Courageous Women of the Vietnam War

by Kathryn J. Atwood

  Ho Chi Minh lived nearby, and one day in 1951, Phuong met him. His appearance surprised her. “Nothing we had heard about him corresponded to this man in his fifties who was nothing but skin and bones,” she wrote later. “With piercing eyes and a small beard, he dressed in the way of ethnic minorities, with brown shirt and pants, and his famous sandals.”

  He was also very kind, pitying the workers for their lack of quality food and advising them on specific health issues, such how to avoid malaria, a common jungle disease. Phuong was impressed that their great leader was so concerned with the details of their well-being.

  And he was about to lead them to victory.

  In October 1952 Ho’s top general, Vo Nguyen Giap, and Giap’s troops were occupying a small village called Dien Bien Phu, located near the Laotian border. When the French pushed them out, General Giap realized that Dien Bien Phu would be an ideal spot for a final showdown with the French army: the French would be isolated and dependent on parachute drops, whereas the Vietminh could be constantly reinforced from behind.

  The Battle of Dien Bien Phu offered the Vietnamese the exhilarating hope of independence from the French. Each evening, Finance Ministry workers excitedly assembled around a large map that depicted combat areas with red pins and French casualty numbers on labels. “The atmosphere was electric,” Phuong later wrote of this time. The slogan heard and repeated everywhere was “We work one and all for Dien Bien Phu.”

  Vehicles heading to Dien Bien Phu passed by the Finance Ministry all hours of the day and night: people on bicycles carried their village’s required allotment of rice to the front lines of battle while trucks rolled by loaded with weapons and ammunition. Journalists, writers, and musicians all raced there as well, and Phuong heard many moving stories of long-separated friends reuniting at the front.

  Hoang returned from China and was allowed to see Phuong for one night before he too left for the front, where he had been ordered to lead an artillery battalion.

  On May 7, 1954, Phuong was at a printing shop discussing Dong’s latest issue with the printer. A radio was playing. Suddenly the broadcaster began to shout. The Vietminh had defeated the French!

  Phuong rushed outside to join the crowds of cheering people.

  After the victory, Hoang was redeployed, and the Finance Ministry moved out of the mountains to Hanoi. So with her toddler and a new infant son, Phuong walked from the mountain dormitory to the city. At one point she became completely overwhelmed with exhaustion and hunger. She went to a temple to pray for help but soon fell sound asleep. Two wealthy women who had come to the temple with a food offering took pity on her and gave the offering to her and her children. One of the women, Madame Tung Hien, had known Phuong’s father and insisted that Phuong and her children come live in her large Hanoi home. Phuong gratefully accepted.

  But when Hoang arrived in Hanoi, he refused to enter Madame Tung’s home. “Why are you living at a bourgeois woman’s house?” he demanded.

  Phuong explained that she had viewed the unacceptable alternative allotted by the Finance Ministry: an extremely tiny room.

  “Phuong,” he replied, “why don’t you behave like everybody else?”

  It was pointless to argue, and Phuong relented. Soon she was living with her children in a room so dark it needed artificial lighting even during the day. They had no furniture, only two jute sacks on the floor. Because the war was over and people who, like her, had previously lived in the jungle were now in Hanoi, the city’s population swelled dangerously. People filled the streets, waiting in lines for everything from use of a toilet to food and water.

  Phuong rarely saw her husband. Hoang liked neither the stifling room nor the cries of his hungry children, so he spent most of his time in the army barracks, where there was nonetheless no more to eat than at home.

  At work Phuong could see a new social class forming: Communist Party members received all the high-ranking jobs. They constantly harassed Phuong and other non-Communist employees about joining the party and eavesdropped on their conversations for any comments that might possibly be considered offensive to Communism.

  Phuong began to have nightmares. “I never could have imagined that this time of peace would be so hard to bear,” she wrote later.

