Women in the Vietnam War

[4] These women made vital contributions on the Ho Chi Minh trail, in espionage efforts, medical care, logistical and administrative work, and, in some cases, direct combat against opposing forces.

That year, the People's Self-Defense Force was created as a local part-time militia and by 1970, over one million women would serve in it, with at least 100 000 in combat roles and with some undertaking Airborne School training.

[22] North Vietnamese women played an important role in the creation and maintenance of the Ho Chi Minh trail, which the United States National Security Agency called "one of the great achievements of military engineering of the 20th century" for its effectiveness in supplying troops in the south despite being the target of one of the most intense air interdiction campaigns in history.

One spy, Nguyen Thi Le On, who had been arrested and eventually incorrectly deemed not a communist by the South Vietnamese police, pretended to have gone mad from the torture she endured, at which point Southern troops freely told her sensitive information out of pity for a harmless old woman.

The NLF, however, tended to discourage sex in espionage, such as seducing potential sources, both out of concern for traditional gender norms and to uphold the example of Ho Chi Minh, who was described as the "celibate married only to the cause of revolution".

[29] Some women spies become national symbols, such as Võ Thị Thắng, who, upon receiving a 20-year sentence from South Vietnamese officials for an assassination attempt, simply smiled and retorted that "your government will not last that long".

[32] The Perfume River Squad, formed in 1967 as a top-secret North Vietnamese covert unit and made up of 11 young women, most of whom were still teenagers, was personally recognised by Ho Chi Minh, who wrote a poem about their exploits.

[33] Several women spies were awarded the Hero of the People's Armed Forces, such as Đinh Thị Vân, who created an underground espionage network that passed through the major cities from the North to Saigon, and Le Thi Thu Nguyet, who bombed several American military facilities and earned the nickname "Iron Bird" for her toughness.

[35] Both South and North Vietnamese women served as active combatants during the war, particularly in the National Liberation Front due to promises of female equality and a greater social role within society.

[36] Ho Chi Minh urged Vietnamese women to prioritize three duties during the Vietnam War: "continue production when men went into the army so that the people would be fed, to run family affairs and care for their children, and to fight the enemy when necessary.

Women played a prominent role in the Đồng Khởi Movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s, with Nguyễn Thị Định serving as a co-founder and deputy commander of the National Liberation Front.

They spread rumors through the Market Mouth — women hunkering behind their wares, buying and selling, bartering and chatting, and sending and receiving undercover messages — that armed men returning from the North were preparing to strike.

[47] Women staged peaceful confrontations right in front of ARVN troops with the goal of convincing those who had been conscripted to desert and to shame the others into giving up the fight.

The military decided that they would recruit women who had been youth volunteers before to drive truck loads of soldiers up and down the Ho Chi Minh trail while American pilots were dropping bombs from the sky.

Marc Jason Gilbert of Hawaii Pacific University, has argued that: Most non-communists leaders like Bùi Diễm, the Republic of Vietnam's Ambassador to the United States, had known from their youth of the Trưng sisters' fame "as a part of the heroic flow of Vietnamese history" and also grasped the significance of their story as a rallying cry for freedom.

This failure contributed in no small measure to the Republic of Vietnam's defeat, both in the field as well as on the propaganda front: armed veteran female Việt Cộng excelled in recruitment, in part by shaming men into joining a fight in which women were already engaged.

This movement called for women to step in agricultural production, to take over the running of their households when husbands went off to fight, and to join local militias to aid the defence of their villages.

[57] The United States had a program to target these people to be trained to help America seize land from the Viet Cong and the U.S. also had the aim to gain their support whilst doing this.

Karen Stuhldreher argues that in popular portrayals of the War "the line between sex and violence becomes blurred" and that "the motivation provided by the narratives noticeably highlights the sexual".

Among the internal refugees were many young women who became the ubiquitous "bar girls" of wartime South Vietnam, "hawking her wares—be that cigarettes, liquor, or herself" to American and allied soldiers.

"[93] American nurses played a significant role in Operation Babylift, a mass evacuation of children from South Vietnam to the United States and other countries before the Fall of Saigon.

[118] Female soldiers serving in Vietnam joined the movement to battle the war and sexism, racism, and the established military bureaucracy by writing articles for antiwar and antimilitary newspapers.

[125] In 1968, Ursula Franklin and Muriel Duckworth presented a brief to a House of Commons committee asserting that Canada and the United States had entered into military trade agreements without adequate public debate.

[134] Kate Webb gained prominence for the fearlessness of her reporting, at one point in 1971 even being held prisoner by People's Army of Vietnam troops and seeing a number of newspapers print premature obituaries.

[138] Ann Bryan Mariano, who covered the War for German tabloid Overseas Weekly, sued the American government after it attempted to ban the paper from being published across the Pacific region, winning the case in 1967.

"[142] Denby Fawcett, who had quit her job at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin after the paper refused to assign her to Vietnam, also described facing difficulties getting permission to accompany troops to combat zomes: One of the first officers I asked turned me down, saying I reminded him of his daughter.

Warren Wilson College professor Jeffrey A. Keith notes that "Vietnam War-era print journalism on Saigon exhibited thematic continuity with colonial writings about the city.

[171][172] The War also saw the widespread use of chemical defoliants by the American military, such as Agent Orange, which continue to affect the landscape, cause diseases and birth defects, and poison the food chain.

[175] In 2005, the diaries of Đặng Thùy Trâm, who worked as a battlefield surgeon for the People's Army of Vietnam and Vietcong from 1966 to her death in 1970, were published, selling over 300,000 copies in less than a year.

[181][182] After making the 2017 documentary series The Vietnam War, directors Ken Burns and Lynn Novick stated that "one of the revelations of the project was how much women were on the [North Vietnamese] front lines...