The Vietnam War is remembered in the United States as a macho war fought mainly by men. It was anything but. Women fighters in North Vietnam played a key role in stopping the most intense bombing in modern times. The U.S. Air Force and Navy dropped over 7 million tons of bombs over North and South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, more than twice the total of U.S. bombings over Europe and Asia during World War II. In South Vietnam, women helped defeat the U.S. and South Vietnamese ground and air forces. Yet, fifty years on, the history of the women who defeated a superpower, while celebrated in Vietnam, remains largely unrecognized and undocumented in our history of the war.
Nguyễn Thị Kim Huế was one of one hundred and thirty eight thousand Youth Volunteers. Some enlisted. Most were drafted. Aged between 17 and 24, the all-female and mixed-sex units were stationed on the Ho Chi Minh Trail to defend the military supply route against the U.S. air war. A further 1.7 million women over 24 joined Women’s Union militias to defend their homes, villages, and towns. They built trenches, repaired bombed roads, transported ammunition, and shot down U.S. planes bombing bridges, roads, and towns. In South Vietnam, an estimated one million women, known as the Long-Haired Army, fought directly with the National Liberation Front (NLF)— the Viet Cong to us—serving as snipers, spies, ammunition carriers, medics and cultural troops. The NLF co-founder and deputy commander was the female revolutionary Nguyễn Thị Định (1920–1992).
An expert markswoman, Nguyễn Thị Kim Huế was stationed with her platoon on the Mu Gia Pass, the most dangerous stretch of the Trail network. A month after she enlisted in 1965, the U.S. unleashed Operation Rolling Thunder, a sustained bombing campaign against North Vietnam intended to interdict transportation routes and stop the spread of communism. Youth Volunteer brigades were in charge of decommissioning unexploded bombs to keep the truck convoys moving south. They detonated the explosives at close range without the benefit of remote controls. They moved earth with shovels and wheelbarrows to fill the bomb craters. They transported ammunition between Trail stations and they served in the People’s Army’s anti-air defense units posted along the Trail.
Nguyễn Thị Kim Huế remembered the April 1966 bombing when more than half her team perished. The U.S. Strategic Air Command B-52 bombers dropped some 600 tons of 500 and 750-pound bombs during the first strike alone, “the largest bombing operation since World War II.”
“We had to rebuild the road every day because there were so many bombs… The worst B-52 attacks were in 1966. In my platoon, out of sixteen, ten were killed,” she said.