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This page intentionally left blank
 Beyond Combat
Women and Gender in the Vietnam War Era

Beyond Combat: Women and Gender in the Vietnam War Era inves-
tigates how the Vietnam War both reinforced and challenged the gen-
der roles that were key components of American Cold War ideology.
Although popular memory of the Vietnam War centers on the “combat
moment,” refocusing attention onto women and gender paints a more
complex and accurate picture of the war’s far-reaching impact beyond
the battlefields. Encounters between Americans and Vietnamese were
shaped by a cluster of intertwined images used to make sense of and
justify American intervention and use of force in Vietnam. These images
included the girl next door, a wholesome reminder of why the United
States was committed to defeating communism; the treacherous and
mysterious “dragon lady,” who served as a metaphor for Vietnamese
women and South Vietnam; the John Wayne figure, entrusted with
the duty of protecting civilization from savagery; and the gentle war-
rior, whose humanitarian efforts were intended to win the favor of the
South Vietnamese. Heather Marie Stur also examines the ways in which
ideas about masculinity shaped the American GI experience in Vietnam,
and ultimately, how some American men and women returned from
Vietnam to challenge home-front gender norms.

Heather Marie Stur is an Assistant Professor of history at the Univer-

sity of Southern Mississippi. Dr. Stur has won fellowships from the
Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the Gerald R.
Ford Foundation, the Doris G. Quinn Foundation, the Marine Corps
Heritage Foundation, the University of Wisconsin, and Marquette Uni-
versity. She has published in several journals and collections, including
The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics, and Culture; America and
the Vietnam War: Re-examining the Culture and History of a Genera-
tion; Highway 61 Revisited: Bob Dylan from Minnesota to the World;
Soul Soldiers: African Americans and the Vietnam Era; and Milwaukee
History.
 Beyond Combat
Women and Gender in the Vietnam War Era

HEATHER MARIE STUR

University of Southern Mississippi
 cambridge university press
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town,
Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Tokyo, Mexico City
Cambridge University Press
32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, ny 10013-2473, usa
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521127417


C Heather Marie Stur 2011

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2011

Printed in the United States of America

A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data

Stur, Heather Marie, 1975–
Beyond combat : women and gender in the Vietnam War era / Heather Marie Stur.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-521-76275-5 (hardback) – isbn 978-0-521-12741-7 (pbk.)
1. Vietnam War, 1961–1975 – Women. 2. Vietnam War, 1961–1975 – Participation,
Female. 3. Vietnam War, 1961–1975 – Social aspects. 4. Women – United States –
History – 20th century. 5. Women – Vietnam – History – 20th century.
6. Sex role – United States – History – 20th century. 7. Sex role – Vietnam – History –
20th century. 8. Masculinity – United States – History – 20th century. 9. Masculinity –
Vietnam – History – 20th century. I. Title.
ds559.8.w6s78 2011
959.704 3082–dc22 2011015050

isbn 978-0-521-76275-5 Hardback

isbn 978-0-521-12741-7 Paperback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls
for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not
guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
 To Jay, who provides the music.
And to Angus, who makes us want to dance.
 Contents

Acknowledgments page ix

Introduction 1
1 Vietnamese Women in the American Mind: Gender, Race,
and the Vietnam War 17
2 “She Could Be the Girl Next Door”: The Red Cross SRAO
in Vietnam 64
3 “We Weren’t Called Soldiers, We Were Called Ladies”:
WACs and Nurses in Vietnam 105
4 Gender and America’s “Faces of Domination” in Vietnam 142
5 Liberating Men and Women: Antiwar GIs Speak Out
against the Warrior Myth 183
Conclusion: “You’ve Come a Long Way . . . Maybe”:
Gender after Vietnam 215

Bibliography 243
Index 259

vii
 Acknowledgments

At the end of my dissertation defense, one of my committee members,

Alfred W. McCoy, remarked that I seemed to have had a lot of fun in
graduate school. Puzzled, I must have looked at him inquiringly because
he continued by saying he had read my acknowledgments, in which I had
mentioned Friday Night Music Club, the 5260 crew, and other groups of
friends and family members who had clearly made my time in graduate
school bearable, if not a downright blast. Professor McCoy’s comments
reminded me then – and still do now – that the journey of writing a
book, like anything in life, is best made with fellow travelers who provide
guidance, encouragement, comfort, love, and, yes, fun, along the way.
Thanking them here is just a small gesture compared to how much my
fellow travelers have enhanced my life and this book.
The project began as a dissertation, and my committee at the University
of Wisconsin (UW) provided invaluable advice and support when it was
in its earliest stages. I thank my adviser, Brenda Gayle Plummer, as well
as Tracy Curtis, Susan Johnson, Alfred McCoy, and Craig Werner for
helping me clarify my vision and write better. I also thank Steve Stern and
Jeremi Suri, who offered help and encouragement at various points during
my time at UW. The Doris G. Quinn Foundation, the Marine Corps
Heritage Foundation, the University of Wisconsin Center for Southeast
Asian Studies, and the University of Wisconsin Department of History
provided me with generous fellowships and grants that allowed me to
complete my studies and dissertation in a timely manner, and I thank those
organizations for their support. As I worked to transform the project from
a dissertation to a book, I was fortunate to receive a William Appleman
Williams Junior Faculty Research Grant from the Society for Historians
ix
x Acknowledgments

