Comparison Between the Roles of American Women and Vietnamese Women in the Vietnam War

America's wars have historically been a reflection of America's very own cultural tendencies; they're usually enormous in scale, they traditionally consist of a colorful variety of fronts and they are most often regarded as a man's game. So it doesn't strike one as peculiar, perhaps, that the perpetually striking images of Vietnam are of camouflaged nineteen-year-old men enduring the graces and horrors hosted by Southeast Asia during the skirmish that lasted over a decade. It may seem more peculiar, however, when one considers that more than 15,000 women relocated from their American homes to the perilous, jungle canopied land. Vietnam's legacy of physical handicapping, psychological desecration and cultural rifting echoes in an innumerable collection of films, books, publications, organizations and documentation detailing the heroics, trials and disgraces of a generation of men. But the women that this nation sent off to serve in a countless number of indispensable capacities have enjoyed no such narrative proliferation.

And if popular cultural tendencies are any indication of a society's greater conscience, than surely America's warrants some self-examination. Because poorly kept records that are only now being dusted and reassessed will suggest that a more honest cultural recollection of Vietnam would account for women who sacrificed significant personal entitlements at the behest of war.

At the end of the war, America was not the only nation to neglect acknowledging its women. Vietnam would perhaps be inclined to even greater guilt in the matter, particularly due to the extensive support that their forces received from the female population. Records of service by South Vietnamese women, who fought alongside American soldiers in combat, have suffered borderline denial in the scarcity of their recorded mention. And the remarkable quantities of girls and women who left behind homes in order to carry on resistance for the North Vietnamese army and the Vietcong are all but disregarded by a government that owed much to their contributions. As the struggle in Vietnam escalated and gradually crumbled into American defeat, much was made apparent about the vast cultural differences separating the two civilizations represented therein. And many could accredit the Vietnamese victory to a Western underestimation of just how significant a factor this difference would be. The substantial advantages that this allowed the Vietnamese in their own country would continue to frustrate and infuriate American soldiers and strategists throughout the war. But for all of the severely antithetical elements of both countries, their ideologies seem to suggest a broader circumstance for the world. Their common silent disavowal of woman's service to the war effort is indicative of the international patriarchy of war. In the aftermath of Vietnam, both countries trended toward this perspective, dashing the much deserved recognition of women to obscurity.

Motivated by desires to help those they knew were suffering abroad and to find adventure far away, many American women sought service in a broad range of positions. "Women served in Vietnam in many support staff assignments, in hospitals, crewed on medical evacuation flights, with MASH Units, hospital ships, operations groups, information offices, service clubs, headquarters offices, and numerous other clerical, medical, intelligence and personnel positions. There were women officers and enlisted women; there were youngsters in their early twenties with barely two years in service and career women over forty." (Wilson, 2). Unfortunately, the exact number of women who served for America is officially unknown because military documentation does not classify those enlisted by gender. But even a cursory conversation with a male veteran should elucidate the abundance of women, particularly nurses. And in point of fact, many nurses who had enlisted in military nursing school were ensured that only volunteers would be sent overseas. This, they would find out, was not entirely accurate With increased casualty came an increased necessity for medical services. And just as the role of the draft heightened notably in the onslaught of the war, so too did exportation of female nurses. And not all of them had volunteered for the tour.

Throughout the conflict, these women were subjected to unfathomable dangers, and the pressures of practicing medicine under the weight of war marked a distinct difference from all prior experiences. Though it certainly bears noting that many nurses were sent to war with only a minimal body of experience to begin with. By all accounts, however, the necessary experience arrived daily in a series of new challenges and heretofore unseen despairs. Likewise, the women learned to cope with exhaustion, fear and hostility at an intensity to that point unknown to them. Like the thousands of American boys who came of age or lost their lives in Vietnam, so too did thousands of young women press through to maturity in the face of monumental adversity, and most usually due to it. And women lost their lives as well. Nurses fell as casualties in plane and helicopter crashes, as did officers. Female officers were killed in ambushes along the Ho Chi Minh trail and others still were lost during the Tet Offensive that was undiscriminating in its selection of victims. Military women, though not in combat service, died as POWs and more still were designated MIA and were never recovered. And in one of the most tragic turns of a war characterized by tragedy, thirty-nine women, working for an assortment of American humanitarian and military agencies, lost their lives in the crash of Operation Babylift, a mission designed to remove Vietnamese children from the country and relocate them to safety.

