A Book review

Even the Women Must

Fight – Memories of War
from North Vietnam
Author: Karen Gottschang Turner (with
Phan Thanh Hao)

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (1998)

Reviewed by: Le Hoang Anh Thu

Note for Hoa Sen University’s readers: Copies of

this book are available at the Gender and Society
Research Center (Room C004, 93 Cao Thang,
District 3, Ho Chi Minh City)

“ Even the Women Must Fight” is an English-translated quote from a familiar

Vietnamese saying that Karen Gottschang Turner chose to name her book. With this title,
she seems to convey to her Vietnamese readers the impression that this is a book of
mixed narratives from both Turner, an outsider who tells the story of a foreign country to
her native countrymen, and the women she interviewed in North Vietnam, insiders who
experienced the war.

Readers may expect to see portraits of heroines who fought during the war in Vietnam, or
read stories that vigorously depicted heroic and sacrificial acts for the country by
heroines. This is true, but it is also more than that. In this book readers can find the life
stories of several female war veterans from a girl born to a family strictly preferring sons
who left to join the army for a new path to happiness in her life, to an obscure village girl
who became a famous heroine during the war because of her skill in shooting down many
American airplanes to protect a bridge near her village.
On the one hand, “Even the Women Must Fight” is a collection of vivid memories of
many female war veterans who lived, fought, sacrificed their youth and health, and
sometimes even sacrificed family happiness to work as soldiers or youth volunteers in the
jungles surrounding the Ho Chi Minh trail; volunteers also helped to bandage those
injured by the bombings right in their own urban neighborhoods during the war. On the
other hand, the book is a travel-journal by the author who came to Vietnam to meet with
many people, from scholars, to film directors, to wartime heroines, to former youth
troops, many of whom now live in economic hardship with almost no compensation from
the government. The stories depicted in this book are in many ways the author’s personal
interpretations of war experienced by women. The author tried her best to present to her
readers, as exactly as possible, what these women told her by adding many direct quotes
in the book from her conversations with them, and described in detail the atmosphere of
each meeting. She also expresses her viewpoint with many comments and analysis of the
narratives of Vietnamese women and her own feelings, sometimes of great sympathy,
admiration, excitement, or even guilt.

In one chapter, she tells the story of Ms. Đức Hoàn, the actress-film director who joined
the anti-French resistance at the age of 10 to escape from her father who had very strong
Confucian traditional opinions about a woman’s role in a family. She was sent to Russia
for training in the film industry and later became a director who made films to raise the
mood of the Northern Vietnamese people during the war against America. After the war,
she used films to tell the story of the soldiers’ lives who came home from war to face the
pains and losses that the war had forced upon them, and who tried to find ways to go on
with their lives living in a new reality.

In another chapter, Turner tells the story of a beloved national Vietnamese heroine, Ngô
Thị Tuyển, who with her team shot down many American airplanes to protect the
Dragon’s Jaw Bridge in Thanh Hóa, her hometown. She is an example of how women
had to perform tasks in place of the men who had gone to the front. Women who did not
leave for the front had to raise children, encourage their husbands and sons to go to the
front, work on rice fields, and volunteer for local military tasks. Tuyển experienced great
pain when she received news of her husband’s death on the warfront, and yet she could
not leave her place of duty to collect her husband’s body. After the war she married a
disabled soldier, and they desperately wanted children but could not because of the
injuries she had received during the war. She begged her visitors to bring along their
children whenever they visited her.
In a third chapter about living members of the Volunteer Youth Corps, who worked on the
Ho Chi Minh Trail, Turner combined several stories of female youths from various
backgrounds who voluntarily enlisted in the army. They could have been girls from
middle-class backgrounds wanting to prove their sincere commitment to the Communist
Youth Union by volunteering to do all the dirtiest work. They could have been mothers
who volunteered to join the Youth Corps to dig canals and dredge lakes to prove their
proletarian spirit, and to get access to a state hospital that would care for their children
back home. They also could have been farmers from villages who wanted to sacrifice
themselves for a higher goal by following the call of Ho Chi Minh.

Under Turner’s pen, these were very lively conversations. However, readers do not feel
manipulated by the author’s own perspective about wars or are the chapters overloaded
with too many narratives and descriptive details. Turner’s writing is light and she tries to
add many quotes from her conversations when needed to give the readers the feeling that
they are really there with Turner talking to the veterans. Readers still have a great deal of
room for their own analysis and assessment of Turner’s data to arrive at their own
understanding. For example, in the chapter about Ngô Thị Tuyển the heroine, we can feel
how the author’s meeting with this heroine was viewed with great sensitivity by the local
authority and by the heroine herself.
Turner, as a text-based historian, has skillfully made use of the narratives to accomplish
the goal she set forth in her book: to bring the stories of the female war veterans to life
and to empower them by describing the present situation that governmental post-war
recognition of the roles of women are generally still absent. Turner also acknowledged
that her American identity posed barriers in her fieldwork. She found many veterans
intentionally narrated their testimonials in repeated themes and, on the other hand, certain
themes were never revealed to foreigners.

Turner tries to make her argument throughout the many stories presented in her book, that
the Vietnamese case is particularly interesting to consider in studies about war. How did
Vietnamese society, in which women’s role as mothers is so highly praised, adopt the idea
that mothers could leave home to do all the work that fathers would have done if they
were not in the war-front, and even carry the guns to become citizen-warriors? In all the
stories that Turner presents to her readers, we can easily detect the female veterans’
feminine side and their maternal duties that they had never abandoned even during the
war. To illustrate this argument, at the beginning of the book, Turner described her
conversation with a veteran who joined the war to avenge her family who were all killed
during an American bombing in Hanoi. When this veteran finished her story and turned to
Turner to ask about the author’s personal life, the author honestly talked about having
divorced her husband and raising her children as a single mother. To the author’s surprise,
the veteran’s friendliness disappeared immediately and was replaced by coldness; the
veteran could not forgive Turner for not having sacrificed her own needs to maintain her
family.