of American Foreign Relations, a Gerald R. Ford Foundation Research

Travel Grant, and a research grant from the Committee on Services and
Resources for Women at the University of Southern Mississippi. I am very
grateful to these organizations for their generous financial support.
No dollar amount can match the value of the archivists and profes-
sional colleagues who have helped me along the way. I have had the
pleasure of meeting and working with archivists who have made the act
of research less solitary and more enjoyable. I thank Richard Boylan at the
National Archives in College Park, Maryland; Stacy Davis and William
McNitt at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum; and
Steven Fisher at the University of Denver Penrose Library Special Collec-
tions. The Vietnam Archive at Texas Tech University is an outstanding
resource for those of us who study the Vietnam War, and I greatly appre-
ciate the kindness and generosity that Laura Calkins, Ty Lovelady, and
Steve Maxner showed me when I did research there. Amy K. Mondt was
especially helpful in walking me through the process of obtaining permis-
sion to use images from the Vietnam Archive. At the Wisconsin Historical
Society (WHS), James Danky was enthusiastic and helpful when I was
just beginning my research, and the collection of GI antiwar newspa-
pers housed at WHS led me to the ideas that became the foundation for
this book. I am also grateful to the archivists who photocopied many
pages for me from the Marguerite Higgins Papers at the Syracuse Univer-
sity Library Special Collections. It is good to have friends in high places,
and Sondra Zaharias, a fellow Marquette class of 1998 graduate now
employed at Getty Images, helped me get the rights to publish an image
of Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu, one of my earliest inspirations for this book.
Without that photograph, the book would just not feel complete to me.
As I tested my ideas and research at conferences, I received helpful and
encouraging feedback from fellow participants at the annual meetings of
the Society for Military History and the Organization of American His-
torians, as well as at Texas Tech’s Vietnam Symposium and the War and
American Identity Conference at University College Dublin. I especially
thank Justin Hart, Steve Maxner, David Ryan, and Janet Valentine for
their comments on my work.
Michael Foley saw promise in this project when it still seemed like a
rough draft to me, and I am eternally grateful to him for pushing me
to do my best work and for believing in its value. In his capacity as co-
editor of The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics, and Culture, Mike
reached out to me, a new scholar, with respect and enthusiasm, and he
has been a steadfast supporter ever since. His work on draft resistance
 Acknowledgments xi

during the Vietnam War is a model of scholarship, and through his peace
activism, he lives the ideals that he teaches. Mike is also a dad, and our e-
mail conversations have often turned to the joys and challenges of raising
young children while trying to write books.
Closer to home, I am inspired and sustained daily by my amazing
colleagues in the History Department at the University of Southern Mis-
sissippi. Not only am I surrounded by brilliant scholars and innovative
teachers, but there is laughter in our hallways, as well as good music in the
main office thanks to Shelia Smith, our extraordinary office administra-
tor who knows the inner workings of the university better than anyone.
For her patience and support, I owe Shelia way more thanks than I can
express here. I am especially thankful to my friends in the Center for
the Study of War and Society: Susannah Ural, Andrew Wiest, and Kyle
Zelner, and I owe a deep debt of gratitude to my department chair, Phyllis
Jestice, who somehow found time in her jam-packed schedule to read my
entire manuscript and offer detailed comments that seemed to come from
a specialist in modern U.S. history even though she is a medievalist. Phyl-
lis is a visionary department chair, committed to cultivating a faculty of
productive, successful, and happy scholar-teachers, and she makes special
efforts to help junior faculty achieve their professional goals. I am one of
the lucky recipients of her support. I also thank Michael Neiberg, now of
the U.S. Army War College, who was my faculty mentor during my first
year at Southern Miss. His guidance and encouragement were crucial as I
learned the ropes of being a history professor, both at the university and
in the profession at large.
At Cambridge University Press, I am grateful to my editor, Eric Cra-
han, who saw something worthwhile in this project and who patiently
guided me through the publishing process. A constant advocate for me,
Eric helped me focus the project and remained committed to helping
me achieve its full potential. His assistant, Abigail Zorbaugh, and Paul
Smolenski, senior production controller, worked hard to prepare the
manuscript for publication, and I thank them for their support. I also
thank senior project manager Peggy Rote and the copy editors at Aptara,
Inc., for seeing the manuscript through the final stages of production.
The two anonymous readers who commented on the manuscript offered
wise insights and thoughtful suggestions that strengthened the book
immensely. I am extremely grateful to the readers for the time they took
with my work.
This book would not have been possible without the women and men
who generously shared with me the stories of their service in Vietnam
xii Acknowledgments

