This article examines the problems facing female "American War" veterans in Vietnam today. The Vietnamese government has not provided adequate welfare for these veterans, who are also facing enormous difficulties in starting their own families. In reaction to such difficulties, some veterans pay young men to impregnate them and live in isolated all-female communities with their children. While such single families are inconsistent with traditional morality in Vietnam, most Vietnamese have been willing to tolerate these families in recognition of the great sacrifices these veterans have made for their country.

Karen Turner received an M.A. in Asian Studies from Yale University and a Ph.D. in Chinese history from the University of Michigan. She has conducted research on law in China since 1979, and presently works on women veterans' issues in Vietnam. She is currently a Research Fellow in the East Asian Legal Studies Program at Harvard Law School.

The war that Vietnamese call the American War was not the first threat to Vietnam's national integrity that compelled women to take up arms to save the nation. But the technologically advanced weapons that the U.S. deployed threatened the very existence of the Vietnamese polity and harmed its population in more permanent ways than earlier incursions. As one northern Vietnamese woman, who fought against both the Americans and the French, observed in an interview in 1996, "The French ate away at our souls; the Americans threatened to destroy the very body of our nation." The Vietnamese people staved off the U.S. military assault. But the deadly residue of a war that aimed to denude and pollute the very land itself lives on, most permanently in women's bodies. Exposure to lethal chemicals, coupled with malnutrition, malaria, and mental stress, compromised women's reproductive capacities and their opportunities for marriage and motherhood once the war ended.

Evidence from Vietnamese materials suggests that during the war, worries surfaced that women's polluted bodies might render them unfit to realize a Vietnamese woman's most fundamental human right-the experience of childbirth in her youth and the care of a filial adult in her old age. In the case of women veterans, demographic forces also worked against those who delayed marriage and childbirth because these women had to compete for a diminished population of males after the war. Individual women and their families were not the only losers in this post-war tragedy. When the communist government called on young men and women to fight for the nation at a time when they would have married and started families in peacetime, it unwittingly endangered its own future by jeopardizing the reproduction of healthy new citizens, who would otherwise have replenished the generation sacrificed during the war.

In this brief essay, I first describe women's invaluable contributions to the national cause after 1965 and refer to examples of ambivalent responses to their militarization. Women's participation in an arena of death and violence engendered anxiety about their future domestic lives, as I demonstrate in sections two and three. However, as I conclude, a deeply shared cultural belief that motherhood is a woman's natural right has afforded some women the leverage to become mothers without marriage in spite of their traditional obligations to perpetuate the patriarchal family and to ensure social harmony. The legal system has adjusted to the reality of these single mothers' decisions by expanding its definition of full citizenship to include illegitimate children. It is true that households headed by single mothers are among the poorest in Vietnam, and that some of these individuals have suffered censure in conservative village communities. But many Vietnamese have accepted the practice of middle aged women "asking for a child" as one way to repay women veterans for devoting the best years of their reproductive lives to save the nation.

1. Women's Contributions

We can understand Vietnamese women's decisions only in the context of the dilemmas forced upon them by the war. Men and women alike had no choice but to make the best of a drawn out and bloody war fought on their homeland. Many lost their lives, their health, and their hopes for a normal family life to the war. But women did not expect men to fight on their behalf and chose in a variety of ways to take action against the enemy themselves. They were motivated not only by intense propaganda campaigns to draw the civilian population into a total people's war, but also by a sense of the desperate need to protect their homes from annihilation. Young women were inspired as well by a long history of women who took up arms to fend off foreign invaders. During the American war, some women fought the war close to home, serving in local militias and self-defense forces and maintaining production in factories and fields. Others severed their connections with home and family to work as sappers, gunners, liaison workers, road-builders, engineers, reporters, combat entertainers, and medics in the battlegrounds south of the DMZ in the remote jungles and mountains that sheltered the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

