than our own in Australia. Women the former military command headquarters had equal, and often more than equal, and private residence of General representation in all activities of the society. Westmoreland. We were four civilians, but as guests of the That day, sitting in Westmoreland’s Women's Union we were treated like important reception room, we learnt the reason for the politicians or officials would be in Australia, position that women enjoy in Vietnam now. We meeting with the heads of the main met peasant women guerilla fighters from the government departments and armed forces. provinces, women officers from the armed The Australian Embassy staff in Hanoi joked forces, schoolteachers turned urban with us, somewhat enviously, about the revolutionaries, women from the upper privileges we were receiving. classes of the Although we had gained some appreciation "old" Saigon regime under the French, 18 AUSTRALIAN LEFT REVIEW No. 53

including a Vietnamese princess who had long administrators and replaced them with local worked in support of the liberation forces. The peasant self-management committees. status of women was tied to their crucial role in Madame Dinh mobilised peasants who had the struggle for national independence. been involved in earlier resistance against the Vietnam would not have become free from the French. Their weapons were bamboo sticks French or the Americans were it not for its and kitchen knives. Her “army” held a tiny women. liberated zone in Ben Tre. Her actions Most western commentators have failed to provided the model for othor provinces in the see the significance of the role of women in the South to follow. war. Hardly a news reporter had any It was mainly after 1965 when the US sent conception of what they wre doing. troops into the South on a massive scale, that Journalists portrayed women as passive the movement to have women join the army victims of the war, not as active agents in it. increased. News reports invariably assumed that all Women became full-time members of the Vietnamese troops, guerillas and militia were armed forces in the south. Many of them held male; that all political prisoners were men; that leading positions. About 40 per cent of the support services such as medicine, regimental commanders of the PLAF were ammunitions and agricultural production women. They were troops who dealt with the were mobilised and run by men; that anti­ American mobile reserves, initiated offensive aircraft gunners were male. operations and attacked major US Even people who have studied and written concentrations. All were volunteers who about Vietnam from a sympathetic position received no salary and when not in combat, have not considered the sex of those involved. helped in harvesting, building homes and One well-known Australian anti-war activist schools, and administering free medical care and author on Vietnam showed rank disbelief and medical training. when, on my return home, I began talking of the wartime achievements of women. Women also formed a major part of regional guerilla forces, full-time fighters who operated in the region where they lived. They engaged WOMEN AS SOLDIERS US forces in the same area, lay ambushes, encircled bases, and attacked posts. The Vietnamese did not defeat the Women in local self-defence units, or militia Americans by adopting conventional women, were not full-time soldiers but fought methods. No agricultural society facing the when their area was attacked, pinning down greatest war machine that human history has local forces and keeping their posts produced could have done that. They won permanently encircled. because they developed a successful strategy that combined military action with A higher percentage of women were in the revolutionary politics. At our meeting at local militia and regional guerilla units than in Westmoreland’s house, we were introduced to the PLAF. The local militia kept villages one of the originators of that strategy, Madame fortified with trenches, traps and spikes. These Nguyen Thi Dinh, Deputy Commander in defences were decisive in wearing down the Chief of the People’s Liberation Armed Forces. morale of Saigon and US troops. Her officia l title is General and she was second During the in 1968, the in charge of the South Vietnamese armed National Liberation Front staged a military and forces during the war. publicity coup by taking over the US Embassy The offensive that Madame Dinh led in Ben in Saigon. Blazoned across the front pages of Tre province in 1960, and for which she had newspapers all over the world were earned her military post, became the model photographs of the NLF flag flying from the strategy for all liberation forces throughout roof of the Embassy. But no newspaper the South. It combined both what the mentioned that it was a women’s commando Vietnamese called “armed struggle” and group that forced the occupation of five of the "political struggle". The insurgent forces in seven floors of the Embassy, killed two Ben tre involved large numbers of