Courageous Women of the Vietnam War

by Kathryn J. Atwood

  In June 1970, when her yearlong tour was up, Lynda boarded a jet, her “freedom flight” out of Vietnam. “As the jet took off, I was filled with the most exhilarating sensation of my life … like the weight of a million years had been suddenly lifted from my shoulders,” she said.

  But when the bus from the airport dropped her and others off at the Oakland Army Terminal at 5:00 AM, they had no way of immediately reaching the San Francisco International airport, which was 20 miles away. Lynda decided to hitchhike her way there.

  Dressed in her uniform, she watched car after car whiz by. Some of the drivers screamed obscenities at her. Others threw garbage. Finally, two friendly young men in a van stopped and offered her a ride. Relieved, Lynda tried to swing her duffle bag into the vehicle. Before she could do so, one of the men slammed the door shut.

  “We’re going past the airport, sucker, but we don’t take Army pigs,” he said. Then he spit on her, called her a Nazi, and drove away, the back wheels of the van showering her with dirt and stones.

  “What had I done to him?” Lynda wondered. “Didn’t they realize that those of us who had seen the war firsthand were probably more antiwar than they were? That we had seen friends suffer and die? That we had seen children destroyed? That we had seen futures crushed? Were they that naïve?”

  Someone finally took pity on her, and eventually she made it back home to Virginia. On the first night she presented her family with a slide show of Vietnam photos. When she came to photos of the operating room, her uncomfortable parents asked if she could show them something “less gruesome.” Lynda hid the slides away in the back of her closet. “I had learned quickly,” she wrote later. “Vietnam would never be socially acceptable.”

  Years passed, and Lynda took a series of nursing jobs while suffering an intense emotional pain she couldn’t shake or even begin to comprehend.

  She eventually married a close friend who created a radio documentary called Coming Home, Again, relating Vietnam veterans’ experiences. One of the men involved in her husband’s project asked Lynda if she would agree to be interviewed for the documentary. Then he asked her to create the Vietnam Veterans of America (VVA) Women Veterans organization, to reach out to women veterans.

  Lynda agreed. She also began studying post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and realized it had been part of her life for years. She was certain that many other women veterans were also suffering from PTSD. Her Women Veterans project gave a voice to these women and helped them realize they were not alone.

  She became the first American Vietnam military nurse to publish a widely read war memoir; her book, titled Home Before Morning, helped inspire the creation of China Beach, an award-winning TV series set in an American evacuation hospital during the Vietnam War.

  The VVA honored her in 1982 with its Excellence in the Arts award and in 2002 with its Commendation Medal.

  Lynda suffered from a vascular disease she believed was related to Agent Orange, a defoliant used by the US forces during the war.

  She died at age 55 on November 15, 2002, and her death was widely mourned within the Vietnam veteran community. “Lynda’s book stands as one of the most powerful, evocative, and influential Vietnam War memoirs,” said Marc Leepson, the arts editor of the VVA’s national newspaper, in an obituary for her. “Home Before Morning changed people’s attitudes about the women who served in the Vietnam War, especially the nurses who faced the brutality of the war every day and whose service was all but ignored during the war and in the years immediately after.”

  AGENT GRANGE

  Because Communist forces found cover under the lush vegetation growing in Vietnam during the war, the US military decided to destroy that cover by spraying it with powerful plant-killing defoliants—millions of gallons’ worth. The most widely used of these was Agent Orange, so named because of the orange band around its storage barrels. Agent Orange was extremely successful in clearing ground cover, but it caused severe damage to everyone who came near it, both in the short and long term: Millions of Vietnamese and Americans who were exposed to Agent Orange later gave birth to or fathered children with severe disabilities. A similar number of veterans on both sides of the war developed fatal illnesses years later from their previous contact with the poisonous substance.

  LEARN MORE

  American Daughter Gone to War by Winnie Smith (Gallery Books, 1994).

  Dreams That Blister Sleep: A Nurse in Vietnam by Sharon Grant Wildwind (River Books, 1999).