  The government took complete control of all private homes and businesses in the city before turning to the countryside to initiate what would be known as “land reform.” To accomplish this, they trained small teams of educated people. Phuong’s team included five physicians, two of whom had lived in the jungle during the war. The team members were trained by a Communist doi, or team leader. “You people have benefited from good living in the past, whereas … we have always been exploited,” the doi began. “We are going to make you understand … why it is necessary to wipe out all landowners without the slightest pity.”

  After their training, the group traveled from village to village. They would stay with the poorest family and ask them to identify the wealthiest villagers. The neighbors of one man, the owner of five taxis, falsely accused him of being a landowner. When a young boy tried to blindfold him before his execution, the doomed man refused, saying, “No, I want to look at this slaughter up to the end.” Just before he was shot, he said, “It’s shameful. Down with Communism.”

  What have all these long years in the Resistance been sacrificed for? Phuong asked herself as she observed these grim proceedings. What happened to our lofty ideals?

  When she returned to Hanoi, Phuong continued to hear the results of the land reform: each day’s denunciations and executions were broadcast to the public via loudspeakers. She felt as if she were witnessing the utter destruction of a civilization.

  The land reform didn’t stop until the parents of a prominent Communist official were sentenced to death. Despite its supposed purpose of wealth distribution, the land reform’s two-year reign of terror had done nothing to raise anyone’s standard of living. Life was bleaker than ever for most.

  Although they didn’t have much more money than anyone else, top Communist Party members owned the most beautiful homes and were the only Vietnamese to own cars. This new social structure affected the military as well: Hoang was forced to leave the army, “for the good of the people,” he was told. Officials had checked his background and determined that he was too bourgeois—middle class and materialistic. He spent all day and night lying down and staring at the ceiling in their tiny, airless room. Phuong feared he was becoming suicidal.

  He eventually recovered some hope, and in 1963 Phuong was given a new job, at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Four years later, while working there, she was asked to assist a German filmmaker named Joris Ivens, a personal friend of Ho Chi Minh.

  As she helped Joris film life at the 17th parallel (the dividing line between the North and South), an area the United States was now heavily bombing, Phuong grew to admire the astonishing resilience of the people who lived there. Noticing her interest, Joris suggested to Phuong that she also become a filmmaker. After repeated requests to the government over a period of several years, she began working in Vietnam’s film industry and for more than a decade made documentary films for Vietnamese television.

  Phuong, second from right, working on 17 Parallel—People’s War with filmmaker Joris Ivens, second from left, 1967. Xuan Phuong

  By 1989, however, 60-year-old Phuong had grown restless. “I had spent my life depending on others,” she wrote later of this time, adding, “I had sacrificed all that I had for the benefit of a collective society. I reasoned that the moment had finally come for me to live for myself.”

  The government allowed Phuong to travel to Paris and remain there for two years. And when she returned to Vietnam, she moved to Saigon, now renamed Ho Chi Minh City, where she was allowed to open an art gallery called the Lotus Gallery, which she still runs to this day.

  LEARN MORE

  Ao Dai: My War, My Country, My Vietnam by Xuan Phuong with Danièle Mazingarbe (EMQUAD International, 2004). The English
translation of Phuong’s originally French memoir.

  Lotus Gallery website, www.lotusgallery.com.vn.

  “Nguyen Thi Xuan Phuong—Galerie Lotus,” www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFvPPC-_Kr4/.

  French-language interview (no subtitles) with Xuan Phuong in the Lotus Gallery.

  GENEVIÈVE DE GALARD

  “I Only Did My Duty”

  AT 4:30 ON THE AFTERNOON of May 7, 1954, the valley of Dien Bien Phu in Northern Vietnam was eerily quiet. Only hours earlier it had been shaken by the deafening roar of cannons.

  French officers and soldiers who had earlier destroyed the remaining ammunition at Dien Bien Phu’s French garrison (military post) were now quietly drinking champagne, another valuable they didn’t want to leave behind. While these men solemnly toasted each other good-bye, they waited for the approach of the Vietminh, a guerrilla force that had just shocked the world by defeating them.

  Waiting nearby with her patients was a military nurse named Geneviève de Galard.

