The Women of Loi, Vietnam

Captives in Their Own Land

Dr. Alexandre Yersin

Nguyen Thi Nhan

After the war, he can begin to be bitter. Those who point at and degrade his bitterness, those who declare it's all a part of war and that this is a job which must be done--to all those patriots I will recommend a postwar vacation to this land, where they can swim in the sea, lounge under a fine sun, stroll in the quaint countryside, wife and son in hand. Certainly, there will be a mine or two still in the earth. Alpha Company did not detonate them all.
--Tim O'Brien,  If I Die in a Combat Zone

In Today's New York Times a reporter, Julie Cohn, has committed an  act of journalism, with an article about the women of a small village in Loi, Vietnam, who chose to have children without benefit of marriage.

Of course, in 21st century America, women having children as single mothers is commonplace, but Vietnam is an old culture, with old values. There, women should only have children within the confines of marriage. 

But during the American war,  women were joining platoons, fighting in the rice paddies and by the time the war was over and they returned to life in peacetime, they were in their 20's, beyond the age of marriage. Women in Vietnam married at age 15 or 16.  By 20 you were over the hill, no longer a desirable mate. They were called "qua lua," spinsters. 

The Times story tells of women who returned from the war, looked at their lives, their prospects and said, "To hell with all that," and they went out and asked a man to father a child, without asking for any support or any kind of ongoing relationship.

For these women, there was the practical consideration that in Vietnam you need a child to support you in your old age, because there is no government, no community, no other structure to support you. But, the article implies, there was also the personal calculus by each of these women, independently, that those old rules do not work for me. I served. I was a hero and now you tell me I will be shunned because I'm too old for marriage?

What all this made The Phantom realize is how myopic, how one sided his view of the war has been. When The Phantom was in his 20's, and prime draft bait, he never thought of Vietnamese men or women as having to make the same conscious decision about whether or not to serve that the Phantom and all the boys of his generation had to make. The Vietnamese, as far as he could see,  were either all fanatics, who enthusiastically marched off to war, or were simply minding their own business, when the Americans dropped war upon them.

 But now it's clear there were clearly Vietnamese, men and women, who made a decision to participate,  and paid a price.

Now these people, born on the other side of the planet, are entering their 60's just as the Phantom's generation of American kids who were 20 then are 60 now, and living with the underground ordinance of that war.

If there were any Americans who had a positive effect on that unfortunate people, the Phantom cannot think of who they might be.  Were there any members of the Wehrmacht (the German army) who brought anything but misery to the countries they invaded or to the Jews they delivered up to the Gestapo?

Westerners, as a rule raped, pillaged or exploited Indochina/ Vietnam for centuries. But, like Schindler, there were exceptions, the occasional man who, in the midst of evil  tried to do a virtuous act.  Alexandre Yersin, a German speaking Swiss, who had been educated in Paris by none other than Louis Pasteur, voyaged to Vietnam in the late 19th century and was captivated by the place. Pasteur and his French colleagues implored him to return to the laboratory in Paris, but  he slept in his room  in Vietnam and he heard tigers roaring in the night forests. He was hooked.

 When bubonic plague broke out in Hong Kong, he popped over there long enough to identify the causative organism, to make anti serum to it and he had enough on hand to treat Vietnamese villagers for plague when it arrived a few years later--the first people in the history of the world to be treated and saved by an effective medical therapy for plague.

The Vietnamese, understandably, still revere Yersin.  What they think of Americans,  we can only imagine. We did not come to save them from the black plague, or to lift their standard of living with trade and economic development. We came to murder and destroy, and we were clumsy but effective.  

And now, years later, in a very personal and profound way, we see what damage we did which cannot be measured in body counts or tonnage of bombs dropped or buildings destroyed or forests denuded.  There were victims we did not count, who also suffered, beneath our notice.

Whenever we talk about American troops bringing peace, freedom, prosperity, and the American way of life to other peoples, living in other cultures, whether it be Afghanistan, Iraq or Vietnam, stories like this one ought to be told.

Good works of man do not follow armies. The may follow doctors and medicine and pumps which harvest clean water for a village, but not armies.