Courageous Women of the Vietnam War

by Kathryn J. Atwood

  Jurate asked him about Captain Bynum. How had he died?

  Three days after Jurate’s evacuation, Anthony said, the patrol had returned to Khe Sanh only to be ordered back out hours later to assist some men enmeshed in a desperate battle. Captain Bynum was hit in the chest and continued fighting, but was rescued too late.

  Jurate, it turned out, hadn’t been even remotely responsible for his death.

  She became a passionate advocate for refugees, seeking US aid for them and personally visiting war-torn Bosnia, Rwanda, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. She received a Freedom Award in 2010 from the International Rescue Committee. She is a board member of the Women’s Refugee Commission and currently serves as president of the Kazickas Family Foundation, an educational philanthropic organization focused on her native Lithuania.

  Jurate lives in New York City.

  LEARN MORE

  Odyssey of Hope by Joseph Kazickas (Tyto Alba, 2006).

  A memoir by Jurate’s father, detailing his family’s escape from Communist-controlled Lithuania and their years as refugees in Germany and life in the New World.

  On Their Own: Women Journalists and the American Experience in Vietnam by Joyce Hoffmann (Da Capo, 2008).

  “These Hills Called Khe Sanh” by Jurate Kazickas, in War Torn: Stories of War from the Women Reporters Who Covered Vietnam by Tad Bartimus et al. (Random House, 2002).

  IRIS MARY ROSER

  Australian Relief Worker

  IRIS MARY ROSER HAD A LONG history of war-related relief work. As a teenager during World War II, she had delivered groceries—filling in for delivery men who had been called to active duty—in Tenterfield, her hometown in the Australian state of New South Wales, before she joined the Australian Women’s Land Army, working on farms to help prevent a famine.

  Iris Mary married shortly after the war, and while raising three sons, she also found time to serve in numerous charities. But in 1967 she and her husband began having marital trouble and divorced. Now she needed a new start. But what would it be?

  Australia was sending troops and medical teams to Vietnam, so the war was constantly in the news. One day Iris Mary read a newspaper article about an organization called Project Concern (PC), which was running a hospital in an area of South Vietnam known as the Central Highlands. The PC hospital and clinic desperately needed volunteers. Iris Mary immediately knew that she must be one of them and signed up to go. But as she prepared to leave, she had to fight off intense waves of fear: she had never traveled very far from her hometown.

  Iris Mary in 1968. Iris Mary Roser, Ba Rose: My Years in Vietnam, 1968–1971 (Sydney: Pan Books, 1991)

  If she had been afraid before her journey began, those fears were significantly increased when Iris Mary reached Hong Kong by ocean liner. Chilling news was coming out of Vietnam: Communist fighters had successfully mounted a surprise attack on more than 100 South Vietnamese towns and cities during the Tet holiday.

  All flights to Saigon were canceled for the next 16 days. Finally, on February 18, 1968, Iris Mary flew out of Hong Kong and landed in Saigon.

  It was a war zone. “I walked off the plane to find myself surrounded by mayhem,” Iris Mary wrote later. “Artillery was booming nearby; tanks and reams of barbed wire were everywhere; weapon-laden soldiers were hurrying in all directions.”

  After several misunderstandings and misdirections, Iris Mary arrived at the Dalat US military base, which was on high alert for enemy activity. When she requested a ride to the PC hospital, located 25 miles away outside the village of Dam Pao, the base commander seemed shocked. And irritated.

  “Don’t you know there’s a war going on out there, ma’am?” he asked.

  But another man standing nearby told Iris Mary that an armed helicopter, or gunship, was headed for that area in order to sweep with gunfire, or strafe, a Vietcong (VC)–occupied village. He suggested she come along. He would drop her off afterward, he said.

  Iris Mary was placed between two machine gunners. “But unlike them, I did not have ear muffs,” she wrote later, “and when the village was underneath us and the firepower started I thought my eardrums would explode as their guns spat bullets by the hundreds.”