  During the 1930s Geneviève attended a grade school named Cours Louise-de-Bettignies. She was profoundly impressed with her teacher’s stories about the school’s namesake, a brilliant French agent who had worked for British intelligence during World War I and had died while in German captivity.

  Geneviève’s own family had a long history of military service: one of her ancestors had fought with the famous medieval hero Joan of Arc. Her late father and uncles had been French army officers, and many of her male relatives had fought in World War I.

  So it was hardly surprising when, in January 1953, 27-year-old Geneviève joined the military herself, becoming a flight nurse with the Groupement des Moyens Militaires Transports Aériens, or GMMTA, the air transport service of the French air force. The GMMTA evacuation planes flew to the areas where the French military was at war—Algeria and Indochina—and transported the French wounded to Saigon and Paris.

  In late 1953 the French army—and the evacuation nurses who supported them—increasingly focused on a remote camp in Indochina situated near a small village named Dien Bien Phu. The commander of the French army in Indochina, General Henri Navarre, decided that it would be an ideal spot to place a garrison of soldiers, who could protect Laos, cut Vietminh supply lines in the area, and prepare for a battle he was sure the French would win. Although Dien Bien Phu was surrounded by jungle and could only be accessed by air, French soldiers were improving its airfield and readying it for use.

  On January 12, 1954, Geneviève landed there for the first time to pick up a planeload of wounded men. The camp was preparing for war, as she described later:

  From the air it was a universe of tunnels, trenches, and shelters whose entrances were revealed and reinforced by logs and sandbags. Machine-gun posts were spotted on the hillsides, and on the plain, and as we descended to land, I could see the brown tarps that still covered the shelters. Once I landed, the hills, green and wooded seemed suddenly less hostile than the vast jungle universe we had flown over with its menacing density. In the distance a few rice fields still quivered in the wind, but the camp was closed in by a threatening jungle where paths must be carved out by machete.

  Geneviève at Dien Bien Phu in February 1954, wearing her flight evacuation uniform. Geneviève de Heaulme

  The Vietminh, who had been creating diversions elsewhere while quietly digging artillery trenches and tunnels as close as possible around Dien Bien Phu, launched their first major attack on the French garrison on March 13, 1954.

  Geneviève arrived in Dien Bien Phu once again, on March 28 at 5:45 AM. The morning fog was so thick her pilot couldn’t see where to land. His third attempt was successful except that he ran the plane into some barbed wire. The oil radiator was punctured, and the plane wouldn’t be operational until repaired.

  But it would never be used again: after the passengers had disembarked and as the fog lifted, the plane became visible to the Vietminh, who took aim and fired. Geneviève watched it go up in flames.

  With the plane destroyed, she had to wait for a return flight and spent the night in Dien Bien Phu. Meanwhile, soldiers eager to get in touch with their families, deluged her with personal letters to deliver for them.

  The next morning, while waiting for the arrival of an evening plane that would evacuate her and 250 desperately wounded men, Geneviève distributed items the Red Cross was parachuting into the camp: cigarettes, milk, and oranges. As day wore into night, one Vietminh shell after another exploded on the landing field.

  By midnight, rain was pouring out of an ink-black sky, and the damaged landing field was thick with slippery mud. The wounded were carried out to meet the plane. Geneviève’s jeep became stuck in the mud. As she sloshed her way to the landing spot on foot, she saw a plane approaching. She didn’t think it would be able to land safely. Apparently someone in the control tower shared her opinion, because, rather than landing, the plane kept going.

  Geneviève and the wounded returned to the garrison.

  The following afternoon, at 4:00, a new Vietminh attack began, this one with Soviet-made howitzer cannons. “I felt as if it was the end of the world,” wrote Geneviève later. “The impacts shook our bunker. Pieces of earth fell from the roof…. Nobody said a word. All around there were wounded men bearing their sufferings with courage, and I knew that at dawn, when the battle decreased, the stretcher bearers would bring the new wounded. How could I sleep?”