and after. I am indebted to Lynda Alexander, Doris “Lucki” Allen, Joan

Barco, Doug Bradley, Nancy Calcese, Colleen Campbell, Carol Chapman,
Jeanne Christie, Bill Davis, Judy Davis, Joyce Denke, Debra Drummond,
Marj Dutilly, Shirley Fleischauer, Susan Franklin, Marj Graves, Dorris
Heaston, Shirley Hines, Kathleen Huckabay, Kay Johnson, Rene John-
son, Ann Kelsey, Nancy Keough, Martha Maron, Linda McClenahan,
Lola McGourty, Susan McLean, Jim Mifflin, Janie Miller, Eileen O’Neill,
Sandra Pang, Dorothy Patterson, Nora Preston, Linda Pugsley, Paula
Quindlen, Mary Robeck, Jim Roseberry, Anna Rybat, Emily Strange,
Mike Subkoviak, Elton Tylenda, Nancy Warner, J. Holley Watts, Linda
Wilson, Patty Wooldridge, and Jennifer Young for their openness and
honesty. My friend, Doug Bradley, has been especially helpful and inci-
sive. I hope this book does justice to their experiences.
My friends are blessings that I do not give thanks for nearly enough.
A special shout-out goes to Story Matkin-Rawn and Tyina Steptoe,
dear friends and dissertation writing group members. The feedback and
encouragement they gave me during our weekly meetings at Angelic Brew-
ery are evident in this book, and I raise a pint of Leinie’s Summer Shandy
to them. I love that we have continued on our academic journey together,
now as professors, and though our meetings are much less frequent these
days, I know there is some collaborating in store that is going to be awe-
some. I absolutely miss Friday Night Music Club, especially founding
members Charles Hughes, Alexander Shashko, and Craig Werner . . . we
may never completely agree about rock-n-roll, but man, the debates were
so much fun. I thank Matt Blanton, Andrew Case, Dave Gilbert, Brenna
Greer, Holly McGee, Jennie Miller, Leah Mirakhor, Will Shannon, Maia
Surdam, Zoe Van Orsdol, Vanessa Walker, and Stephanie Westcott for
their friendship during graduate school and since. Above all, I thank my
old friends who knew me long before I was a historian, and whose con-
stant love and support has kept me grounded and joyful. Kati Kreslins,
Brigid Miller, Becky Rocker, Mark Shields, and Chris Toma are truly
some of the most important people in my life, and their loyal friendship
is priceless.
The enthusiasm of my wonderful family sustained me through the long
process of writing this book. I owe a lifetime of love and thanks to my
parents, Jeffrey and Michaline Stur, whose belief in me has never faltered,
and who have supported me unconditionally in every possible way. My
siblings, Erica Burg, Dave Burg, and Jeff Stur; and my goddaughter,
Charlotte “Chachi” Burg, are constant sources of joy in my life, and
I love them dearly. Much love and thanks to Grandma and Grandpa
 Acknowledgments xiii

Nalewski; Aunt Kathy Nalewski; Aunt Patti and Uncle Eddy Centkowski;
Aunt Judith Rutovic; Aunt Tina and Uncle Rich Bronisz; Aunt Nina
and Uncle Eric Stur; April Richwalski; Tricia Bronisz; Brent Bradford;
BreAnne, Bob, and Mihaly Csernak; Mathew Richwalski; and Jonathan
Bronisz. I also thank my in-laws, the Campbells and the Van Orsdols,
for their love and support. My Grandma and Grandpa Stur did not live
to see the completion of this project, but they were two of my biggest
cheerleaders, and I love and miss them terribly. I know they are watching
over me and beaming with pride.
Craig Werner has already been mentioned several times in these
acknowledgments, and that is a testament to how important he is to
me. Ever since we met at Borders in Madison, Wisconsin, one cold morn-
ing years ago and bonded over our shared love of Springsteen’s “Incident
on 57th Street,” Craig has been a devoted mentor and a steadfast friend.
He has believed in me when my own faith has faltered, and he pushes
me to think more deeply, write more confidently, trust my instincts, and
stay true to my convictions. For those reasons and more, Craig’s imprint
is all over this book. He has read every word many times and provided
countless wise comments, graceful critiques, and empathetic pep talks as
the project took shape and evolved over time. I am a better scholar, a
better writer, and a better teacher because of Craig, and I hope that I can
at least begin to repay him by channeling his energy when I mentor my
own students. Muchas gracias, mi amigo.
Two people have brought the ultimate joy and purpose to my life.
Jay Van Orsdol is my artist and my guitar man, and on more than one
occasion he has turned our little house in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, into
a juke joint. He is a patient problem-solver and an affectionate father,
and he makes a mean red beans and rice. His kind-hearted smile has
never stopped melting my heart. Angus “Cheeky Boy” Van Orsdol loves
everything about this life (including the spicy red beans and rice), and he
lets us know that with his big belly laugh and his happy dance. He is my
sweet baby boy, and I hope he grows up to be just like his daddy. For the
life that we have created, and for all that is yet to come, I dedicate this
book to my guys with deepest love.
 Introduction

Lily Lee Adams served as an Army nurse in Vietnam from 1969 to 1970
at the 12th Evacuation Hospital in Cu Chi. She was a twenty-year-old
American girl, a New Yorker, the daughter of an Italian mother and a
Chinese father. John F. Kennedy’s call to young people – “Ask not what
your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country” –
had inspired her to join the military. In many ways, Adams’s story was
typical of young Americans who volunteered for the armed services in the
1960s, but her Asian heritage resulted in some telling differences. Some
of the U.S. servicemen she encountered in Vietnam assumed that Adams
was a prostitute when she was not wearing her nurse’s uniform. “When
I was in civilian clothes and walking around with a guy, the other guys
would just assume I was a whore,” Adams said. “The Army used to truck
in whores all the time.” She learned to keep her military identification
with her at all times. “It really hurt inside that I had just spent twelve
hours treating their buddies, and they thought I was just some Vietnamese
whore,” Adams said. When GIs solicited her for sex, she would think,
“You guys don’t even know that if you came into my hospital I’d be
taking care of you, giving you everything I have just to keep you alive.”
Even the Vietnamese guards at the post exchange (PX) where Adams
was stationed assumed she was a prostitute and demanded her ID while
waving other military staff through. Adams remembered a nurse from
the Philippines who left Vietnam after a few months of service because of
similar treatment. “She was not used to the sexual harassment and racial
discrimination, and she asked me how I handled it,” Adams said. “I told