This essay focuses on the young women who fought in the youth brigades on the Ho Chi Minh Trail because they left their homes to live and work with men as equals. These teenagers took primary responsibility for keeping the roads open, and supplies and troops moving down the Trail to the southern battlefields. Official estimates state that between 1965 and 1973, at least 170,000 young people joined these brigades through their youth unions. However, recent Hanoi newspaper reports question that figure, arguing that many more served but have simply been forgotten in the official calculations. Reliable statistics about women in the communist self-defense forces and militia units in the North are harder to find, but estimates run as high as almost one million. The role of women was of particular importance because in the coastal areas and other strategic sites, female anti-aircraft units formed the first line of defense. Most of the female volunteers and militia women were the daughters of workers or farmers, usually with no more than a primary school education. Around 70,000 women professionals, doctors, engineers, and reporters were recruited or volunteered to support the communist People's Army of Vietnam. After 1969, women who had the talent and temperament for military life could join the regular forces, but their number remained less than 10,000. In the South, the National Liberation Front (Viet Cong) boasted more than one million women among its members by 1965. As the war progressed, more women joined the guerilla units that bore the brunt of the war. At least one-third of these personnel were women, organized into groups, squads, and platoons, commanded in some cases by local woman leaders and in other cases by men. Many of these women were seasoned combatants, skilled in the use of weapons that they had captured from enemy forces.

In late-1990s Vietnam, the militarized woman served as a powerful symbol of the extent to which ordinary people were driven to save the nation and the high price they paid for their service. For example, in 1996, veteran and Hanoi-based military historian, Nguyen Quoc Dung, called on feminine imagery to describe North Vietnam's wartime anti-aircraft defense system: "The American pilots never knew that beneath them, our Vietnamese women had woven a fine hairnet of opposition." Relishing the contrast, he boasted that it was "the simple, modest activities of Vietnamese women ... who used their small guns to shoot and their delicate hands to defuse bombs that in the end defeated the well-fed American pilots in their big heavy planes." He credited women in the South for the spontaneous revolts against Ngo Dinh Diem and his U.S. supporters that fueled a more widespread and organized resistance. Clearly, Professor Dung intended to use his assessment of women's activities to reassert the official line that Vietnamese morale counted for more in the end than American technology, and that the Viet Cong uprisings in the South stemmed from local resentments rather than Hanoi's machinations. When queried about the impact of the war on these young women, he admitted that the volunteer youth who worked on the Trail had been poorly supplied during the war and were left without proper veteran's compensation when the war ended. However, he argued that the military life offered many young people the chance to learn new skills that enhanced their post-war opportunities.

In popular culture, however, much more attention is directed today to the postwar disappointments of women veterans than to their wartime exploits. The brave woman who returns home after years in the jungles so old and sick that she can never attract a man, so desperate for a child that she ensnares unsuspecting men to impregnate her, willing to defy convention to raise a child outside of marriage, has become a stock character in recent film and fiction.

2. Ambivalence about Women Warriors

The old adage, "When war comes close to home, even the women must fight," attests to Vietnam's mixed feelings about women's proper place in military conflicts, for it suggests that a woman's duties could include military service to the nation, but only when all else failed. Traditional Vietnamese stories reveal that a woman could take part in armed conflicts, but that unease about her martial role would in the end overshadow gratitude for her contributions. Legends surrounding the most famous women fighters in Vietnamese history, the Trung sisters who raised a rebellion against the Chinese in 40 A.D., and Lady Trieu, who entered the fray two centuries later, betray ambivalence about the martial woman. Male scholars over the ages have not questioned the almost foolhardy bravery of these women, but Lady Trieu in particular has garnered mixed reviews because her story cannot be made to fit the Confucian mold of the good woman. Indeed, depictions of Lady Trieu contain hints that the matriarchal culture that preceded Confucianized patriarchy lived on well after Chinese cultural norms extended into North Vietnam. She is usually portrayed as a superwoman, riding proud on her war elephant, with frightened Chinese soldiers falling before her. Without any domestic impulses, she was stubborn enough to refuse marriage and housework, and charismatic enough to lead men in a rebellion. However, she is painted as something of a freak, a grotesque figure with three-foot long breasts and savage violent streak. Moreover, like the Trung sisters and the many martial women whose valor has secured them a place in history, Lady Trieu was defeated and killed in the end, never able to translate her martial power into authority in a civil society. Women coming of age in Vietnam hear a confused if not contradictory message from these legends: a woman should be willing temporarily to inhabit a masculine world of violence and death to save the nation, but she must not lose sight of her larger duty to produce and nurture sons who could take their rightful place as the state's true citizens.