  Shortly afterward, the hospital came into sight. By the time the gunship dropped her off, Iris Mary’s legs were shaking so much she wondered if they would hold her up. They did, and the staff greeted her eagerly. A young woman named Tuyet, who came forward to help Iris Mary with her luggage, said, “Unfortunately, you have arrived at a time of sadness and tension. Many of the villages around us have been attacked. Relatives of some of the staff have been killed, the homes of others have been destroyed. We are all afraid that the hospital will be next.”

  An American nurse took Iris Mary on a tour of the hospital and clinic. Everything was shockingly rudimentary, and each hospital bed contained two patients. Others lay on the floor.

  All but four of the staff members were Montagnards (French for “mountain dwellers”), people who were native to the Central Highlands. Because the war had forced many of the area’s Montagnards out of their homes, they had become nomads, staying wherever they could grow some rice and live in relative safety.

  Iris Mary drove weekly to the more advanced hospital in Dalat. There she collected food and medical supplies for the Dam Pao PC clinic and hospital. Sometimes she took patients to Dalat if their medical issues were too complex for the PC hospital.

  Although Dam Pao was in the midst of a VC-controlled area, the PC workers had been told “through the village news network” that they could use the roads between 8:00 AM and 3:00 PM. The staff all knew why: Project Concern was a nonpolitical organization. As such, it asked no questions and treated all medical issues, including battle wounds, and all patients, including VC fighters.

  But the VC were determined to assert their authority, often in terrifying ways. One day, while Iris Mary and a young Montagnard PC staff member named K’Duc were driving back from the Dalat hospital after dropping off a patient, they saw, in the middle of the road, the body of a dead man. Iris Mary immediately stopped, wanting to cover it somehow before any children saw it.

  K’Duc grabbed her before she could get out. “Go! Go!” he yelled.

  When they arrived back at the clinic, K’Duc told her that the VC had killed the man and displayed his body in order to keep the local people in line.

  But the PC team members continued their work. Whenever there was a lull in fighting, they traveled through neighboring villages instead of waiting for the villagers to come to the clinic. They would always begin by greeting the headman and the medicine man. Then Iris Mary assisted the medics as they treated a variety of ailments: malaria, intestinal parasites, tuberculosis, respiratory infections, abscesses, chicken pox, mumps, measles.

  Many of the village people lived in constant pain. “Their gratitude for a handful of aspirin was heart-rending,” Iris Mary remembered. “Our medics won my utmost admiration as they gently treated the people. They were not only giving a little relief from suffering, but also showing that the people at the PC hospital really cared.”

  One day a group of particularly sick people walked into the hospital from Durbrach, a village about six miles away. Their festering lumps and high fevers were diagnosed as bubonic plague, and someone at the hospital made an urgent call to the province office at Thu Duc to request extra vaccines.

  Iris Mary and K’Krai, a Montagnard PC staff member, drove to Durbrach to convince the other villagers to get vaccinated. But when they arrived, the village was deserted. Strings with meat hung in every doorway. K’Krai explained why: the villagers had attempted “to appease their gods” before fleeing into the jungle. Iris Mary and K’Krai were certain that many of the villagers were already infected and would die if not vaccinated.

  Province officials, through the use of a helicopter and a loudspeaker, urged the Durbrach villagers to come to the hospital for their vaccinations.

  Infected villagers heard the message and came by the hundreds f
or their first of two injections. But a few days later, when the villagers tried to return for the second shot, the roads around the hospital were blocked. Although the barriers were only sawed-off trees, everyone knew the VC had put them there. So the villagers stayed away.

  These roadblocks also caused food shortages for the hospital staff. When the staff’s supply was down to one bag of rice, Iris Mary decided to visit a farmer who always sold his vegetables to the PC for a nominal price. A PC worker named Phu accompanied Iris Mary on the drive, breaking the tension and making her laugh. “Hello, Mrs. Water Buffalo,” he would say to any buffalo they passed. “You are looking well today. Have you seen any naughty men with guns? Miss Buffalo, how sweet you look. Could you tell us if there are any ‘Charlies’ [Vietcong] around?”