1
2 Beyond Combat

her I got used to it. I grew up with discrimination and learned how to deal
with it.”1
The troops’ responses to Adams were grounded in a set of contradic-
tory assumptions and images – passed down in basic training, popular
culture, political speeches, and GI folklore – that assigned ideologically
charged meanings to Asian and American women. Focusing on the ten-
sion between these images and the lived experiences of men and women
in (and after) Vietnam, Beyond Combat: Women and Gender in the Viet-
nam War Era investigates the conflict, not just as a military maneuver,
but also as a complex web of personal encounters between Americans and
Vietnamese that took place in the hothouse environment of war. Although
popular memory of the Vietnam War centers on the “combat moment,”
refocusing attention onto women and gender paints a more complex –
and, ultimately, more accurate – picture of the war’s far-reaching impact
beyond the battlefields. A substantial majority of interactions between
American men and various groups of women, whether American or Viet-
namese, took place not in combat situations, but on bases in Long Binh
and Qui Nhon, in brothels in An Khe and Cam Ranh Bay, and along
the boulevards of cities such as Saigon and Da Nang. These encoun-
ters, which were grounded in the reality of American power and domi-
nance even when individual GIs attempted to soften that reality through
humanitarian outreach, were shaped by a cluster of intertwined images
that Americans used to make sense of and justify intervention and use of
force in Vietnam: the girl next door, a wholesome reminder of why the
United States was committed to fighting communism; the dragon lady,
at once treacherous and mysterious, a metaphor for both Vietnamese
women and South Vietnam; the “John Wayne” figure protecting civi-
lization against savagery; and the gentle warrior, whose humanitarian
efforts were intended to win the favor of the South Vietnamese. A careful
examination of these images reveals the ways in which home-front culture
influenced American policymaking and propaganda regarding Vietnam,
and how the actual lived experiences of the men and women on the
ground both enforced and challenged the gender ideology deployed in
military and diplomatic rhetoric.

1 Victor Marina, “Fighting for your country,” Rice, April 1988, 37; “‘We saved lives
in Vietnam,’ recalls Adams. But racism, Agent Orange, left their scars.” Asian Week,
February 22, 1985, Lily Adams Collection, University of Denver Penrose Library, Box 1,
Folder “Lily Adams.” See also Kathryn Marshall, In the Combat Zone: An Oral History
of American Women in Vietnam (Boston: Little, Brown, 1987), 222.
 Introduction 3

Even as they were being challenged on the home front, American Cold
War ideas about manhood and womanhood shaped relations between
U.S. military bases and surrounding Vietnamese communities; they were
invoked to mobilize citizens for the war effort and played a role in human-
itarian endeavors by U.S. troops in Vietnam. At times, South Vietnamese
women were cast as “damsels in distress,” representatives of a nascent
democracy – a Southeast Asian mirror of American Cold War norms –
in need of protection from Communist despoilers. At other times, Amer-
icans viewed Vietnamese women with suspicion, as new incarnations of
the “dragon ladies” of the World War II era or, as Adams’s experience
demonstrates, sex objects whose purpose was to satiate the carnal desires
of American troops.
In contrast to the dragon lady and the sex object, both of whom rep-
resented real and metaphorical threats to U.S. troops, the American “girl
next door” – white, middle class, and pure – symbolized the way of life
the United States had committed itself to defending against communism
and a host of associated fears, including homosexuality, racial strife,
the collapse of the nuclear family, and the disintegration of capitalist
prosperity.2 Faced with these anxieties, American women who ventured
to Vietnam were expected to fulfill the conventional women’s roles of
caregivers, mothers, and virginal girlfriends, even as their concrete expe-
riences told a different story. The images were pervasive, surfacing in U.S.
policymakers’ conversations, informational pamphlets published by the
State and Defense departments, Army operations manuals, newspapers
and magazines published for servicemen, and hundreds of popular songs,
movies, and television shows. Combining the currents running through
these images, Adams’s experience highlights the misunderstandings they
caused when applied to actual women. As an American woman in nurse’s
attire, she had an accepted, if marginal, role in a war zone, but her Chinese
ethnicity activated the stereotypes that led some troops, both American
and Vietnamese, to conclude that she was more likely a dragon lady than
a girl next door.
The confusion surrounding women’s roles in Vietnam played out in
complicated ways in the experiences of male GIs as well. Like American
and Vietnamese women, U.S. servicemen found themselves in situations
that had been shaped by a set of gendered assumptions, articulated with

2 Elaine Tyler May explores the links between home front gender ideology and Cold War
containment in Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York:
Basic Books, 1999).
4 Beyond Combat

