One of just a handful of women reporting on the Vietnam War, Kate Webb was captured by North Vietnamese troops and presumed dead—until she emerged from the jungle waving a piece of white parachute material after 23 days in captivity. Le Ly Hayslip enjoyed a peaceful early childhood in a Vietnamese farming village before war changed her life forever. Brutalized by all sides, she escaped to the United States, where she eventually founded two humanitarian organizations. Lynda Van Devanter was an idealistic young nurse in 1969 when a plane carrying her and 350 men landed in South Vietnam. Her harrowing experiences working in a combat zone hospital would later serve as inspiration for the TV series China Beach.
In these pages readers meet these and other brave women and girls who served in life-threatening roles as medics, journalists, resisters, and revolutionaries in the conflict in Vietnam. Author Kathryn J. Atwood presents a clear introduction to each of five chronological sections, guiding readers through the social and political turmoil that spanned two decades and the tenure of five US presidents. Each woman’s story unfolds in a suspenseful, engaging way, incorporating plentiful original source materials, quotes, and photographs. Resources for further study, source notes and a bibliography, and a helpful map and glossary round out this exploration of one of modern history’s most divisive wars, making it an invaluable addition to any student’s or history buff’s bookshelf.
OTHER BOOKS IN THE WOMEN OF ACTION SERIES
Bold Women of Medicine by Susan M. Latta
Code Name Pauline by Pearl Witherington Cornioly, edited by Kathryn J. Atwood
Courageous Women of the Civil War by M. R. Cordell
Double Victory by Cheryl Mullenbach
The Many Faces of Josephine Baker by Peggy Caravantes
Marooned in the Arctic by Peggy Caravantes
Reporting Under Fire by Kerrie L. Hollihan
Seized by the Sun by James W. Ure
She Takes a Stand by Michael Elsohn Ross
Women Aviators by Karen Bush Gibson
Women Heroes of the American Revolution by Susan Casey
Women Heroes of World War I by Kathryn J. Atwood
Women Heroes of World War II by Kathryn J. Atwood
Women Heroes of World War II—the Pacific Theater by Kathryn J. Atwood
Women in Blue by Cheryl Mullenbach
Women in Space by Karen Bush Gibson
Women of Colonial America by Brandon Marie Miller
Women of Steel and Stone by Anna M. Lewis
Women of the Frontier by Brandon Marie Miller
A World of Her Own by Michael Elsohn Ross
Copyright © 2018 by Kathryn J. Atwood
Foreword copyright © 2018 by Diane Carlson Evans
All rights reserved
First edition
Published by Chicago Review Press Incorporated
814 North Franklin Street
Chicago, Illinois 60610
ISBN 978-1-61373-074-4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Atwood, Kathryn J., author.
Title: Courageous women of the Vietnam War : medics, journalists, survivors, and more / Kathryn J. Atwood.
Description: First edition. | Chicago, Illinois : Chicago Review Press Incorporated, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Audience: 12+.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017040059 (print) | LCCN 2017040968 (ebook) | ISBN 9781613730751 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781613730775 (epub) | ISBN 9781613730768 (kindle) | ISBN 9781613730744 | ISBN 9781613730744(cloth)
Subjects: LCSH: Vietnam War, 1961–1975—Participation, Female—Juvenile literature. | Vietnam War, 1961–1975—Women—Biography—Juvenile literature.
Classification: LCC DS559.8.W6 (ebook) | LCC DS559.8.W6 A89 2018 (print) | DDC 959.704/3082—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017040059
Interior design: Sarah Olson
Map design: Chris Erichsen
Image of Iris Mary Roser on page 96 and image of An Trong orphans on page 104 from Ba Rose by Iris Mary Roser. Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders. The editors would welcome information concerning any inadvertent errors or omissions.
Printed in the United States of America
5 4 3 2 1
Are you so smart that you truly know who’s to blame? If you ask the Viet Cong, they’ll blame the Americans. If you ask the Americans, they’ll blame the North. If you ask the North, they’ll blame the South. If you ask the South, they’ll blame the Viet Cong. If you ask the monks, they’ll blame the Catholics, or tell you our ancestors did something terrible and so brought this endless suffering on our heads.
—When Heaven and Earth Changed Places
Vietnam is like a huge jigsaw puzzle where none of the pieces fit.
—Ba Rose: My Years in Vietnam, 1968–1971
CONTENTS
Map
Foreword by Diane Carlson Evans, captain, Army Nurse Corps, 1966–1972
INTRODUCTION
PART I 1945–1956: HO CHI MINH’S REVOLUTION
Xuan Phuong: Young Revolutionary
Geneviève de Galard: “I Only Did My Duty”
PART II 1957–1964: NGO DINH DIEM’S CIVIL WAR
Le Ly Hayslip: “Freedom Is Never a Gift”
Bobbi Hovis: Witness to History
PART III 1965–1968: LYNDON B. JOHNSON’S AMERICAN WAR
Kay Wilhelmy Bauer: American Survivor
Jurate Kazickas: “What’s a Woman Like You Doing Out Here?”