  She couldn’t. “The shelling lasted all night,” she wrote. “The din was terrifying.”

  When the shelling stopped, it was clear that Geneviève would be staying indefinitely at Dien Bien Phu. The Vietminh had moved closer to the garrison, rendering the landing field impossible to use. Geneviève wrote later that although the high command didn’t want women at Dien Bien Phu, and although she was a flight nurse, not a ground medic, there was only one thing she could now do: “care for and stay with the wounded.”

  Major Paul Grauwin, MD, was the surgeon in charge of Dien Bien Phu’s main 44-bed underground hospital. He put Geneviève to work there. While the two surgeons “performed miracles,” Geneviève gave shots, changed bandages, and distributed medicine by the light of an electric lamp.

  Because the wounded were no longer being evacuated, the main hospital became overwhelmed with wounded men. Hundreds were also placed elsewhere throughout the camp, including battalion dressing stations and hastily dug shelters. Geneviève made a point to visit everyone she could, distributing Red Cross items and checking on the wounded soldiers’ progress.

  Dr. Grauwin was very nervous about Geneviève leaving the main hospital, and he had reason to be: there was danger not only from Vietminh artillery assaults but also from the continuous rains. Mud was everywhere: the tunnels, the shelters, the lower-level beds. Once, while outside, Geneviève sunk hip-deep into the mud and had to be pulled out by two medics. The humidity also brought a proliferation of biting insects, which afflicted everyone, especially the men wearing casts, who were already in agony with humidity-induced skin irritation.

  It seemed like conditions in Dien Bien Phu could not get much worse for the French. But they did. On April 3 the Vietminh announced a half-hour cease-fire so that both sides could remove their wounded from the battlefield. When the French soldiers walked toward the enemy lines, however, they made a horrible discovery: the Frenchmen they found on the stretchers were not wounded; they were dead, their bodies mutilated. Morale sunk even lower among the French troops.

  Yet as the enemy moved in, Geneviève’s very presence lightened the profound sense of hopelessness falling upon the garrison. Later that day a large group of French paratroopers landed in the area. One of them, when he saw Geneviève, exclaimed cheerfully, “What do you know? There’s a woman here!”

  Though overwhelmed with medical work, Geneviève tried to attend to the men’s emotional needs as well, explaining later that “when wounded, the toughest man becomes as vulnerable as a child and needs to feel supported…. In Dien Bien Phu I was, in a way, a mother, a s
ister, a friend.”

  One man whose legs were paralyzed told Geneviève, “Every time you walk into my room my morale goes up 100 percent.” So Geneviève visited him every day, praising him as he tried to wiggle his toes.

  As the battle raged, Lieutenant Colonel Pierre Langlais, whom Geneviève considered to be “the soul and mind of the defense of Dien Bien Phu,” sent her a message: A large American press agency in Hanoi, representing the famous American war correspondent Marguerite Higgins, wanted to help Geneviève write her memoirs. They would pay her well.

  Geneviève laughed, returned to her work, and never responded to what she termed “that astonishing offer.”

  On April 29 Geneviève received two offers she did accept: a Legion of Honor and a Cross of War from Lieutenant Colonel Langlais. He had found the Cross of War in the camp, and the Legion of Honor had actually been intended for him. (The one intended for Geneviève had accidentally landed in enemy territory.)

  Lieutenant Colonel Langlais wrote Geneviève’s awards citation, which read: “Geneviève has earned the admiration of everyone for her quiet and smiling dedication…. With unmatched professional competence and an undefeatable morale, she has been a precious auxiliary to the surgeons and contributed to saving many human lives.”

  Geneviève particularly loved the last phrase: “She will always be, for the combatants at Dien Bien Phu, the purest incarnation of the heroic virtues of the French nurse.”

  On the morning of May 6 Geneviève heard a “terrifying noise … a sort of howl followed by an explosion.” She heard one of the men say, “That is Stalin playing the organ” (referring to the sound of Soviet-made rocket launchers nicknamed “Stalin’s organs”).