varying degrees of clarity and awareness, about America’s place in the

world. In U.S. popular culture, the girl next door’s archetypal defender
was John Wayne, who, as Richard Slotkin writes, symbolized the “per-
fection of soldierly masculinity” in the 1960s.3 The John Wayne image,
transmitted through generic cowboy and soldier characters in movies and
on TV, as well as by Wayne himself, represented U.S. martial prowess
along with a broader collection of American virtues, including patrio-
tism, courage, Christian faith, and unremitting dedication to protecting
the civilization embodied in the girl next door. Growing up in a milita-
rized culture predicated on defending the American way of life, many of
the young men who went to Vietnam, as Andrew Huebner has observed,
considered John Wayne the embodiment of their “martial dreams.”4 Born
during World War II and coming of age during the nebulous, nearly fifty-
years-long event called the Cold War, they witnessed empires collapse
and new nations emerge in the initial phases of the postcolonial strug-
gle, which would define the second half of the twentieth century. The
generation of American boys whose fathers had fought against Germany
and Japan was encouraged to make sense of these circumstances not
by looking ahead, but by looking back, beginning with their childhood
games, playing cowboys and Indians and reenacting World War II.5 As
they approached and entered their teenage years, they listened to Pres-
ident John F. Kennedy’s rhetoric about fighting tyranny and spreading
democracy throughout the decolonizing world.6
When put into action in Vietnam, this dual mission – to battle com-
munist insurgency while winning hearts and minds with modernization
projects and humanitarian aid – gave rise to a variation on the John
Wayne theme: the “gentle warrior.” As depicted in both military and civil-
ian media, the gentle warrior was to be the bearer of U.S. benevolence,

3 Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century

America (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 489–533.
4 Andrew J. Huebner, The Warrior Image: Soldiers in American Culture from the Second
World War to the Vietnam Era (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press,
2008), 250.
5 Tom Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning
of a Generation (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 69–89.
6 For a discussion of the Kennedy administration’s modernization theories, see Michael
E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building”
in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Nils
Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Balti-
more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).
 Introduction 5

similar to organizations such as the Peace Corps and the U.S. Agency
for International Development. Providing health care to Vietnamese fam-
ilies, building schools, and sponsoring orphanages, gentle warriors – a
term used in The Observer, the official newspaper for the U.S. Mili-
tary Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) – represented an alternative
to communist brutality as they deployed what Joseph Nye calls “soft
power.”7 The dragon lady, the girl next door, John Wayne, and the
gentle warrior reflected gendered, ultimately patriarchal, beliefs about
national security and America’s duty to weaker peoples and nations.
The images illustrate how popular home-front beliefs about men’s and
women’s appropriate roles were deployed in U.S. policies toward Viet-
nam, reflecting what Americans thought about themselves and about the
U.S. position in the world. Like the depictions of women, though, the
images of men circulating through military rhetoric and the mass media
reflected irreconcilable tensions, not just in the images, but in the U.S.
mission itself. Vietnamese men were notably absent from the Ameri-
can wartime imagery, and although some GIs acknowledged the martial
fortitude of their enemies in the National Liberation Front and North
Vietnamese Army, their allies in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam
(ARVN) were rarely depicted in soldier folklore or home-front popular
culture.8
The policies of Kennedy and his successor, Lyndon Johnson, were
grounded in a pervasive and powerful gender ideology, which was often
implied rather than explicit, in which John Wayne and the girl next
door represented American power and civilization. These images would
shape the experiences of the Americans who served in Vietnam, as well
as the policies that sent them there. As Susan Jeffords writes in The
Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War, a book
that profoundly influenced my work, the Vietnam War consisted not
just of battlefields, but also “fields of gender,” in which “enemies are
depicted as feminine, wives and mothers and girl friends are justifications
for fighting, and vocabularies are sexually motivated.”9 On these fields
of gender, the irresolvable tensions in American ideology became clear.

7 Joseph Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (Cambridge, MA: Public
Affairs, 2004).
8 On ARVN, see Andrew Wiest, Vietnam’s Forgotten Army: Heroism and Betrayal in the
ARVN (New York: New York University Press, 2007).
9 Susan Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (Bloom-
ington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989), xi.
6 Beyond Combat

Vietnamese women were at once damsels in need of rescue and dragon

ladies who must be slain, the American girl next door represented an ideal
of white femininity that was under fire from the women’s and civil rights
movements, and the gentle warrior attempted to rebuild that which his
comrades destroyed in combat, exposing the contradictory nature of soft
power and ultimately failing to mask the war’s devastating effects. For
some individual U.S. servicemen, the time they spent teaching English to
Vietnamese students or providing medical care to remote villages helped
them feel human and offered a sense of purpose in what otherwise seemed
to be a pointless war. In the larger context of U.S. policies, massive
bombing, misguided operations, and atrocities negated much of the good
that some GIs tried to do.
Juxtaposed with the realities of day-to-day experiences in Vietnam,
the images together point to a fundamental contradiction in the Ameri-
can mission, which has been identified in James Gibson’s The Perfect War:
Technowar in Vietnam and Christian Appy’s Working-Class War: Amer-
ican Combat Soldiers and Vietnam. Even as the United States presented
itself as a benevolent entity protecting the American way of life from
the insidious spread of communism and rescuing the Vietnamese from
communist oppression, U.S. policies and actions damaged the infrastruc-
ture, economic system, and family structures that military humanitarian
projects attempted to fix. Grounded in gendered and racialized beliefs
about American power, the notion that the United States had to destroy
Vietnam to save it – an idea based on a statement a U.S. Army major
allegedly made to journalist Peter Arnett after a battle in the city of
Ben Tre – fundamentally undermined official rhetoric about democracy
building.10
Drawing on oral histories and extensive interviews, as well as foreign
policy documents, military publications, civilian newspapers and maga-
zines, and the literature of GIs and veterans, Beyond Combat pays spe-
cial attention to the experiences of women, primarily American but also
some Vietnamese, who until recently have remained relatively absent from
Vietnam War scholarship. As psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton wrote regard-
ing his work with Vietnam veterans, although war primarily is about
“male obligation and male glory,” women – in symbol and in reality –
are crucial to it, used to confirm the manhood of soldiers and positioned