Iris Mary Roser: Australian Relief Worker
PART IV 1969–1970: RICHARD M. NIXON’S “PEACE”
Anne Koch: “I Knew in My Heart That I Had to Go”
Dang Thuy Tram: Communist Field Surgeon
Lynda Van Devanter: “Why Do They Have to Die?”
PART V 1971–1975: ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS
Kate Webb: Captive Journalist
Joan Baez: Protest Singer
Tracy Wood: “They’re the Story”
Kim Phuc: Running from War
Acknowledgments
Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
FOREWORD
THE ECHOES OF THE VIETNAM War are heard in these gripping accounts of women from around the world who were, in various ways, deeply and passionately involved with the war. These disparate voices span three decades, illuminating the feminine face of war and adding to the undeniable legacy of women’s involvement in its perils. First, author Kathryn Atwood gives us an important lesson in Southeast Asian history, beginning with 1945. She provides a historical chronology of the Vietnam War while directing a spotlight on the bravery and achievements of not only the risk-taking women who participated in the war but also those who suffered gravely from its consequences. Their recollections paint pictures for us, unforgettable portraits.
For me, there is something different about this book. When I finished the last page, engrossed in the lives of these featured women, I contemplated why I felt awe and remorse. I was shaken. The author takes us on a journey back more than a half century to a time of unspeakable brutality, exemplary heroism, loss, and hope. It was a time when most women who had stepped up to serve humbly declared, like the French nurse Geneviève de Galard, serving in Vietnam in the 1950s, “I only did my duty.” Under harrowing conditions with dying men all around her, she, the lone woman, dressed wounds and kept up morale in the face of mounting casualties. We read her story here and know she is an indisputable hero.
We read Dr. Dang Thuy Tram’s diary entry about her patients: “Your blood has crimsoned our native land…. Your heart has stopped so that the heart of the nation can beat forever.” Dr. Tram w
as dedicated to saving lives of the Communist guerrilla forces in underground hospitals very near to where my fellow nurses and I were saving lives of American soldiers in the 71st Evacuation Hospital, Pleiku, in 1969. She and I could not have been very far from each other. In her diary, she wrote of “hatred for the invaders.” That was me! I was the invader. We were women on different sides of the war, yet we both were passionate about our work, we both loved our countries, we both loved our patients, and we both fought despair in watching young men suffer and die. She was killed in June 1970. She died for her country, a hero to her people; she was buried on her sacred ground. US military women (eight nurses) died in Vietnam too, their bodies shipped home. Each one a hero.
I was shaken because I was taken back to a time and place where my colleagues and I didn’t know if the Vietnamese women working in our hospital wards were friend or foe. We did know they were stealing from us—our drugs, IV tubing and bottles, field dressings. They would do anything to save their husbands, brothers, fathers, and sons. Dr. Tram fought her war the same way I fought mine—ignoring the thuds of rockets and mortars landing around us, we saved lives the best we could with what we had. Only she was facing the stark terrors of the ravages of war in the country she loved, while I could fly home at the end of my tour.
I felt remorse in not taking the time to grasp or truly feel what it felt like for these women on the other side. That is not something we do when others are the enemy. We put distance between ourselves and them. Later, we look for understanding and reconciliation.
This book is not about proving the rightness or wrongness of the Vietnam War. This is a galvanizing chronicle of women who were caught up in the hellishness of war. Yet each of them found the spirit and stamina to overcome trauma and heartbreak with the endurance needed to survive and move forward. Some women drawn to the war chose their battles—US military nurses, civilian women in support of the US Armed Forces, civilian women from neighboring countries, journalists who brought the war’s grim realities to the world’s attention. These women who, despite naysayers proclaiming they didn’t belong in a war zone, volunteered to serve in the jungles, rice paddies, and villages of Vietnam. Others had their battles chosen for them—children burned by napalm who faced a lifetime of recovery and political persecution in their own country; Vietnamese women furtively protecting their families, homes, and livelihood from destruction. We hear too from those on safer shores—the war protestors.
In revealing war’s inhumanity, Courageous Women of the Vietnam War illuminates our shared humanity by bringing us these compelling voices from both sides of the conflict. We find their truths in their remembrances. Their inspiring stories deepen our understanding of war’s exacting toll and leave us with remarkable insights into that turbulent era.
We need to look further, however, and see the personal cost for these daring women’s devotion to duty. After years of suffering in silence, there is now a name, and treatment, for the lingering emotional trauma from war—post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). War may be as close to hell as we ever get, leaving nightmares, memories, and emotional wounds that require the healing powers of a lifetime. Sorrows can be borne if we unburden our stories. Yes, even for most of us who believe “I only did my duty.”
—DIANE CARLSON EVANS
DIANE CARLSON EVANS was a captain in the US Army Nurse Corps from 1966 to 1972, serving in Vietnam in 1968 and 1969. Founder and president of the Vietnam Women’s Memorial Foundation, she spearheaded a campaign to place in the nation’s capital a national monument that recognized the contributions of military women to their country as well as civilian women’s patriotic service. These efforts were rewarded when a bronze monument portraying three women and a wounded soldier was dedicated on November 11, 1993, at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, DC.