Ambivalence about a woman's duty to the state and the family marks the life story of one of the most beloved heroines in North Vietnam today, a militia woman who became an official dream girl during the American war for her unstinting urge to sacrifice herself and her appealing country manner. As a young woman, Ngo Thi Tuyen won fame in 1965 for shouldering 95 kilograms of ammunition to supply artillery defending the strategic Dragon's Jaw Bridge, which was located in her hamlet outside the city of Thanh Hoa. The bridge itself stood as a powerful symbol of resistance when it became the target of continuous American air attacks between 1965 and 1972. Hanoians today remember how they listened to radio reports on the fate of the bridge, how they felt that as long as the Dragon stood fast the country would prevail, and how a young peasant woman, Ngo Thi Tuyen, became a symbol of stoic and persistent resistance. The famous poet and writer, Nguyen Duy, recalled over thirty years later that he and other artillerymen in the hills around the bridge knew about this young woman, and the fact that she could keep up the fight helped their morale.

When she received her medals, the officials seemed as interested in her soft feminine side as in her military accomplishments. A description of her demeanor at the May Day celebration in Thanh Hoa in 1965, as she sat beside other war heroes, played up her youth and innocence: "This nineteen-year old young woman still looked like a little girl, with her round and innocent face and childlike features. She shunned public attention. Her big dark eyes shied away from admiring gazes and she did not know what to do with her arms, now laying them on the great table before her, now crossing them on her chest."

A mature Colonel Tuyen understands that her story has always served multiple purposes, but she is quite able to sort out the personal from the political. She recalls her exploits and her reactions to the days of fame with a mix of pride and embarrassment:

In 1965, just a few hours after our marriage, my husband was sent to area B [the southern battlefields]. As a militiawoman, I was in charge of transporting ammunition to the regular forces. That very night, the American planes poured bombs into the area and twenty-two of my comrades-in-arms were killed. But we had to defend the Dragon's Jaw Bridge at all costs on that terrible night-and we had to keep the trucks going over it on their way to the South. I don't know how I was able to carry those big boxes of ammunition that time. More than once, my strength came from anger and the need to avenge my dead comrades. Later I was interviewed by many journalists. I had to pose for their photos. I was young then and proud of myself. I was even invited to Hanoi to make a speech. It was so nice to be there. But they made me wear the traditional Vietnamese long dress, the ao dai, and it was too complicated for me and the high-heeled shoes tortured my feet. So I had to hold up my dress to keep it from flopping around and walk barefoot when I finally retreated back to my room in the guesthouse. And I didn't know how to talk to people in Hanoi-I did not have a high level of education, you know.

Ironically, this young woman was harmed more by her role as a postwar icon than by her wartime burdens. Many foreign journalists from socialist countries came to interview her. At one interview with an East German television team, doubts were expressed as to whether she could really carry ammunition twice her weight. In order to prove the truthfulness of her story, the young Ngo Thi Tuyen had to repeat the feat for the team in front of the provincial guesthouse. This act, she claims, caused the back troubles that would haunt her post-war life.

Today, Ngo Thi Tuyen is a lieutenant colonel in the regular army, in charge of veterans' affairs for her area. Disillusioned and angry about the treatment meted out to those who sacrificed so much to win the War, she carries her own sorrows. She is childless, which she thinks is the result of her literally backbreaking performances. Her importance to her countrymen and women has changed. Now it is not her physical endurance, but her barren, broken body that invites attention, and her shabby treatment at the hands of local Party cadre that arouses anger. Until its recent repair, her run-down house had become something of a local tourist attraction, a symbol of the government's lack of concern for its most heroic citizens. Yet, Lieutenant Colonel Tuyen reminds visitors to her hamlet, now the site of a museum commemorating the dead, that she and her team shot down their fair share of planes, not out of simple good luck, but because they were well-trained, disciplined fighters. Despite all of her private disappointments, she is still proud of what she and her villagers accomplished.

3. Women Outside the Community

Unlike the young female volunteers who worked on the Trail, Ngo Thi Tuyen fought the War within the confines of her family and community. And it is in part for this reason that she has become a national heroine in the post-war era. Unease seeps into discussions about young women, who left their homes at a time when normally they would be thinking of marriage, to live and fight side by side with men in Vietnam's most remote areas. The female film director, Duc Hoan, said in 1996 that even Vietnamese did not understand how terrible it had been for the women who worked on the Trail until a documentary about them came out in the early 1990s. "We cried when we saw their sick, dark-eyed faces, their thin bodies, hunched in pain as they shouldered their heavy burdens, their feet almost bare and often bleeding."