10 James Gibson, The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam (New York: Atlantic Monthly
Press, 1986), 226; Christian Appy, Working Class War: American Combat Soldiers and
Vietnam (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 207–8.
 Introduction 7

either as sources of “chivalric inspiration” or dehumanized justifications

for brutality.11 Vietnam was the descendant of a legacy of wars in which
women were used to build troop morale and inspire political obligation
among U.S. troops, as works by Ann Pfau, Sonya Michel, and Robert
Westbrook illustrate.12 Taking place at a historical moment when gen-
der roles were undergoing challenges and changes on the home front,
the Vietnam War differed from previous wars because the tensions and
contradictions that had previously been veiled were exposed in a much
clearer way.
Just as there was no typical GI in a war in which men were clerks, bak-
ers, dog handlers, and journalists as well as combat soldiers, there was no
generic story of the American woman in Vietnam. We can only estimate
the numbers of women who served in the military in Vietnam – although
the Defense Department did not keep accurate records on women, it has
calculated that approximately 7,500 women served in Vietnam; the Vet-
erans Administration has set the number at 11,000. More than 80 percent
were nurses, most from the Army Nurse Corps. Among those who were
not nurses, about 700 women were members of the Women’s Army Corps
(WAC), and much smaller numbers served in the Navy, Air Force, and
Marines.13 Pinning down the numbers of civilian women who worked in
Vietnam is even more difficult; estimates have gone as high as 55,000.14
Kathryn Marshall, a journalist who compiled an oral history anthology
based on interviews with American military and civilian women who

11 Robert Jay Lifton, Home from the War: Learning from Vietnam Veterans (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1992), 245.
12 Ann Pfau, Miss Yourlovin: GIs, Gender, and Domesticity during World War II (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2008), via Gutenberg-e, www.gutenberg-e.org/pfau/;
Sonya Michel, “American Women and the Discourse of the Democratic Family in World
War II,” in Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, ed. by Margaret
Randolph Higonnet, et al (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 154–67;
Robert Westbrook, “‘I Want a Girl, Just Like the Girl That Married Henry James’:
American Women and the Problem of Political Obligation in World War II,” in American
Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 4 (December 1990), 587–614.
13 Another 500 women served in the Air Force during the Vietnam War, but most of them
were stationed in the Pacific and other parts of Southeast Asia, not in Vietnam. Fewer
than thirty women Marines served in Vietnam. In addition to nurses, nine women Navy
officers served tours of duty in Vietnam. See Marshall, 4; Ron Steinman, Women in
Vietnam (New York: TV Books, 2000), 18–20; Susan H. Godson, Serving Proudly: A
History of Women in the U.S. Navy (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2001), 213;
Col. Mary V. Stremlow, A History of the Women Marines, 1946–1977 (Washington,
DC: History and Museums Division Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps, 1986), 87.
14 Marshall, 4; Milton J. Bates, The Wars We Took to Vietnam: Cultural Conflict and
Storytelling (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), 163.
8 Beyond Combat

served in Vietnam, notes that the lack of official records “both serves as a
reminder of government mishandling of information during the Vietnam
War and points to a more general belief that war is men’s business.”15
Even though the number of American women who served was minuscule
compared with the number of men, ideas about women and gender
were, in fact, very present in foreign policy documents, policymakers’
conversations, soldier folklore, and the rhetoric of basic training.
Although a few women went to Vietnam before the United States com-
mitted combat troops, the majority of American women who served in
Vietnam in either military or civilian capacities arrived between 1965,
the year of the first deployment of ground troops, and 1973, when the
last U.S. combat troops departed. Women were exempt from the draft,
and not all women who joined the armed services during the era wanted
an assignment to Vietnam. When it came down to personnel needs, some
who went did so only because they had received orders. In contrast,
civilian women by and large chose to go to Vietnam, often because they
desired to help the troops. Whether military or civilian, those who picked
Vietnam went for a variety of reasons that depended on factors such as
race, class, and religion. The Army Nurse Corps offered money for col-
lege and career opportunities that some female recruits viewed as a move
toward independence. Some women thought service in Vietnam sounded
like an adventure, with the chance to travel to an exotic locale while
avoiding or delaying marriage and family life. Others felt guilty that con-
scription forced men to serve, and they wanted to do their part to help.
Another group was answering President Kennedy’s call to young Amer-
icans to go out into the world as missionaries of democracy. Whatever
their motivations or backgrounds, all the American women who served in
Vietnam had to deal with the tensions that came to a head with particular
clarity for Lily Lee Adams.
Beyond Combat contributes to the growing body of scholarly liter-
ature on American women and the Vietnam War inspired by the oral
histories compiled by Keith Walker, Ron Steinman, Kathryn Marshall,
Olga Gruhzit-Hoyt, and Elizabeth Norman.16 Kara Dixon Vuic’s Officer,
Nurse, Woman: The Army Nurse Corps in the Vietnam War examines