peasants. hundred US personnel, and compelled They stormed the militia posts of the Ambassador Bunker to escape in a helicopter. American-backed Diem, ousted Diem’s village We learnt that the leader of this offensive at WOMEN IN THE 19 the American Embassy was Le Thi Rieng, a In the final push that won victory in April former Vice President of the Women’s Union, 1975, wom en were in the forefront. and a member of the central committee of the Tens of thousands of women rushed to NLF. Within hours of the occupation, while US occupy the different provinces in the South. and Saigon officials were still reeling from the “We seized thousands of military posts, and attack, Le Thi Rieng was executed. took over administrative bases, factories and Most of the guerilla fighters in Cu Chi schools. We captured military stores, weapons province were women, and they earned forthe and took prisoners. Women planted the PRG province the nickname of the ‘‘Iron Triangle”, flag everywhere”, said Ms Hanh of the so called because guerilla persistence in this Women’s Union. area led to it being the most heavily "Millions of women throughout South bombarded and defoliated area in the south. Vietnam called on Saigon troops to We saw Cu Chi later. There is hardly five feet surrender”. It was this strategy that caused the between one bomb crater and the next. The inner collapse of Thieu’s army. “Women were Americans have sewn a highly noxious weed, directly responsible for the fall of the 25th over six feet high, and as far as the eye can see, division in the south-east, divisions 7 and 9 in covering fifty per cent of the province and thus the south, and division 21 in the south-west. In preventing rice production. Saigon alone, 300,000 troops collapsed, and We met some of these women, in Cu Chi women guerillas headed the invasion of itself, forty kilometers from Saigon. Thieu’s Presidential Palace.” “The US and Saigon administrations With us at the meeting were some of these realised the crucial role of women in this women. Ms Xuan was amongst the guerilla province”, said Ms Phuoc, a middle-aged fighters who led the army into Saigon. Pham peasant , "because in 1968 and 1969, Thi Duyen, a peasant woman, led guerilla almost the entire female population of Cu Chi fighters in Tu Due province. They took overthe were forced into concentration camps. They district administration, captured Thieu troops knew women were acting as guerillas, liaison and forced a general surrender in the province. and infiltration forces." Ms Duyen led her troops to free prisoners from “Many of the women escaped from the the local gaol and to take over the main concentration camps at night and returned to electrical power station serving Saigon. guerilla activity in their local areas. The Ms Hanh then turned to a young woman women destroyed most of the 42 fortresses in alongside us, perhaps 18 or 19 years old. their area, as well as producing and providing “Sister Nguyen Thi Phuong had a baby only food and medical assistance to other guerilla five months old. Early on the morning of April fighters. Our battallion was called the Iron and 30, with her baby tucked under one arm and a Steel battallion.” gun in the other, sheforced two colonels and a We drove further into the province. The road captain of Thieu’s army to surrender. Her became impassable and we transferred to a troops captured an important US petrol and oil jeep. It was overcrowed and the jeep lurched reserve and two hundred military lorries and along a boggy track. We stopped and Ms trucks". Phuoc led an inspection ot a network of For some of the guerilla women, however, tunnels and underground shelters which she the end of the war was a bitter experience. A had helped build and in which she had lived for number of women who engaged in full-time months at a time. The trapdoor into the tunnels guerilla action left their children with friends was just big enough to accommodate her and relatives, and in many cases, in slight body. kindergartens. Though many of these “The trapdoor was covered over with leaves. kindergartens contained children who were You couldn’t tell it was there”, said Ms Phuoc, orphans, they were not orphanages as we demonstrating for us. "When they came”, she know them. Such fine distinctions, however, said, “we could hear the American soldiers did not bother those Americans who “rescued” above us. Sometimes they urinated on the children they considered "orphans” from ground over our heads.” these places in the dying days of the war, flying Almost as an after thought she added, “This them out in ’s was the main headquarters of the NLF in the to the USA, England and Australia where they South". were adopted out, or in one hideous case 20 AUSTRALIAN LEFT REVIEW No. 53

M y wish is to ride the tempest, tame the waves, kill the sharks. I want to drive the enemy away to save our people. I will not resign myself to the usual lot of women who how their heads and become concubines.

- Thieu Thi Trinh, the woman who led insurrections against the Chinese in 248 A.D.