The high costs that women paid for leaving the safety of their homes in their adolescent years is only slowly coming to light. Evidence shows that during the war, military officials understood that women presented special problems in the field. But the military could not spare its able-bodied men to carry out support operations and hence could not afford to keep women out of the army. Colonel Le Trong Tam, an officer in the military division in charge of the Trail after 1959, explained that the army had never planned to use women on the Trail, but when necessity forced them to include women's labor, they did take account of the risks and hardships for women. According to Colonel Tam, President Ho Chi Minh cautioned military commanders to watch out for women's welfare and special health needs. In fact, however, the men and women who worked on the Trail became cogs in a huge conveyer belt with only one goal-to keep the supply trucks and marching soldiers on the move to the South. Most of the youth received only rudimentary training and supplies. Despite the hardships, most of them stayed on as long as their health held out and some eventually joined the regular forces.

Why did these young women volunteer to leave the relative safety of their homes? Some of their reasons for doing so echo those expressed by young people anywhere. The pull of adventure and the lure of freedom from home and village supervision became all the more attractive if a young person could serve for a greater cause. Some youngsters hoped that their families would be relieved of yet another mouth to feed in hard times, and others went simply because "Uncle Ho" asked for their help. Many young women, who in peacetime would be dreaming of a husband and children, figured that they had to leave home to save home. As one woman veteran recalled in an interview in 1996, her anger and desire to avenge her family impelled her to take action.

I was born in Thai Binh Province. My family was farmers. In 1948, my father was killed in the French War. My mother was with child when he died and she raised us four children alone. In 1968, I volunteered to be a people's soldier (bo doi), and I spent five years in the field during the most terrible time of the war. Why? Four people in my family died when the Americans bombed the Hanoi suburbs. I was angry and I believed that what men could do, I could do too. Life was hard. In the jungle, we kept the telephone lines open, and at first, I was homesick and afraid. But I wanted to avenge my family, to kill Americans for what they did. I survived, and when the war was over, my spirits soared. But life was still not easy. My husband is a career military man who served in the South during the American War and then in Cambodia. He carries a bullet in his body and he is not well after so many years in the battlefields.

When assessing her life, however, she placed ultimate value on her family. She was most grateful that she had two children after the war. And when asked whether it had been hard to return to domestic life after so much independence during the war, she responded indignantly, "Why would I not treasure my home? Sure my family would never be the same again. Some were dead, some wounded and sick. But the hope that I would one day raise children in a safe place kept me alive. It was what I was fighting for. And I was lucky. I survived when so many others died. I have children, when so many stay alone." Most women do not see a contradiction between their will to fight with their duties and emotions as women. The two impulses were linked: if women did not fight, they would have no safe place in which to raise a family in the future.

Women in the volunteer youth teams who fought on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, isolated in the jungles and highlands of the Truong Son mountain range that borders Laos, faced particularly difficult physical and psychological challenges. Equipped only with the barest essentials, forced to forage for food and at times to manufacture their own shovels and hoes, women still tried to maintain decent hygiene and appearance in the wilderness. Even simple ornaments could prove lethal, one female platoon leader remembered, and so she and her comrades painted their hair ornaments black to prevent the gleaming metal from attracting attention from U.S. spotters. A constant theme that surfaces in both women and men's stories of hardship centers on their lack of adequate clothing. Most volunteers were issued two sets of clothing that in some cases had to last through years of hard living in the dank jungles. Women especially suffered. They could not hang their clothing to dry because white cloth could attract the deadly attention of U.S. fire. In an interview with members of Volunteer Youth Troop C814, the men remembered how they worried about women's health in such conditions:

We men felt sorry for the women. It was harder for them. Sometimes they had to work underwater, moving stones. I was in charge of logistics. I went to find the women one day. I had to be careful to warn them, so they wouldn't be surprised, because they had to take their clothes off to work. These long stretches underwater harmed their health and now they have women diseases. I know, I am a married man. Some of these women got sick during the War and now they are old and still they have no medicine. Some couldn't marry later.

One of his female comrades present during the conversation indicated that she did not want to emphasize her physical vulnerability, but her endurance and competence with guns and bombs:

Most of us carried AK 47s. One time when a bridge had been bombed and there was no time to rebuild it, we used our bodies to hold the planks so the trucks could keep moving. Sometimes people drowned in the mountain streams and rivers. ... We had different educational levels and we were young. A few had finished secondary school, but the majority was still in primary school. We were divided up along the same lines as the regular army, working in squads of fifteen to twenty people. We had to protect our fifteen kilometers of road and that was it. The road came first. We had orders not to run for cover when the bombs came, but to keep on working and to stand up and shoot at the planes.