15 Marshall, 4.
16 Women’s oral history collections include Keith Walker, A Piece of My Heart: The Stories
of Twenty-Six American Women Who Served in Vietnam (New York: Ballantine Books,
1985); Kathryn Marshall, In the Combat Zone; Elizabeth Norman, Women at War:
The Story of Fifty Military Nurses Who Served in Vietnam (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1990); Olga Gruhzit-Hoyt, A Time Remembered: American Women
 Introduction 9

the Army Nurse Corps’ efforts to recruit both female and male nurses
amid increasing challenges to traditional gender roles. Vuic argues con-
vincingly that even though the Army had to respond to gender changes to
meet its wartime personnel needs, it ultimately did not reject the gendered
structure in which men were fighters and women were caregivers.17 Like
Vuic’s book and the aforementioned oral history collections, my work
approaches the subjects of women and gender in the Vietnam War from
American perspectives. Although I provide a glimpse of the war’s impact
on Vietnamese women through those viewpoints, I look forward to the
continued work of scholars of Vietnamese history, some of whom, includ-
ing Sandra Taylor, Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen, and Karen Gottschang
Turner, have begun the process of telling the stories of women from both
North and South Vietnam.18
As Elaine Tyler May outlined in the now-classic Homeward Bound:
American Families in the Cold War, Americans used gender and sexuality
to make sense of the Cold War world, linking private matters such as mar-
riage and family life to U.S. foreign relations. Engaged in an ideological
struggle with the Soviet Union for power and influence in the world, U.S.
leaders portrayed capitalist democracy as the humane alternative to com-
munism; in his “kitchen debates” with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev,
then-Vice President Richard Nixon held up suburbia and its affluence as
the epitome of American values. The heterosexual gender roles implicit in
the image were strictly enforced, with the white, middle-class, suburban,
nuclear family as the ultimate symbol of appropriate roles for men and
women. Bringing the notion of “separate spheres” into the mid-twentieth
century, politicians, sociologists, and medical doctors prescribed policies
that once again placed women in charge of the home and childrearing
and gave men financial and political responsibilities.19

in the Vietnam War (Novato, CA; Presidio Press, 1999); and Ron Steinman, Women in
Vietnam (New York: TV Books, 2000).
17 Kara Dixon Vuic, Officer, Nurse, Woman: The Army Nurse Corps in the Vietnam War
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).
18 For studies devoted to various Vietnamese women’s experiences in the war, see Sandra
C. Taylor, Vietnamese Women at War: Fighting for Ho Chi Minh and the Revolution
(Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1999); Karen Gottschang Turner, Even the
Women Must Fight: Memories of War from North Vietnam (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley
& Sons, 1999); Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen, Memory is Another Country: Women
of the Vietnamese Diaspora (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2009). See also Le Ly
Hayslip’s memoir, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places: A Vietnamese Woman’s
Journey from War to Peace (New York: Plume, 1990).
19 May, xxiv-xxv.
10 Beyond Combat

Whatever the theoretical expectations, the experiences of women in the

Cold War era reflected the disconnects between the image of the suburban
housewife and the realities for most American women, as Wini Breines,
Susan Douglas, Alice Echols, Ruth Feldstein, Susan Hartmann, Joanne
Meyerowitz, and Ruth Rosen have shown.20 Married and middle-class
women increasingly sought paying work outside the home, and groups
such as the National Manpower Council and the President’s Council
on the Status of Women called for the incorporation of women into
service for the nation’s defense. Tracking the contradictions embedded
in the situation, scholars including Robert Corber, K. A. Cuordileone,
John D’Emilio, and Jane Sherron De Hart have shown how policymakers
capitalized on the culture of fear and uncertainty in the Cold War world
to demonize and persecute Americans – especially gays, lesbians, and
African Americans – who defied or tried to live outside the boundaries
of domesticity. Their work is part of a broader conversation concerning
the transitions that were taking place in post-World War II American
society, transitions that would ultimately redefine “traditional” gender
roles.21
As Sara Evans and other women activists have written, those roles
persisted even within the era’s movements for social change; their expe-
riences of marginalization within civil rights and antiwar organizations

20 Wini Breines, Young, White, and Miserable: Growing Up Female in the Fifties (Chicago,
University of Chicago Press, 1992); Susan J. Douglas, Where the Girls Are: Growing
Up Female with the Mass Media (New York: Times Books, 1994); Alice Echols, Shaky
Ground: The Sixties and Its Aftershocks (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002);
Susan M. Hartmann, From Margin to Mainstream: American Women and Politics since
1960 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989); Hartmann, “Women’s Employment and the
Domestic Ideal in the Early Cold War Years,” in Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender
in Postwar America, 1945–1960, ed. Joanne Meyerowitz (Philadelphia: Temple Univer-
sity Press, 1994); Joanne Meyerowitz, “Beyond the Feminine Mystique: A Reassessment
of Postwar Mass Culture, 1946–1958,” in Not June Cleaver; Ruth Feldstein, Mother-
hood in Black and White: Race and Sex in American Liberalism, 1930–1965 (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 2000); Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the
Modern Women’s Movement Changed America (New York: Penguin, 2006).
21 John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual
Minority in the United States, 1940–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
See also Robert J. Corber, Homosexuality in Cold War America: Resistance and the
Crisis of Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); K.A. Cuordileone,
Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War (New York: Routledge,
2005); Jane Sherron De Hart, “Containment at Home: Gender, Sexuality, and National
Identity in Cold War America,” in Rethinking Cold War Culture, ed. Peter J. Kuznick
(Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2001); Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America:
A Cultural History (New York: The Free Press, 1996), 236–37, 241–42.
 Introduction 11