  Home Before Morning: The Story of an Army Nurse in Vietnam by Lynda Van Devanter with Christopher Morgan (Beaufort Books, 1983).

  Part V

  1971–1975

  ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS

  IN FEBRUARY 1971, PRESIDENT Nixon’s “Vietnamization” received a major test: Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) soldiers went up against North Vietnam Army (NVA) soldiers in what was called Operation Lam Son 719. The ARVN mission was to invade Laos in order to disrupt the flow of supplies down Ho Chi Minh Trail to the Vietnamese Communists in the South. It was a disastrous defeat for the ARVN troops, who were supplied with US airpower but no American ground forces.

  But Nixon publicly claimed the operation a victory. Few Americans shared his opinion: polls taken regarding the president’s handling of the war were sinking even lower than his general approval rating. A majority 58 percent of Americans now considered the war to be “morally wrong.”

  If Americans back home were growing disillusioned with the war, many US servicemen in Vietnam were even more so. Even apart from the deliberate My Lai slaughter, their military was responsible for a large and disheartening number of civilian casualties. And if President Nixon was really winding down America’s involvement in the war and sending fighting men home, why were draftees still arriving? Search-and-destroy missions became “search-and-avoid” missions as draftees did whatever they could to survive their yearlong tours of duty. The use of marijuana, opium, and heroin, easily obtainable on the streets of Saigon, skyrocketed among a growing number of US servicemen, many of whom also created their own antiwar organizations and underground protest newspapers. Back home, Vietnam veterans were protesting the war as well: on April 22, 1971, more than 1,000 of them took their combat award medals and threw them onto the steps of the US Capitol.

  While these events were enormously frustrating to Nixon, he remained determined to keep the United States in Vietnam until it was clear that the South could stand alone.

  His anger reached new limits, however, when on June 13, 1971, the New York Times began publishing portions of the Pentagon Papers—7,000 pages of top-secret US documents and analyses regarding the Vietnam War. The documents proved that the previous administrations had been filled with individuals—including presidents—who had doubted the war’s ultimate success from the very beginning. The United States had stayed in Vietnam not because its officials thought they could win the war but because they didn’t want to be responsible for losing it.

  The papers did not mention Nixon’s administration—they stopped before his election—but the president was still furious, and he launched an unsuccessful attempt to shut down their publication.

  Then, months later, while Secretary of State Henry Kissinger continued secret talks with leaders from both North and South Vietnam, Nixon put into action his own diplomacy plans: on February 21, 1972, he stepped onto Chinese soil and met with Chairman Mao Zedong, initiating a thaw in relations between the two Cold War enemies that many hoped would reestablish diplomatic ties between their nations. America’s staunch anti-Communist president shaking hands with the second-most-powerful Communist leader in the world had seemed impossible only a short time before. The Hanoi government wished it was: if the United States and China normalized relations, as Nixon hoped, China might no longer support Hanoi’s war.

  The North Vietnamese government hardly needed a reason to undermine Richard Nixon. So, hoping to destroy his chances for reelection in November and testing the strength of South Vietnam with
fewer Americans there, North Vietnamese forces launched the Eastertide Offensive, a major months-long attack in the South. As the Tet Offensive had virtually ended the possibility of Lyndon Johnson’s reelection, so Hanoi officials hoped this Eastertide Offensive would do the same to Richard Nixon’s reelection plans.

  Instead Nixon responded with increased naval and air attacks on North Vietnamese infrastructure, military targets, and population centers. These continued throughout the summer of 1972 and always resulted in the outbreak of new American protests. These protests affected Nixon in an increasingly dangerous way: he began to view the demontrators as his personal enemies.

  So while he waged an open war against the North, his administration waged a secret one against his fellow Americans. On June 17, 1972, five men were arrested for breaking into the offices of the Democratic National Headquarters, located in a Washington, DC, building called the Watergate. It was soon discovered that the men had been hired by the committee to reelect the president.

