Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (21 page)

With political objectivity Peter Arnett, a New Zealander, told me that it was common knowledge among the Saigon press corps that the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese Army rarely com mitted rape. "The VC used terror as a daily weapon," he said bluntly. "They would line up and behead the leaders of a village as a matter of course, but rape was not part of their system of punish ment. They were prohibited from looting, stealing food or rape, and we were always surprised when they did it. We heard very little of VC rape."

The Vietcong prohibition against rape went further than moral suasion. American military intelligence routinely made avail able to reporters captured documents taken from dead Vietcong in the field. Among these documents Arnett had several times seen papers referring to Vietcong soldiers who were reprimanded, sent to the rear or even shot for rape. "The VC would publicize an execution for rape," he said. "Rape was a serious crime for them. It was considered a serious political blunder to rape and loot.
It
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wasn't done. At the same time they made women who were raped by the other side into heroines, examples of enemy atrocity."*

Arnett's analysis of why the Vietcong didn't rape went beyond their efficient system of reprimands. He was aware that Vietcong women played a major role in military operations and that the presence of women fighting as equals among their men acted against the sexual humiliation or mistreatment of other women, and he understood that a guerrilla force depends for its survival upon the good will of the people, men and women alike. He was also mindful of what he called the Vietcong's "sense of dedica tion" to their revolutionary mission. To elaborate on this point he employed an interesting comparison. "I knew American officers," he said, "who did not use the brothels during all the time they were in Vietnam. These men were so involved with their dedica tion to winning the war that they literally did not need sex, while it was a different story, of course, for the American enlisted men. I think the Vietcong could control their lust from a similar sense of dedication."

The AP correspondent and I differed strongly during our sev eral interviews over whether "lust" or a powerful male need for sex had anything to do with the incidence of wartime rape, or, for that matter, the use of Army brothels, and I am at great pains to quote him
fairly,
although I disagree with this part of his analysis. Ob servers in Vietnam, and 99 and 9/ ioths of them were men, were usually confounded by the lack of Vietcong rape ( if they thought about it at all ) .
t
The experience of Kate Webb, United Press

*
The concept that a revolutionary guerrilla army of peasants does not rape was laid down with simple eloquence in 1928 by the great Chinese general Chu Teh, whose motto was "Take not even a needle or thread from the people." Chu Teh's rules, a far cry from the practices of his enemy, the Kuomintang, included, "return all straw on which you sleep before leaving a house; speak courteously to the people and help them whenever possible; return all borrowed articles; pay for everything damaged; be honest in all business transactions; be sanitary-dig latrines a safe distance from homes and fill them up with earth before leaving; never molest women; do not mis treat prisoners."

t
CBS correspondent Dan Rather, who was assigned to Vietnam in i965-1966, told me that he, for one, remained unaware of any political distinctions in rape habits during his one-year tour. "Rape was not something that was foremost in my mind when I talked to people," Rather admitted. "My aver age story was shooting, shelling and bombing. The pattern was to jump on a helicopter, shoot a story very quickly and ship the film back to Saigon. I

lnternational's bureau chief in Cambodia, bears this out. Webb, like Arnett a New Zealander, was captured and kept prisoner by the Vietcong for twenty-three days. Months af ter her release she said, "Everybody wants to know if I was raped. And when I tell them no, most people seem to be disappointed. They don't under stand the Vietnamese code of very strict behavior."

An American, Dr. Marjorie Nelson, who worked in a medical rehabilitation center for Vietnamese civilians from 1967 to 1969 and was captured along with another American woman by Viet cong in Hue during the Tet offensive, also needed to protest her chastity af ter her release. She said, "This is a question that I know comes up in the minds of, well, certainly of any GI who's been in Vietnam, and many other people. Certainly this thing could have occurred, and I think on a couple of occasions we were simply lucky that it didn't. However, once we were in the camp it was quite clear that the cadre also were concerned about this, and they made sure that our privacy was respected."

And so we come to the Americans-where first we must look at institutionalized prostitution, for as the American presence in Vietnam multiplied, the unspoken military theory of women's bodies as not only a reward of war but as a necessary provision like soda pop and ice cream, to keep our boys healthy and happy, turned into routine practice. And if monetary access to women's bodies did not promote an ideology of rape in Vietnam, neither did it thwart it.

General George S. Patton, who had been so pragmatic about expectations of rape, is credited with the desire to experiment with military brothels during his World War II command, an idea he abandoned when he became convinced that the uproar they would create among wives and mothers back in the States might hurt the

never did a rape story, and if you had been doing my job I don't think you would have, either. Everywhere you looked there was a horror and a brutality. Rape may have been mentioned to me several dozen times while I was in Viet nam. When you see women crying, and you see that universal look of bitter ness and anger, you find out about rape. My own limited experience led me to conclude that everybody who passed through a village did it-steal a chicken and grab a quick piece of ass, that sort of thing. Based on my own experience I would have to say that the Americans and the Korean troops were probably the worst-they had the least to lose-but I wouldn't build any case for the other side's superior morality. Vietnam was a loosely organized gang war, and the women caught it from all sides."

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war effort. Patton did not have his way in World War II but his ghost must have approved of Vietnam.

The tradition of military brothels had been established in Vietnam long before the American presence. The late Bernard Fall, who wrote so vividly of the war in its early years, detailed with enthusiasm the French Army's particular contribution to the use of women in war-the mobile field brothel, or
Bordel
Mobile de Campagne, stocked with girls imported from Algeria. "The B.M.C.'s would travel with units in the combat zones," Fall wrote, "and in general, the French Army in lnpochina kept them pretty much out of sight of American newsmen and officials. 'You can just imagine the howl if some blabbermouth comes out with a statement to the effect that American funds are used to maintain bordellos for the French Army,' said one colonel." A mobile field brothel, Fall reported, was inside the famous fortress of Dien bienphu when the French surrendered.

By the time the Americans had fully replaced the French in Indochina the war had sufficiently disrupted South Vietnamese society to a point where it was no longer necessary to import foreign women for the purpose of military prostitution. I do not mean to imply that prostitution was unknown in Vietnam before the long war. As Peter Arnett told me, "Prostitution was a time honored. tradition. Certain heads of families would not think twice before routinely selling their daughters if they needed the money." But as the long war progressed, prostitution ii:icreasingly became the only viable economic solution for thousands of South Viet namese women. By
1966
the problem had reached such propor tions that a Committee for the Defense of the Vietnamese Woman's Human Dignity and Rights was organized in Saigon by several hundred women educators, writers and social workers, ac cording to an AP dispatch. The wire service reported that "bitter words" were expressed at the first meeting. "The miserable condi tions of war have forced our people to sell everything-their wives, children, relatives and friends-for the American dollar," a woman educator was quoted. The Committee for the Defense of the Vietnamese Woman, overwhelmed by the reality of the Vietnam war, was never heard from again.

The American military got into the prostitutiop business by degrees, an escalation process linked to the escalation of the war. Underlying the escalation was the assumption that men at war