This woman entered the youth teams with more schooling than the others, many of whom had not progressed beyond the seventh grade, and so was trained on the spot to defuse bombs and land mines. She described how hard it was to learn to deal with each new kind of bomb the U.S. developed, but, like typical teenagers, the volunteers made a game out of this dangerous work. She was especially proud of her decision to join a squad of thirty people who volunteered to defuse particularly lethal bombs. The women of this volunteer youth troop C814 wanted it to be known that they had performed men's work with competence. And although the men claimed that women suffered because they were women, they did not remember their female comrades-in-arms as creating undue burdens or tensions under fire. In fact, working with women who handled weapons and danger with poise served to deepen the resolve of men to act with similar courage.

The most glowing reports of women's courage often came from soldiers who had just arrived in the hotspots where women worked or from reporters on the lookout for heroic stories. Road 20 held a special appeal, and the youth who worked on it were viewed as romantic, heroic figures. Constructed through rugged mountain terrain in Quang Binh Province as an alternative route through the mountain passes on the borders of Laos, it was named for the average age of those who built it. A lore grew up around this site, which was one of the most fiercely contested sites along the Trail, and it became a favorite stop for journalists in search of a heroic story to inspire the people back home. Many visitors from the rear wrote about the women who fought there. A reporter painted a vivid picture of young women working together, singing, and standing fast as U.S. planes fired rockets. One woman who had defied orders that she remain behind because of illness impressed him: "Judging by way she held her rifle and the look on her face, I imagined that she thought she could defend the whole...area with her small rifle." A newly arrived soldier reacted strongly to the presence of women in so dangerous a place: "They were young maidens, and I felt a deep pity for them. Anyway, they are women, just out of seventh grade. They have been here only seven months. Their skin was still smooth and not yet tanned. How beautiful and how youthful they are." Later, he began to admire them for more than their looks-as he witnessed how they worked on construction using makeshift materials, laughing in the face of hardship. But he could not forget that they were women after all when he noted that they were beginning to look pale and ill and no longer menstruating.

In an interview in 1997, Hanoi military historian Nguyen Quoc responded to questions about sexual tensions among men and women in the field by dismissing such concerns as irrelevant to the Vietnamese situation. He insisted that the Vietnamese did not use comfort women as did the Japanese during Second World War, and that Vietnamese military personnel were generally too preoccupied with sheer survival to think about romance. Colonel Le Trong Tam pointed out that in the decade of peace after 1954 and before the Americans invaded, young people were able to get an education, read literature, and develop romantic ideas. He admitted that romance did happen and that some women did become pregnant. The commanders sent them home, with marriage certificates in some cases, to protect them and their children from ostracism by conservative villagers. When asked about sexual harassment, most people agreed that it did exist, usually behind the lines and almost always when a power differential existed-but rarely among equals in the armies. As one woman pointed out, the morale of the army and the people back home would have been undercut if men in the field routinely harmed young women, and morale was what the Vietnamese Army depended on above all.

The few pieces of evidence from the war that do deal with women as sexual objects show that some men were intrigued by seeing evidence of female bodies in unlikely places and others worried about the consequences of hard living on their health and fertility. Erotic notions about women in war were more likely to be expressed by visitors to the battlefields than by the rank and file. Major General Phan Trong Tue, during a visit from Hanoi to the Ho Chi Minh Trail, rhapsodized in his memoir over the "poetic sight" of the young volunteer's underwear and penned a poem celebrating their "pink brassieres," "frail heels", and "sweet songs." A common image in memoirs and war literature is that of the young female liaison agent, guiding the truck drivers through difficult terrain by "floating" through the jungle paths in their white blouses, encouraging the discouraged, tired drivers with their smiles. Apprehension about women becoming too masculinized emerged from a variety of materials. A journalist on the Trail, for example, noted that soldiers taunted young women volunteers pushing heavily loaded pack bicycles up steep trails-"Be careful or you'll destroy your sex."