  They made it to the farm, loaded the vehicle with vegetables, then returned without a single VC encounter.

  VICTOR CHARLIE AND THE VIETCONG

  The NATO phonetic alphabet, created in the 1950s, assigns a word for every letter of the English alphabet in order to avoid confusion during radio communications. The words help differentiate letters that might sound similar when spoken, such as M and N, or P and V The word assigned to V is Victor and to C is Charlie. So when discussing the Vietcong during radio communications, instead of saying “VC,” military personnel used the code “Victor Charlie.”

  But the VC remained active in the area, always exerting their control. One day a young girl was brought into the clinic with knife marks crisscrossed all over her body. This had been done, the medics were told, to punish her mother, who had made the mistake of selling rice to an Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) soldier.

  The VC fighters would also set themselves up as tax collectors at checkpoints, stopping vehicles and charging each driver a fee. Whenever Iris Mary drove through the checkpoints, however, she was never stopped. Though she tried to play it cool, she was actually terrified when driving through these areas, writing later that she was always “expecting a burst of gunfire into the tyres that thankfully never came.”

  One day the headman from Sre Rung, a nearby Montagnard village, came by PC asking if the workers would obtain some rice from Dalat and store it at the hospital and clinic for his village’s people.

  Months before, the VC had occupied Sre Rung, living in tunnels and bunkers underneath the homes. When the VC guerrillas demanded a share of the village’s rice supply, there wasn’t enough left for the villagers.

  The PC staff agreed, and the plan worked—until the VC discovered it. When the VC retaliated by destroying village property, the elders decided to move their village elsewhere.

  The Southern government provided the villagers temporary protective quarters in the form of iron sheds near the hospital. Iris Mary was amazed at how quietly and courageously these Montagnards—1,000 men, women, and children—left their homes one day and found spots for themselves inside the sheds. That night the government bombed their village to destroy the VC bunkers.

  A relatively peaceful period followed. The PC staff began to joke that “Charlie” had taken a holiday. But then one day at 2:00 PM, while she rested on the porch during the siesta, Iris Mary heard “a hiss.” She looked around the corner of the building and saw “a dark head and beckoning finger.” The stranger had come to give a message: the VC were on their way to attack a village only about 500 yards from the PC hospital, which would be next. The first attack was planned that day for 5:00 PM.

  Iris Mary quickly relayed the message to the hospital staff and villagers, and the villagers immediately began evacuating on foot. Iris Mary and the doctors knew they could call for helicopter evacuation. But as their Montagnard staff wouldn’t be included in the evacuation, they chose to remain.

  Their situation was desperate. The hospital’s jeep and the ambulance were in Dalat being repaired. An old ambulance was nearby, but its driver, Ong Krah, was using it to collect wood, as he always did on his day off. If he didn’t return on time, they would have to walk.

  Despite the tension, no one panicked as they packed their bags. The villagers walked by: adults carrying bundles taller than themselves, children carrying younger children, old people riding in carts.

  By 4:30 the stream of villagers was thinning. One of the workers began to weep. Then another cried out, “Ong Krah, he is coming!”

  With only seven minutes to spare, the PC staff drove away.

  Iris Mary decided to stay at the US base in Lien Hiep, where she could keep informed about VC activities in Dam Pao. The rest of the staff stayed at the Cam Do Hotel while they visited the surrounding villages.

  About a week after the scheduled VC attack on the hospital, Iris Mary asked the US colonel in charge if the staff could return.

  “I wondered how long it would be before you asked that question,” he said. “Are you sure you want to go back?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “You had problems getting out, you may not make it next time.”

  Iris Mary insisted. He refused at first but finally relented, though not before voicing his doubts about the rest of the team’s courage. “How stupid can you be to expect them to volunteer to go back in there?” he asked. “They would have to be as crazy as you are.”

  Apparently they were. The others arrived to pick up Iris in a military vehicle filled with supplies, ready to return to Dam Pao.

  On their return, they discovered that the VC had only taken food and drugs; the hospital equipment remained untouched.