Graphic representation of the Trung sisters. taking 200 of them to their death when their country’s oral history, providing one of the "rescue” plane crashed. Many guerilla parents main inspirations for resistance to foreign who had left their children in the care of such domination. Every spring, on the sixtieth day kindergartens found in the middle of the of the second moon, the people of Hanoi victory celebrations that their children were celebrate the anniversary of their death. gone and there was no record of what Another part of this oral history is the story happened to them. of Trieu Thi Trinh, a 20 year old peasant woman who in 248 AD led an army of Vietnamese women have perhaps the thousands and drove out the Chinese. She longest traditions of all in military action. A held them at bay during the course of 30 number of women fighters who led attacks on battles but was finally defeated and also the Chinese during the 1,000 years that suicided. occupied Vietnam are still remembered. The best celebrated are the Trung Sisters who, in The idea of the woman fighter became, 40 AD trained 36 women as generals to lead a through such stories, identified with the very peasant army of 80,000 to drive out the concept of Vietnamese nationalist opposition Chinese. For three years they held off Chinese to foreign control. Chinese domination was attempts to restore themselves but in 43 AD identified as a patriarchal dom ination and so a the sisters were defeated by superior numbers rebellion led by women was the appropriate and arms. They then chose the traditional mythological response. Myth and action have Vietnamese response to defeat - suicide. sustained each other. The mythology has encouraged women to become fighters The Trung Sisters have become part of throughout Vietnamese history and their Vietnamese mythology and their story, with battle field exploits have continually provided many embellishments, is a central part of the the basis for further stories. 21

Had the Americans been aware of the “While there was killing, raping, bribery, military history of Vietnamese women they corruption, forced concentration of women may well have approached the war with and children into camps and strategic hamlets, different tactics. the worst effects for women were the wholesale operations of genocide, epicide and But, of course, few generals read history. biocide in the air war. Forty five per cent of our This left open the opportunity for women to land in the south is now unarable. There are conduct one of the most effective campaigns one million widows and 500,000 orphans. of subversion to which any army has been Toxic chemical devastation has left hundreds subjected. of thousands of women infertile and an Peasant women serving GIs doing washing, indefinable number of women giving birth to shining boots, selling food and drink regularly malformed foetuses, not only now, but for gained entrance to US bases. Inside they many generations to come. It is would chart the precise measurements of understandable that one of the most sacred targets that, as guerilla fighters, they planned slogans of all during the to shell that night. war was that ‘when the enemy comes, the Next day, inside the base once more, they women must fight’ would check on the accuracy of their mortar attacks, and if necessary, rechart their WOMEN IN THE NORTH measurements. As they paced out the distances they would defer politely to any Gl The role of North Vietnamese women was who happened to pass. Next night, they would different but no less significant. Whereas shell the base again according to the new women in the South participated in the armed measurements. struggle, in the North they were in self- Even Madame Dinh entered one US base defence, civil defence units, anti-aircraft and disguised as a peasant woman. militia groups for the defence of their factory We were also told that many prostitutes in or village. Saigon were informers for the NLF. While nearly all Northern women received For us, the attitude of Americans towards some military training, and became experts in was epitomised by a badge the use of anti-aircraft weapons and hand-to- we saw on a hat of a captured American pilot, hand combat, few were actual members of the now exhibited in a war museum in Hanoi. It regular army. Those who were, served in depicted the cartoon dog Snoopy saying highly skilled and often dangerous jobs as “Life’s a Bitch”. bomb defusers, medical and liaison workers, The attitude of men to women in North as support troops and supply carriers. Vietnam and the achievements gained by Women were mainly responsible for the women in that country in the twenty years clearing away of devastation after the since independence contrasted starkly with bombings. They dug shelters, rebuilt roads, the unmitigated degradation and violence that bridges, houses, schools and factories. They women in the South endured at the hands of cared for the dead and the wounded. the US regime. Rice production in the North had to be Throughout the war the North provided a sufficient to boost supplies to PRG governed constant reminder of what sort of life was areas or liberated zones and to members of the possible. Women workers in the North enjoyed PLAF as well as sustain food production for equality with men in all fields, and had gained the north. It was necessary therefore to greatly child care, maternity pay allowances and other increase agricultural production in the North reforms that western women have still to win. during the war. In the southern cities life for women was In the North seventy per cent of the food chaotic, exploitive and devoid of any social production was carried out by women and welfare measures. they were responsible for an increased The women we met in Saigon made no productivity in these years. secret of the fact that they suffered far more The increased productivity was not only a under Americans than at any time under the result of land reforms and the collectivisation French. of food production. The degree of workers' Ms Hanh described the war experience. control given to its main workers, women, led 22 AUSTRALIAN LEFT REVIEW No. 53