4. Post-War Dilemmas

In such an atmosphere, it is not surprising that right after the end of the war, the Vietnamese Women's Union reassured readers in a tract called Glorious Daughters of Vietnam that the military authorities had not neglected their duty to socialize women properly in the field. In one of their publications, the Women's Union, the official organization that represented women's concerns to national policymakers, featured an article about the all-female Brigade 609. The story celebrates their courage and ingenuity-they became skilled carpenters and forgers of their own shovels and hoes used in constructing a 1,600-kilometer road. In addition to construction skills, the article points out that these women found time to cultivate domestic ones: "Classes are held regularly for the brigade members, at which they acquire a general education and learn sewing and embroidery, etc. Brigade 609's idea of a good woman is one who works diligently, fights courageously, shows good morals and is likely to become a good wife and mother." The dual message that we detect in this article, ironically put forth by the agency most committed to women's equality, reveals how difficult it would be for women veterans to gain full citizenship once the war ended.

As Cynthia Enloe has written so perceptively, "Wars have their endings inside families." In Vietnam, veterans returned to decimated families and local communities to rebuild their lives in a nation now politically unified but isolated from global events, economically fragile, and still in a state of mourning and recovery from terrible personal devastation. More than 3 million Vietnamese died as a result of the war. At least 300,000 children were orphaned. 200,000 men and women are still missing in action. 1.4 million women were widowed or forced to remain unmarried because of wartime disruptions and injuries. In a climate of such immense suffering, the nation's attention shifted from launching campaigns against outside aggression to mending internal divisions. The notion of the ideal woman mutated as well. Women fighters no longer had a place in a nation recovering from a traumatizing war. Today, greater value is attached to the unselfish mother whose power rests in her ability to replenish literally the nation through her reproductive function, and to engender peace within family and community through her moral force. This contemporary preoccupation with motherhood is vividly displayed in the very shape of the museum, constructed under the auspices of the All Vietnam Women's Federation in Hanoi in 1995. In the vestibule, an amazonian statue of a woman with a child perched on her shoulder stands proud and tall under a breast-shaped conical ceiling with an ornate chandelier. This statue is described by a young Vietnamese guide as "the mother of Vietnam, whose milk brings peace and unity to all of her people." In film, literature, and media presentations, this celebration of motherhood marginalizes women who cannot or choose not to bear children. But it also creates opportunities for women bent on achieving a goal that society cannot deny them.

This current preoccupation with the rights of motherhood is neither new nor a product of official propaganda. Temples and shrines devoted to the cult of the mother goddess dot the Vietnamese landscape. In contemporary society, discussions about how a woman must give birth to fulfill her natural function percolates through daily conversation among men and women alike. "She might be crazy because she has never had a child" is a common observation of the childless woman. The problems faced by barren veterans are the topic of many television stories, fictional accounts, and reportage. The brave woman who has lost her hair, her looks, and her fertility after years of hard living and exposure to disease and chemical poisons, and the guilty male survivor who admires women veterans but in the end prefers a younger, healthier woman as a wife are stock figures in post-war media productions. Not only single women suffer. Married women who decide to have children despite their exposure to chemicals during the war express fear about the outcome and some couples simply decide not to risk a deformed child despite their yearning for a family.

Women in the volunteer youth teams who have never married or received official recognition or recompense for their war service have served as a powerful trope for writers who portray them as victims of war and the heartlessness of a corrupt bureaucracy that ignores their needs in favor of aggrandizing their own power and prestige. Women who served in the regular People's Army of Vietnam forces do receive pensions, but the pensions are as meager as the small amounts doled out to their male counterparts. It is a source of national shame that veterans are among the poorest citizens in Vietnam. The women and men who fought in the volunteer youth teams receive no pension, no military privileges, and no official recognition in the post-war state. Many of them are too ill to continue to work long enough to merit an ordinary worker's pension, and many are farmers without any security outside of family and community support. In the early post-war reconstruction era, veterans tolerated this poor treatment because they realized that the state was isolated and poor itself. However, under the present market-based economic system, veterans find themselves unable to compete with young entrepreneurs and ambitious Party officials. A great deal of bitterness surfaced in the late 1990s around this issue.

In this environment, female veterans are particular likely to lose out. The younger generation cannot be counted on to support the victims of war. Moreover, when motherhood became glorified publicly, women veterans cannot forget that no matter what their wartime accomplishments, they are measured by their reproductive success in a competitive civilian society. Although these pressures to reproduce often coincide with most young women's personal desires, the terrible irony for so many women who gave their youth, their most fertile years to the war, is that they cannot realize their dream of forming a family in peacetime.