  THE WATERGATE SCANDAL

  On June 17, 1972, five men were arrested in the Watergate building complex in Washington, DC. They had been caught trying to plant listening devices in the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, and it became immediately apparent that they had been hired by the committee to reelect President Nixon. The president publicly claimed he knew nothing of the specific incident (which is most likely true) until he’d read about it in the newspapers the following day. He promised a vigorous investigation. However, he and his aides immediately planned a cover-up: he ordered that the burglars be paid for their silence and used the FBI to lie about their motives. Why? President Nixon had secrets he feared might be uncovered by a lengthy investigation. From the beginning of his administration, he had been using the FBI and the CIA to spy on, harass, and destroy the reputations of approximately 200 people, most of them antiwar activists; one of the people targeted was Daniel Ellsberg, the man responsible for bringing the Pentagon Papers to light. When the president’s illegal activities—along with his habit of taping every conversation that occurred inside the Oval Office—were revealed during the Watergate investigation, the House Judiciary Committee ordered the president to turn over his tapes. When he refused, the committee voted to impeach him for obstruction of justice. Nixon resigned on August 8, 1974, before Congress could vote on whether to bring formal articles of impeachment against him. The new president, Gerald R. Ford (Nixon’s vice president), pardoned Nixon within a month, formally ending the investigation.

  The Watergate scandal not only brought down the Nixon presidency but also was a major element in creating the bleak outlook many Americans had about their nation and government during the post–Vietnam War years.

  But Nixon seemed unbeatable: neither the Eastertide Offensive nor the unfolding Watergate scandal prevented him from winning a landslide victory in the November 1972 presidential election.

  Meanwhile, peace talks had stalled. South Vietnam’s president Nguyen Van Thieu was unwilling to sign a peace agreement. Nixon tried to bring everyone back to the bargaining table in December by initiating an intense 11-day series of round-the-clock air attacks on Hanoi and Haiphong, another large North Vietnamese city. These so-called Christmas Bombings, officially named Operation Linebacker II, claimed the lives of more than 1,000 civilians and were condemned by many international figures.

  Days after the bombings stopped, the peace talks resumed. And on January 27, 1973, representatives of the United States, North Vietnam, South Vietnam, and the Vietcong’s new Provisional Revolutionary Government signed the Paris Peace Accords. Nixon had privately assured President Thieu that the United States would respond with military force should the North attack.

  But he wouldn’t be able to follow through on this promise: by the time the NVA had violated the Paris Peace Accord with an attack on the South on December, 13, 1974, Nixon was no longer president. Rather than face the impeachment charges voted on by the House Judiciary Committee, Nixon resigned, all the while claiming his innocence. The new president, Gerald R. Ford, could do nothing about the NVA violations of the Paris Accords: the year before, Congress had passed the Case-Church Amendment, which cut off US funds for any further military activity in Vietnam, Laos, or Cambodia.

  President Ford gave a press conference in January 1975 and expressly stated that the United States would no longer assist South Vietnam. The North wasted little time, and on April 30 NVA troops poured into Saigon as the last Americans were scrambling onto evacuation helicopters lifting off from the roof of the US embassy.

  By 11:00 AM a Vietcong flag hung over a balcony of the presidential palace in Saigon. One young NVA soldier, entering the city for the first time, remarked to a local, “Why did you let us win? It will be terrible now.”

  He was right. The new Vietnamese government immediately sent hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese people with real or perceived ties to the Southern government or the United States to so-called reeducation centers where they lived in barracks and were forced to engage in manual labor and endure strident lectures on Communist ideology designed to purge their minds of Western ideas. Some remained imprisoned for years, while others died from the rough conditions, were executed, or took their own lives.