them to set and fulfill their own targets. women’s conditions with those of Australian Women workers in the North held strong women during World War II. Their work and political convictions about their productive sacrifice are very similar but the situation was contribution. A slogan of the North actually very different. Australian women took Vietnamese Women’s Union was “Let the over men’s jobs but the job categories were women of the North shed more sweat so their reclassified so that women earnt less than a sisters in the South could shed less blood”. man would have fora particular job. There was no proper child care. In North Vietnam none of There are many well known examples where this occurred. North Vietnamese women interpreted this slogan quite literally. After Le Thieng Rieng, the Vice President of the South Vietnamese MIDDLE CLASS WOMEN Women’s Union was executed for her activities in the Tet Offensive in 1968, women in one It is possible to identify two different middle northern province alone worked 44,392 extra classes in South Vietnam, one created by the days to avenge her death. French and one by the Americans. The “old” Women in factories during the war had their bourgeoisie of Siagon were wealthy landlords own slogans. At Nam Dinh textile mill it was: and civil servants who had prospered under “Every meter of cloth is a bullet against the French colonial rule when France had enem y." constructed the “Paris of the Orient” in the The women in the mills worked hard and for nineteenth century. The “new” bourgeoisie long hours during the war. They often walked were those who founded new industries to miles to work. They did not see their children serve the Americans after 1964 and whose for long periods of time, particularly when the numbers were supplemented with wealthy, children were evacuated to the countryside to often Catholic, refugees from the North from protect them from the bombing. the 1950s. While there were many families that overlapped both groups, many more remained Women workers not only made the main distinct. The main difference was that the “old” contribution to food and industrial production, bourgeoisie detested the Americans. they also defended their workplaces. Am ongst our W om en’s U nion hosts in Nam Dinh textile mill in Nam Ha province, Saigon were women who belonged to “old” 100 kilometers from Hanoi, was twice bombed fam ilies. heavily. In the Johnson bombings in 1965, the whole mill, including creches, kindergartens, We visited a school, Minh Khai, in Saigon, at workers' dining rooms and clubs were almost which some of our hosts had completed their totally destroyed. It was devastated again in secondary studies in preparation for 1972 in the Nixon bombings. university, or, as was more often the case, a suitable marriage. The grandeur of the At Nam Dinh women formed their own self buildings and grounds make our present-day defence units. In 1972 a women’s defence unit Australian private schools for seem of 15 shot down a US plane and captured the pathetic imitations by comparison. The “old” US pilot. In Nam Dinh we met two women from bourgeoisie of Saigon was very rich. this unit. Minh Khai school provides a classic Women in agricultural production in the example of the alliances forged amongst the same province formed 20 self-defence units. “old" bourgeoisie against the Thieu and They used anti-aircraft weapons to defend American regimes. Not only former pupils, roads and bridges, dug trenches, rescued the daughters of the rich, but most of the teaching wounded from bombed buildings, gave staff of recent years were active and medical assistance, and carried food to other outspoken opponents of the Saigon and fighters. After the bombings they American administrations. reconstructed roads and bridges, and cleared away devastation. “Eighty per cent of primary teachers, 45 per cent of junior secondary teachers and 30 per We met one young , Thanh Nham, cent of senior secondary teachers were who earned the title of Heroine of the Armed involved in anti-war activities,” the current Forces, for defusing bombs that “exploded on Vice-Principal told us. “A former principal of co n ta ct” . the school was interned for six years by Thieu. It is interesting to compare Vietnamese She has now been reinstated.” WOMEN IN THE VIETNAM WAR 23

Women guerrilla fighters in a self-defence village sharpening stakes for traps to use against their enemy.