Some women are finding their own solutions to this dilemma. Data are beginning to emerge from Vietnam documenting the decisions of women-some but not all veterans or childless war widows-who are opting to have children outside of wedlock. Despite the number of children left homeless by dint of war or poverty, anecdotal evidence suggests that many women view adoption as a less satisfactory remedy than giving birth. One woman claimed in an interview that an adopted child could not be expected to form strong bonds with a single parent who could not provide a "normal" family life. But at the heart of these women's decisions stands the conviction that the experience of giving birth is itself the significant moment in becoming a mother. A recent article about a commune in Thai Binh Province describes female war victims and older women who are "looking for sexual intercourse with one man (even two men in case of necessity) with the sole purpose of having a child born from him (or them)." Some women are willing to pay men with good genes to impregnate them. A woman "getting on in years" made this offer: "Whoever gives me a child I will give him one quintal of paddy if the child is a girl and two if it is a boy." Ironically, these women who are making reproductive decisions outside the patriarchal family accept the cultural and economic equation that values males over females. These women are not political pioneers making a statement by rejecting the family system, but individuals who have been driven outside normal family relations by circumstances. Moreover, they risk not only poverty and disgrace, but also the probability that chemical contamination and illness during their youth may render them incapable of producing a healthy child.

A haunting voice from the past suggests that motherhood outside of marriage is not simply a contemporary phenomenon. The eighteenth century female poet, Ho Xuan Huong, an unusually perceptive critic of gender relations, left for posterity this enigmatic statement: "To marry and have a child, how banal! But to become pregnant without a husband, what an achievement." Today, most single mothers are not enviable rebels but survivors who have made difficult choices. Many of them live in all-female communes in remote areas under conditions of extreme deprivation. Others, however, live within communities in which the fathers of their children are known. Married women view these pragmatic single women in search of a child with pity, empathy and unease. Not surprisingly, some single women have in some cases experienced ostracism. But most sources suggest that many Vietnamese acknowledge that these women have earned their right to have a child. Vietnamese researchers who study these women express anxiety about children raised in "isolated" households, when the ideal remains focused on the "intact" nuclear family. However, one female Vietnamese sociologist notes that single women who choose a man for his good genes rather than his suitability as a husband seem to be remarkably adept at finding good "seed sowers", and that the offspring of these temporary pragmatic unions appear to be more healthy, intelligent, and handsome than other children.

The presence of single mothers generates a variety of responses from academic experts on these women and society in general. The Vietnamese government has adjusted its laws to take into account post-war social realities. In 1986, in response to pressure from the Women's Union, the marriage and family law was revised. Article 29 of this law states that "[r]ecognition of a child born out of wedlock shall be attested and recorded in the Birth Register by the People's Committee of the commune, city ward or town where the child resides." Moreover, Article 3 protects mothers and their children and "shall assist the mothers in fulfilling their noble task of motherhood". Article 117 in the Section on Family Households allows for "'the father, the mother, or another member of the family who is a major' to head the household." These provisions affirm the state's commitment to the rights of motherhood and a flexible definition of legitimate citizens and households.

5. Conclusions

Young women who left the safety of home and community to fight for the nation believed that they had no choice if they were to realize their hope to raise children in peace. They made their decisions in the context of a history that valorized women warriors-even while painting some of them as unruly rebels who could never take part in peacetime governments. Throughout the war era, Vietnamese men appreciated women's courage in the field but expressed anxiety about how wartime conditions might affect their marriage and reproductive prospects. And indeed, these fighting women returned to a civilian society that honored their contributions but pitied their damaged bodies. As I have shown, however, it would be a mistake to write these women off as passive respondents to social constructions of the ideal family or to popular messages about their limited choices. Women who have become mothers out of wedlock have turned the consensus that motherhood is a sacred right on its head by refusing to bow to the notion that an "intact" family is the only proper place for bearing and raising a child. Society at large accepts women veterans' unorthodox solutions as one means to repay society's debt to women whose service was so essential during the war. Households headed by single mothers are not statistically significant-a recent survey places them at about 2% of households in Vietnam in the 1990s. But they are symbolically important, for they are living reminders of the heavy costs that women paid during the war. Moreover, women veterans' resistance to patriarchal constructions of the ideal might have set a dangerous precedent. Women who are too young to have served during the American War are making similar decisions. How society reacts to these women, who cannot call on the language of sacrifice for the nation to press for maternal rights, will provide the true test of the claim that motherhood is a woman's most fundamental natural right.

