Girls Under Fire

In war and in peace, women have stood staunchly beside Viet Nam's menfolk for nearly 2,000 years. Sometimes, they have stood in front. Still celebrated are the two Trung sisters who mounted elephants to lead a revolt against Chinese overlords in 40 A.D. More recently, Madame Nhu carried the banner in Saigon toward the end of the Diem regime and thought it only proper that her sloe-eyed daughter, Le Thuy, receive a pistol for her 18th birthday.

The better to shoot Viet Cong with, declared Madame Nhu, who knew only too well the uses that the V.C. were making of their own female stalwarts. One such is Kim Loan, a pistol-packing mama commanding a guerrilla company near Saigon, who occasionally slips into the town of Tan An for a hairdo. Other tools are the thousands of fishwives and fruitsellers in the market places of South Viet Nam's cities. Their vending stalls provide handy platforms for picking up information or passing propaganda and military messages.

Powder Puff. The French used to call Vietnamese women douces comme les mangues (sweet as mangoes). One sweetie surfaced from Viet Cong ranks last April when South Vietnamese police caught a "pretty, well-shaped and lovable" 17-year-old girl named Nguyen Thi Nga, which means "Moon Fairy." She and two friends had been making themselves lovable around the U.S. officers' mess at Soctrang Airbase, which they planned to blow up with plastic bombs fitted into talcum powder cans. The Viet Cong run a sweeping intelligence network by means of Saigon's myriad bar girls, also have agents working in most of the U.S. military installations around the country. One knowledgeable observer estimates that at least half of the female help employed at Danang also work for the Viet Cong. Though the V.C. often encourage wives to go along with their guerrilla husbands, few women are actually combatants. An exception was among the Viet Cong dead after last month's bloody battle at Dong Xoai. There lay the body of a girl lieutenant company commander.

The Communist press of late has been proudly recounting the life story of 45-year-old Nguyen Thi Dinh, who has been a guerrilla since 1940, now has risen to the rank of deputy commander as well as member of the National Liberation Front presidium. Nguyen Thi Dinh got her Communist apprenticeship in the V.C.'s Women's Liberation Association, which functions in thousands of South Vietnamese villages. The W.L.A. is a kind of Viet Cong ladies' aid: besides nagging government officials, the ladies write letters to boys drafted into the South Vietnamese army urging them to defect, recounting wild tales of the government troops ravaging the folks back home.

Tiger Lady. The government's use of South Vietnamese women in the war is largely confined to some 1,800 distaffers--in the Women's Armed Forces Corps formed last January to provide clerks and other administration personnel or as military nurses, welfare workers and interpreters. But in the nature of the dirty war, a uniform is not necessary for bravery. When a V.C. unit attacked a tiny outpost in Tay Ninh province last year while the post's men were on night patrol, their wives grabbed rifles and tommy guns and coolly held off the attackers until the men returned. In the Dong Xoai battle, Private Nguyen Van Ngoc was pinned down in his machine-gun pit by heavy fire. His wife was with him. Ignoring the crossfire, she raced back and forth supplying him with fresh belts of bullets and grenades until both were wounded.

Down in the Mekong Delta, the "Tiger Lady" of the 44th Battalion is Commander Le Van Dan's wife. Though the mother of seven, she has the rank of a master sergeant, totes a .45 pistol, often accompanies the battalion in battle--where she has won three medals for combat bravery.

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