"Many of the school’s old pupils, in spite of we met in the South, is evident everywhere their bourgeois lifestyle, took part in the now. protest movement," she said. In a war museum in Saigon, prom inence is given to a display of the influence of American The women we met at the Women’s Union culture in Saigon. Row upon row of crude and the teachers at the school were part of a comics, cheap paperbacks, film posters mass movement amongst the “old” represent the popularculture which flourished bourgeoisie that opposed the war. They either in the war years. became revolutionary supporters of the PRG More overt are the photographs of or members of the Third Force - independent Vietnamese women stripping in nightclubs, opponents of the Diem, Ky, Thieu and US their eyes and noses reshaped, their breasts regimes. They despised the newly ascendant and hips inflated with silicone. One sign nouveau riche class of merchants and summed up the Saigonese view of the essence profiteers who lived off these administrations. of American culture: “Car Wash and Get Screwed” . They had seen their lifestyle, a combination WOMEN AND THE POLITICAL of the best traditions of both Vietnamese and STRUGGLE French cultures, replaced by a vulgar imitation of the American way of life The strength of T h e role of women in the their resentment, as of all Vietnamese people "political struggle" (as distinct from the 24 AUSTRALIAN LEFT REVIEW No. 53

“armed struggle”) in raising the political prisoners in South Vietnam, and nearly half consciousness of people in the South, was were women. crucial. By their example, women persuaded Ninety per cent of leading members of the people to become active in the war effort. They Women’s Union were imprisoned, serving organised protest demonstrations and rallies sentences ranging from one to seventeen and mounted a mass movement to encourage years. Saigon soldiers to desert. The women in this movement came to be known as the Long In 1969, fo r the first time, large num bers of Haired Army. women were incarcerated at the notorious prison island of Con Son. Hundreds of thousands of peasant women in the South demonstrated against the use of We met one of these women in Saigon. chemicals and defoliants. Demonstrations Thuynh Ngoc Anh, a schoolteacher, who were often held simultaneously in thirty or spent 12'/2 years in Con Son and was released forty provincial and districttowns. The women before the end of the war only because she had piled branches and dead livestock in view of cancer and was not expected to live. Inside, Saigon troops, to embarrass Saigon officials she told us, women were subjected to the most and to rally sympathy amongst rank and file inhumane treatment, torture, starvation, troops, most of whom were conscripted from infestation of rats, vermin and disease. rural villages like their own. Incurable gynaecological diseases were often the result of prison treatment specially The Long Haired Army was responsible fora intended to humiliate women, such as the mass defection of Saigon troops. Between denial of washing water during menstruation. 1963 and 1973 the number of defections reached nearly 450,000. We asked Ms Anh how was it possible to survive this treatment for such a long period. Other women, not part of this movement, Her answer was simply: “Solidarity amongst formed groups protesting on individual issues. the women. Only this could help us survive." They included the Association of of Prison became a school where the inmates Combatants, the Association of Mothers with taught each other that the only way to remain Children in Gaol, and the Association for the human was to join with other prisoners. Defence of War Orphans and Widows. These were mostly from the urban middle class in “There were small protests at first, such as Saigon. Thousands of them also belonged to a not saluting Thieu’s flag. Individual women mass women’s movement which developed in were repeatedly punished until finally all the 1970called the Women's Committee to Defend women refused to do it and the guards found it the Right to Live. difficult of punish everyone", she said. We met in Saigon a Buddhist nun with The confidence of Vietnamese wom en today saffron robes and shaved head the Venerable is a direct result of their role in resistance over Thich Nu Huynh Lien who told us that many a long period, and more recently in the war religious people had opposed the Thieu effort. The experience of shooting down a B52 regime. In 1967 Nhat Chi Mai, a Buddhist or F111, or learning to take control of a factory, teacher, immolated herself publicly in Saigon. has developed in Vietnamese women a self- Venerable Lien said that her religious sufficiency probably unequalled by women compatriots were alluded to jokingly as the anywhere in the world. The Vietnamese call “Cropped Hair Army”. this process “tu giai phong" or self-liberation. “When the Long Hairs and the Cropped The politics of reunification will be very Hairs fought together they always won”, she interesting. Because they have been said. “Sometimes we fought with weapons, confronted for so long with such an acutely sometimes we propagandized amongst the sexist regime, women in the South talk more Thieu troops”. openly about the sort of issues Western feminists are concerned with. Northern “The Cropped Hair Army clashed with Thieu women have lived with some of these reforms- police often. On one occasion one of our nuns equal employment, child care - for so so long was beaten with an iron mask. We were all that they appear to take them for granted. The pleased about this, because the assault was heightened awareness of the southerners will being shot by eighty-five television units from bring the woman question to the centre of the all over the world”. political debates on reunification. New In 1974 there were nearly 250,000 political feminist initiatives seem the logical result.