Endnotes

1. This essay contains materials gathered from interviews taken in Hanoi from 1993 through 1997, in some cases with the Vietnamese journalist Phan Thanh Hao. Some of the materials included here have appeared in my book with Phan Thanh Hao, Even the Women Must Fight: Memories of War from North Vietnam (Wiley, 1998) and an essay, "Soldiers and Symbols: North Vietnamese Women and the American War", in a collection edited by Gerard DeGroot and Corinna Peniston-Bird, A Soldier and a Woman: Sexual Integration in the Military (Longman, 2000).
2. According to Marilyn Young, The Vietnam Wars: 1945-1990, New York: Harper Collins, 1991, over one hundred million pounds of herbicides alone were used to defoliate the land during the war. See pp. 190-191.
3. This information is taken from various sources, and the statistics must be considered to be estimates only. My information on the North comes mainly from interviews in 1996 with a military historian, Professor Nguyen Quoc Dung, and for the south from Sandra Taylor’s superb new book, Vietnamese Women at War: Fighting for Ho Chi Minh and the Revolution. Kansas: U. Kansas Press, 1999.
4. I want to acknowledge at the outset my debt to my friend and colleague, Hanoi journalist and writer, Phan Than Hao, without whom my work on women in Vietnam would never have been possible.
5. Contemporary Vietnamese female writers are deconstructing these legends. See for example, "The Makings of the National Heroine," by Cong Huyen Ton Nu Nha Trang in Vietnam Review 1, Autumn-Winter, 1996, pp. 388-435.
6. From an appendix at the end of Vietnamese Studies, No. 10, Hanoi, 1966.
7. From an interview with Phan Thanh Hao in Thanh Hoa, 1991.
8. In the memoir of Do Vu, who traveled with the army during the dry season after 1967.
9. In an anonymous memoir written by a forty-year old composer. Available in the William Joiner Center Archives, University of Massachusetts, Boston.
10. In a diary entry dated 1965. I have used the translation of a manuscript taken from the original publication in Tap chi van nghe quan doi [Military Literature and Art Review]. Hanoi: Military Publishing House, 1990. When I refer to "Memoirs", it is to this version unless I state otherwise. These memoirs were in part taken from war diaries and were compiled to show the heroic determination of the men and women who worked on the Trail. But if read carefully, they are valuable sources of information.
11. For example, see the short story, "The Sound of Night," by Cao Tien Le. In Writing between the Lines, ed. Kevin Bowen and Bruce Weigl. Amherst, MA: U. Massachusetts Press, 1997, pp. 46-50.
12. Published by the Vietnam Women’s Union, Hanoi, 1975.
13. See "Women after Wars: Puzzles and Warnings," p. 306. In Vietnam’s Women in Transition. Ed. Kathleen Barry. London: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1996, pp. 299-313. Barry’s compilation of short articles mostly by Vietnamese scholars is a very useful source for seeing the sort of problems that concern Vietnamese women in the 1990s.
14. See for example, Ngo Ngoc Boi, "The Blanket of Scraps." In Rosemary Nguyen, ed. and trans. Lac Viet, Vol. 16, 1997, pp. 96-123.
15. Discussions about women’s responsibilities to the nation and the family became especially important in the 1920s when Vietnamese intellectuals searched for sources of weakness within Vietnamese culture in the face of French colonialism. See Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1992, Chapter 3.
16. See for example, "Remarks on Women Who Live Without Husbands," in Barry, ed. Vietnam’s Women in Transition., pp. 87-92.
17. Vietnamese Literature: Historical Background and Texts. Edited by Nguyen Khac Vien and Huu Ngoc et al. Hanoi: Red River Press, no date.
18. Sociological studies by conservative women academics, for example, are remarkably tolerant. Interview responses confirm the impression that a general feeling that childless women veterans are owed a debt that can be partially repaid by allowing them to have children out of wedlock prevails in the North. Harriet Phinney, a University of Washington doctoral student, is writing a dissertation based on extensive fieldwork about single mothers in northern Vietnam.
19. From Le Thi Nham Tuyet, "Asking for a Child Practice at Anhiep," in Some Research on Gender, Family and Environment in Development. Vol. 1. Hanoi: Research Center for Gender, Family and Environment in Development, 1996, pp. 157-163.
20. Selection of Fundamental Laws and Regulations of Vietnam. 2^nd Edition with Amendments to the Laws Issued in 1995. Hanoi: Gioi Publishers, 1995.
21. See Health and Wealth in Vietnam: An Analysis of Household Living Standards. Edited by Dominque Huahton et al. Singapore: Institute of South East Asian Studies, 1999.