In South Vietnam, women were called to arms by the increasing severity of the war. And like the men, women served in the painfully disadvantaged ARVN alongside American soldiers. Responding to the threatened spread of communism in Vietnam, most citizens of South Vietnam took political action, even prior to American involvement. But with the United States came greater demands for assistance in an ever-growing war effort. The demand commissioned a widespread increase in recruitment and volunteerism to the ARVN, and likewise, called constantly for assistance from civilians inhabiting strategic towns. This need entailed participation from women who, like the men who fought with America, sought to protect their lives from the incursion of communism. Where American women were inclined to join the effort for a variant of personal reasons, Southern Vietnamese women were driven by feelings of nationalism and, most fundamentally, instincts to preserve a culture and way of life from the burgeoning Chinese communist party that had assumed control in North Vietnam. Like the men, women were trained and armed with intent to gird American divisions, provide direction and enact military support when needed. And it was needed often, as most American veterans will attest. The cultural barriers that served to weaken American virtues in Vietnam were, in part, combated by the South Vietnamese assistance that must be regarded by American historians as essential to the American effort. Indeed, the ARVN claimed many important battle victories due to their greater understanding of and familiarity with the countryside. So their importance was unquestionable. And as a crucial utility in the war, the ARVN found it necessary to employ the forces of both genders to maintain its effectiveness in spite of heavy casualties. And the women perpetuated this dedication to opposing communist aggressors, subsisting in abhorrent conditions on meager rations throughout the war.

The emotionally and physically involving proclivities of the war were also responsible for the extensive participation of women on the side of the North Vietnamese, as members of both the official military force and as guerillas in the Vietcong. In 1965, as the war's intensification became an obvious fact with heavily increased U.S. air-strikes, Ho Chi Minh, commander-in-chief of the North Vietnamese Army, sent out a general request to the people of North Vietnam for volunteered engagement in armed resistance to American involvement. This was a request directed specifically to women, who had previously not been members of any organized military operations. American involvement, however, had become a blight on their existence. The increased combat caused by the United States' declaration of war decimated homes, ravaged the countryside, brought destruction and starvation to Vietnamese families and interfered with a civil war for foreign interests. Most devastating to many, however, was the loss of lives that they saw as being the work of American soldiers. It was not simply that the deaths of so many men had encouraged women to enlist. More than that, it was that women who now had lost fathers, sons and brothers were guided by intents of vengeance and pride. Responding to a Vietnamese adage that, from one similar variation to the next, seems to maintain the primary intention that "When war comes, even women must fight," the North Vietnamese women were bound to action. And the crushing blows that the war had dealt to most of their lives made this action a logical conclusion. A story of any woman who ventured to fight on behalf of communist forces in the struggle will balance political views with horror stories of cindered homes and butchered loved ones.

So Ho Chi Minh's request was met with an enthusiasm that, many believe, may have been a deciding factor in the war's outcome. Most women joined through Ho Chi Minh's Volunteer Youth Brigade, that was essential in the effectiveness of the Ho Chi Minh trail, which connected forces, supplies, food and munitions between North and South Vietnam. Requirements for joining this group stipulated that women be seventeen years of age in order to serve. But the implicit motivations driving both the women involved, and the recruitment agencies handling them, guaranteed that this rule would not be strictly admonished. As such, the ranks of the youth organization included girls as young as thirteen who were eager to act on familial obligations of revenge or national commitments to patriotic integrity. So women learned to fire weapons and prepare trapping devices. They were snipers and guards, as well as political activists.

The highly integrated involvement of women on the side of the North Vietnamese was not a coincidence though. And it was dependent upon far more than the length and magnitude of the war, though those were certainly affecting factors. Rather, the new philosophy of communism acted as a release for women from the traditionalist and patriarchal values of Confucianism that had previously determined the cultural outlook of Vietnam. To many of the women involved, the promise of communist influence also promised to be a great step for women's liberation. In the end, the communist victory, they believed, would grant women equal regard in the eyes of their government, whose gender-blind policies would soon be in place.

This served the North Vietnamese well. The involvement of women in particular was troublesome to the gender stereotypes that American soldiers brought with them. For some time, the threat of a female aggressor seemed unrealistic to the western perspective that was heavily steeped in its own sexism. This, combined with the cultural stigma surrounding male physical aggression toward women, granted the North Vietnamese women a considerable advantage. Frequently employed methods of deception and subterfuge were aided by this American perspective on gender politics that the fighting women of the NVA and Vietcong willfully exploited.

In spite of this, and the seeming promise that Vietnam would not foster the universal tendency of male-helmed nations to subjugate women and diminish their accomplishments, the women who helped North Vietnam to victory now languish unrecognized by their government. The heroics and ferocity of these women in support of northern forces hasn't even earned them direct address as veterans. As the Vietnamese government was embattled by unnumbered postwar adversities of economic and social proportions, it left its women to fend unacknowledged with those same realities. Somehow, in the shuffle thereafter, their contributions were lost. But they suffer the same after-effects that plague the men. They are haunted by lost families and lost limbs too. They too were forced to endure the daily hardships of an economically devastated country. The damages of war left the women who served to tolerate malnutrition and widespread disease. And the chemical damage of Agent Orange lingers in the illnesses that women have suffered as well as men. Psychologically, these women have been no better off. In Vietnam, the society as a whole was dealt an emotional scar that knows no traditional means of healing. And the carnage that the war brought into the lives of towns and families left its women with a particularly bitter memory. Because even as the treachery of war robbed them of their innocence and femininity, their own government denied them its empowerment.