  The United States and Communist Vietnam had an extremely difficult postwar relationship. President Ford, stating that the North Vietnamese had “repeatedly and in massive efforts violated the Paris Peace Accords” when they had invaded the South, refused to allow normal diplomatic or trade relations with the new Socialist Republic of Vietnam—a war-devastated nation desperately struggling to rebuild itself and survive on a rigid, government-controlled economy. “Yes, we defeated the United States,” said Vietnamese prime minister Pham Van Dong. “But now we are plagued with problems. We do not have enough to eat. We are a poor, underdeveloped nation. Waging war is simple, but running a country is very difficult.” Most Americans, deeply disillusioned with their government and each other, were in no mood for reconciliation with their former enemy either: approximately 58,000 young Americans had been killed in a war that had not resulted in victory. And 2,000 of these remained unaccounted for years after the war. This last issue remained the most serious and painful point of contention between the two nations for decades.

  These problems, although difficult, were eventually worked out. And in 1997, 22 years after Graham Martin, the American ambassador to South Vietnam, had rushed into a helicopter from the roof of the US embassy in Saigon, the first postwar US ambassador to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam walked calmly through the doors of the brand-new US embassy in Hanoi.

  But it was not the first time Colonel Douglas “Pete” Peterson had been there.

  A veteran of the US Air Force, then Captain Peterson had been shot down over North Vietnam in 1966 and spent the next six and a half years in Hanoi’s infamous Hoa Lo Prison. When diplomatic ties between Vietnam and the United States were fully restored in the 1990s, US president Bill Clinton asked him to be Vietnam’s US ambassador.

  Colonel Peterson had by then retired from the air force and also served three terms as a congressman. He wasn’t initially interested in the president’s offer but eventually decided to accept, having already put his pain in the past. “I didn’t want to be measured on having been sitting in a cell for 6½ years,” he said. “I wanted to be measured on what I could contribute into the future.”

  KATE WEBB

  Captive Journalist

  IN MARCH 1967, 23-YEAR-OLD New Zealand-born Kate Webb left her job in a Sydney, Australia, newsroom and headed for Vietnam. Why? “It was simply the biggest story going, and I didn’t understand it,” she wrote. Neither did Kate understand why, when Australia and New Zealand were sending their young men to fight in the war, their news agencies weren’t also sending reporters there.

  So she went, taking with her only a typewriter, the name of a United Press International (UPI) photographer, and a few hundred dollars.

  Writing articles for Vietnamese newsp
apers for a few weeks brought in enough income to prevent Kate from starvation but not from becoming “seriously hungry.” What’s more, news agency editors constantly rebuffed her, sometimes, she guessed, because she looked much younger than she was. The time on her visa was running out, and she was no closer to understanding the war than she had been before leaving Australia.

  Then Kate got a “stringing,” or freelance, job with a GI newspaper. This gave her formal accreditation with the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), an extended visa, the right to attend daily military briefings, and the right to accompany the fighting men into battle.

  She was gaining an understanding of Saigon—its journalists, priests, bar girls, and street kids—but she wanted to learn more about the war itself. Months later, she did. The war—and the Vietnamese Communist fighters—came to that city in a big way. On January 30, 1968, Kate rushed to the besieged American embassy in Saigon to cover the Tet Offensive, becoming the first wire correspondent to do so. Her articles appeared in the New York Times, Newsweek, and Time. And Kate was glad to discover that she possessed a crucial trait for a war correspondent: she could “function and write amid the knife-edge fear of battle.”

  As Kate’s options widened, she was free to pursue stories that interested her. She decided to spend time with Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) soldiers. She knew that American papers, intensely interested in their own “political clamor over the war,” wouldn’t likely be publishing her stories of these South Vietnamese soldiers. But she went with the soldiers anyway because they were one aspect of the war she didn’t yet fully understand.

  Kate knew that while the Americans could go home after their yearlong tours of duty, ARVN soldiers were required to remain in the war for its duration. For these men, the “dragging war usually spelled dishonor, death, injury, or imprisonment,” she wrote. She followed them on their “pitch-black” night patrols, her way lit only by “the tiny phosphorous mark on the pack of the man in front” of her. They laughed at Kate’s height—five feet seven inches—and her size-eight boots. But they also appreciated her because she did all she could to help them: unlike the Americans, these men didn’t have medical helicopter support. She helped them carry their wounded out of danger.