  As much as she had enjoyed her work with Project Concern, Iris Mary decided not to renew her contract with them. In November 1968 she began working for a different organization in Vietnam called Civil Operations and Rural Development Support, or CORDS. They didn’t have a specific job for Iris Mary, but when they saw her excellent references from PC, they decided to create a new position: social welfare adviser for Gia Dinh Province. She accepted the position, became “Ba [Mrs.] Rose” to the other CORDS employees, and took an apartment in Saigon.

  The Southern government and the United States had created CORDS to inspire loyalty among Southern civilians. But some of Iris Mary’s duties—inspecting welfare institutions and following through on all requests for social welfare—opened her eyes to the blatant corruption that was rampant in the Southern government.

  Her first assignment brought her to a province office where she was to sign receipts for rice to be distributed to refugees. The form stated there were 20 units of rice, but Iris wouldn’t sign for something she hadn’t checked. When she did check, she discovered there were only 16 units of rice.

  “Who are the recipients of the other four?” she asked the CORDS representative who had accompanied her.

  He shrugged.

  “I’ll go and find out for myself at the depot at Can Tho,” she said.

  “No! No!” he cried. “You must not do that, Ba Rose. You would not get back to Gia Dinh alive.”

  Iris Mary had a sudden, chilling realization that “danger in Vietnam did not just come from the Vietcong”—she might be killed by officials of the very government she was working for!

  When she complained to the province chief, he replied, very calmly, that she had to accept the situation: “If you want to work in harmony with Vietnamese officials, you must learn to do things the Vietnamese way.”

  Iris Mary was thoroughly disgusted that in order to do her job, she had to become “a link in a chain of corruption.” And soon she found corruption in a far more disturbing place: an orphanage.

  An Trong was an unregistered orphanage managed by an overly friendly woman whose hands flashed with diamond rings but who didn’t seem to know specific details about the children under her care.

  Iris Mary went to check on the orphanage and meet with the children. While playing with a group of them, she heard whimpering from behind a closed door with a cot jammed against it. She moved the cot and opened the door. On the other side was a small girl lying in her own waste.

  When Iris Mary asked the m
anger for means to clean the girl, the obviously embarrassed woman claimed she was not at fault. The girl’s mother, she said, had left her and never returned. The girl refused to eat.

  An Trong orphans. Iris Mary is standing in back, at center. Iris Mary Roser, Ba Rose: My Years in Vietnam, 1968–1971 (Sydney: Pan Books, 1991)

  A doctor diagnosed the girl with malnutrition. Iris named the girl Small One and hired a caregiver to watch Small One in her apartment.

  Small One improved in a few weeks, but she never smiled or even cried. When she wasn’t sleeping, she only stared or whimpered.

  A few weeks later a young American in civilian clothes named John Roberts came to Iris Mary’s CORDS office. He had been searching for a little girl, he said, the daughter of the Vietnamese interpreter of his former unit. He had promised to take care of his friend’s daughter if anything should happen.

  When his friend was killed, John attempted to search for the girl, but the Vietnamese authorities stood in his way. He tried to extend his tour in order to search for her, but the US military wouldn’t allow it. Upon his return to the United States, he sent money to the girl’s mother, but she never acknowledged receipt of it. Deeply worried, he returned to Vietnam.

  John then located the girl’s mother only to learn that she had brought her daughter to the An Trong orphanage because the child fretted and whimpered all day, missing her father and John. The An Trong manager reluctantly gave John directions to Iris Mary’s office, and now here he was. Iris Mary sensed he was telling the truth, so she took John to see Small One.

  “When we entered the room, the little girl was lying on her back just staring into space. John walked over and looking down into those big solemn brown eyes spoke gently to her. Ever so slowly, her face lit up with the most beautiful smile,” Iris Mary wrote later.

  John took Small One away, and Iris Mary never saw them again. Shortly after this happy reunion, the orphanage manager came to visit Iris Mary and frantically offered one of her diamond rings. “She was afraid she would lose her recently gained [government] support, and I assured her this would not happen on the proviso that she advise us in future if she needed help with a sick child,” Iris Mary wrote later.