INTRODUCTION
IN AD 40 TWO WOMEN, Trung Trac and Trung Nhi, did something that would make them legends in Vietnamese history: they led a military victory.
The Trung sisters, trained in the martial arts and witnesses to the brutal Chinese occupation of Vietnam, were inspired to lead a rebellion after Trac’s husband was beheaded for attempting to do the same; the Chinese had hoped his execution would discourage further resistance.
It had the opposite effect, and a large band of Vietnamese rebel nobles, led by the Trung sisters, eventually captured 65 Chinese-controlled citadels. Trac was then crowned queen of a large territory.
She ruled only three years before the Chinese defeated her. Two hundred years later, Trieu Au, another Vietnamese woman, led an army of 1,000 men into battle against the Chinese. When asked why, she responded, “I want to rail against the wind and the tide, kill the whales in the sea, sweep the whole country to save the people from slavery, and I refuse to be abused.” Her rebellion lasted only months before she too was defeated.
But her words and actions, along with those of the Trung sisters, passed into legend and would inspire generations of Vietnamese people to determinedly seek what these women had fought for: freedom.
Their centuries-long resistance against Chinese domination was eventually replaced by a struggle against the French. When a force of guerrilla fighters known as the Vietminh defeated the French in 1954, Vietnam, part of what the French called Indochina, was temporarily divided in two until nationwide elections could be held two years later. The First Indochina War was over.
But a new war began the following year. Instead of fighting the French, this time the Vietnamese people were fighting each other: the Communist North versus the allegedly democratic South. And the South had a powerful foreign champion: the United States, a nation that by the end of the First Indochina War had been vigorously supporting France against the Vietminh, footing 80 percent of France’s war costs. The new war’s official name was the Second Indochina War. Americans called it the Vietnam War. The Communist Vietnamese whom the Americans were trying to defeat on behalf of the South had a different name for the conflict: Khang Chien Chong My, or the Resistance War Against America. Most North Vietnamese just called it the American War.
These Communists considered the French and the Americans as having exactly the same goals—colonial oppression of their nation—and the two Indochina wars as being two halves of one whole. But the American War was not, as the previous conflict had been, an attempt to retain Vietnam as a wealth-producing colony. Rather, it was a disillusioning and ultimately tragic clash of cultures and ideals.
The United States was in Vietnam because of the Cold War. Communism—by then considered by the world’s democracies to be just as dangerous as the Fascism they had defeated during World War II—was spreading throughout the world. It seemed to American leaders, and to those from the Far East democracies who joined them, that Vietnam was a key place to take a stand against this totalitarianism.
In their determination to stop the spread of Communism, however, these nations—the United States foremost among them—didn’t take the time to thoroughly understand Vietnamese history and its people’s way of thinking, nor did they allow themselves to admit that the South Vietnamese regime they were propping up as a buffer against the Communist North was in no way a democracy, as its leaders claimed. Rather, it was a brutal dictatorship that tortured and killed any of its own people whom it suspected of being Communists.
The culture clash between the Vietnamese South and North was a result of the French occupation. Those South Vietnamese who were educated, urban, and French speaking dearly hoped the Americans would save them from having to forfeit their comfortable lifestyle, which would surely happen under a totalitarian Communist government. For if the Americans couldn’t save them, their own army certainly wouldn’t: these wealthy Vietnamese, and the many corrupt officers of their Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) who had also largely rejected Eastern culture, did little to inspire their fellow Southerners with any sort of patriotism or motivation to fight.
Unlike the wealthy elite, the largest group of Sout
herners, the farmers, maintained traditional Eastern values, which taught them to respect whichever authority was in power. But when their loyalty was simultaneously demanded by both sides—the Vietnamese Communists (Vietcong or VC) fighting secretly in the South and the ARVN soldiers working with the Americans—these farmers became snared in a war that brutalized their families and destroyed their simple way of life along with their precious ancestral lands.
US leaders hoped they could win a war of attrition; that is, they would cause so much loss and destruction as to make the Communists quit. The Americans measured success in body counts, the number of Communist fighters killed. But by making this their yardstick for success, Americans revealed a dangerous ignorance regarding the sincere and intense patriotism that made their enemies quite willing to risk their lives to see their country unified. So as the war progressed, Americans were increasingly baffled by this tiny nation’s ability to endure and defy the world’s greatest military power, year after destructive year.
Americans grew antagonistically divided over the war, and the US military draft became a lightning rod for that division. While fear drove some young men to either comply with their draft notices or flee the country, others on both sides of the issue were motivated by deeply held principles. But it was a rare individual who credited those with opposing viewpoints for acting on the courage of their convictions.
The very concept of patriotism was hotly debated in the United States during the war. Many in the widely diverse antiwar organizations were convinced they were serving their country by doing whatever they could to end its involvement in a war they believed pointless and immoral. On the other side were those who served in Vietnam out of an equally strong sense of patriotic duty that was often coupled with a desire to emulate the heroism of the World War II generation (which in many instances were their own parents).
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