Hoang Thi Nghi is 77 years old and today, 30 years after the Vietnamese people's defeat of the US occupation of their country, she works among the poor and disadvantaged in Vietnam. Her life paints an extraordinary picture of the courage, determination, sacrifice and dedication of the countless Vietnamese women who devoted their lives to the victory of the Vietnamese Revolution and to building a more just and humane society.
In the March 25 Vietnam Investment Review, Hung Quoc explained how Nghi served as a soldier in the Vietnam People's Army (VPA), carrying out propaganda and agitation among enemy troops in France from 1946 to 1954, where she narrowly avoided arrest on many occasions. After the French colonial army was lost the battle of Dien Bien Phu, rather than returning home to marry her lover — a fellow VPA soldier — Nghi was sent to southern Vietnam by the VPA's Enemy Agitation Bureau to prepare for the US intervention.
"I had to lie to my family, telling them that I was going to study in China", Nghi told Quoc. "I asked my lover to wait for me and told him that I would be gone for just two years — otherwise, he could consider our relationship to be over." She ended up working on that mission for 20 years.
Pretending to be the wife of a soldier in the CIA-created Saigon regime searching for her missing husband, Nghi's tasks included mobilising "support for the revolution from patriots who had been forced to join the Saigon regime's army" and working "as a conduit between our comrades in enemy units and their superiors", she recalled.
Nghi helped to establish and operate a large network of moles and sympathetic figures within the enemy forces between 1955 and 1969. She was betrayed and captured in 1957 and imprisoned until 1960, undergoing severe torture until she finally convinced her captors that she wasn't a VPA soldier. She was again captured in 1969 and sent to the Con Dao prison, known as "hell on Earth".
More than 500 women were jailed at Con Dao at the peak of the war, all accused of political crimes. Despite being savagely tortured, they organised among themselves and resisted whenever they had an opportunity. "We would hurl cans of urine at them. If they retaliated with tear gas grenades, we would just throw them back."
When Saigon was liberated on April 30, 1975, Nghi and her comrades subverted a plot to use mines to blow up the whole prison and kill all the inmates.
Nghi now heads the Do Son Charity Association, which has helped to build more than 20 houses for the disadvantaged and sponsors poor children to go to school.
Nghi told Quoc, "I was much luckier than many of my old comrades, who died before our country was liberated."
In the April 24 Viet Nam News, Le Huong outlined other examples of the many women who played critical roles in the Vietnamese revolutionary struggle, including the legendary Ngo Thi Tuyen. Tuyen was a local militia woman. On one occasion, she transported two boxes of anti-aircraft artillery shells to Ham Rong Bridge in Thanh Hoa province. The boxes weighed 98kg — double her body weight.
Huong also described a cold winter night in 1965, when US fighter-bombers attacked the roads near the Ta Vai Bridge in northern Vietnam. The bridge was on a key transportation route for supplying weapons and food to resistance fighters in the south and hundreds of trucks were lined up to use it.
An ethnic Thai road maintenance team of 11 young women built a new road in two hours using stones and wood. Then, because the trucks couldn't use their lights in case they were spotted by the US bombers, 19-year-old team head Quang Thi Linh organised the women to remove their traditional long dresses and create a line, using their white under-clothes to direct the trucks.
Linh told Huong, "That was a difficult decision for all of us. According to the Thai people's custom, single women should never publicly wear our white underdress, and we only wear white during funerals. But, to save the materials and men heading for the front and the lives of the drivers as well, we were willing to do anything."
Then there was the Ba Dam Dang movement, which was responsible for taking over the jobs of men who joined the VPA, caring for families to allow husbands and other family members to take part in military missions and serving in the army when necessary. Some 133,000 female volunteers joined this movement.
Huong concluded: "Without the contributions of average citizens in the north willing to sacrifice all, peace may have come too late."
Kerryn Williams
From Green Left Weekly, May 11, 2005.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.