motivated them to fight for women’s equality.22 In his work on draft

resistance, Michael Foley has shown that although male chauvinism was
part of the culture, as it was in most New Left movements, some women
found empowerment in the work they did to oppose the draft, even if
they did not hold leadership positions. Foley demonstrates how com-
plex – and, ultimately, individual – conceptions of gender and power
could be. For women such as Evans, draft resistance marked “the point
of ultimate indignity” because it was, by definition, male-centered, and
thus often relegated women to subservient, sexually stereotyped roles. For
others, anti-draft activism provided the first opportunity to do something
they felt was truly important.23 Inside and outside the movements, gender
was in flux during the Cold War, and challenges to traditional modes of
thinking took form in a variety of ways that were not always apparent to
the men and women involved.
In addition to addressing these issues, Beyond Combat responds to
historian Joan Scott’s challenge to diplomatic historians to examine the
gender politics that have shaped foreign relations and wars.24 Follow-
ing the lead of Scott and Emily Rosenberg, scholars such as Seth Jacobs,
Christina Klein, Melani McAlister, Andrew Rotter, and Naoko Shibu-
sawa have provided a foundation for understanding how these gender
roles influenced U.S. foreign policymaking in the early Cold War, and
their works offer context for decisions regarding Vietnam.25 Shibusawa
describes how U.S. military and political leaders, journalists, authors, and

22 Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights
Movement and the New Left (New York: Vintage, 1980).
23 Michael Foley, “‘The Point of Ultimate Indignity’ or a ‘Beloved Community’? The Draft
Resistance Movement and New Left Gender Dynamics,” in The New Left Revisited, ed.
John McMillian and Paul Buhle (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 2003), 178–98;
see also Foley, Confronting the War Machine: Draft Resistance during the Vietnam War
(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
24 Joan W. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1988); Emily S. Rosenberg, “Gender,” Journal of American History, 77 (June
1990), 116–24; Rosenberg, “Walking the Borders,” Diplomatic History, 14 (Fall 1990),
565–73.
25 Naoko Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism:
Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley, CA; University of California
Press, 2003); Andrew Rotter, “Gender Relations, Foreign Relations: The United States
and South Asia, 1947–1964, Journal of American History, Vol. 81, No. 2 (Sept. 1994),
518–42; Rotter, Comrades at Odds: The United States and India, 1947–1964 (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 2000); Seth Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam:
Ngo Dinh Diem, Religion, Race, and U.S. Intervention in Southeast Asia (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2005).
12 Beyond Combat

Hollywood executives cast Japan as a submissive woman – a “geisha” –

during the post-World War II occupation to shift American public opin-
ion of Japan, formerly a hated enemy, toward acceptance as a Cold War
ally. Efforts to cultivate warm, patriarchal feelings among Americans for
Asia continued throughout the 1950s, Klein explains, to foster support
for U.S. involvement in the affairs of allies and potential allies in Asia.
Rotter shows that beliefs about masculinity and femininity shaped U.S.
policymakers’ attempts to understand the newly independent India, which
they cast as effeminate, and therefore indecisive and weak, based on their
assumptions about Indian men.
The gendering of power that cast the United States as a global father fig-
ure influenced American relations with the Middle East, Melani McAlister
explains, writing that U.S. policymakers “used a complex and pernicious
language of gender to suggest that American power would produce a well-
ordered international family.”26 Jacobs traces these cultural approaches
to America’s prewar involvement in Vietnam, where the United States
supported Ngo Dinh Diem as leader of South Vietnam. A Catholic and
staunch anti-communist, Diem was the “miracle man” for U.S. policy-
makers in an otherwise untrustworthy, less manly, Asian nation, Jacobs
writes. Central to these foreign policy approaches was an American self-
perception that linked power with heterosexual masculinity, as Robert
Dean and Donald Mrozek have shown. Dean notes that the “lavender
scare” that targeted gays in the State Department and other federal gov-
ernment institutions in the 1950s created a climate in which political
weakness was equated with effeminacy and, worse, homosexuality. This
mindset had a profound impact on both Kennedy and Johnson, who
assessed U.S. foreign relations in general, and American intervention in
Vietnam in particular, in gendered and sexualized terms.27 For them,
a tough, prepared, aggressive U.S. military must be on hand to rescue
nations from the grip of communism.
Bringing together discussions of gender and foreign policymaking,
Cynthia Enloe’s work on gender, militarization, and international rela-
tions has demonstrated that women long have been crucial to the

26 Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle
East Since 1945 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), 47.
27 Robert Dean, Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign
Policy (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001); Donald Mrozek, “The
Cult and Ritual of Toughness in Cold War America,” in Rituals and Ceremonies in
Popular Culture, ed. Ray B. Browne (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University
Popular Press, 1980), 178–91.
 Introduction 13

military’s image as a powerful masculine institution even while they are

required to occupy subordinate positions in martial hierarchies. Enloe’s
writings reveal how militaries rely on and sustain gender, from the state
sanctioning of prostitution at the request of an occupying military to the
enforcement of specific images of masculine sexuality. Hierarchical gen-
der constructions were, and continue to be, perpetuated on stateside and
overseas bases, where military policies have shaped men’s and women’s
sexuality, determined entrepreneurial and women’s economic opportuni-
ties, regulated public health, and controlled entertainment. Women who
signed up for the armed services, Enloe notes, were required to “behave
like the gender ‘woman’” so as not to disrupt the masculine image of the
military.28
Leisa Meyer demonstrates how these patterns were present when the
Women’s Army Corps (WAC) was created during World War II. Both
critics and supporters relied on long-established discourses about race,
gender, and citizenship when building their cases for or against women’s
incorporation into the Army. Meyer points out that some opponents of
bringing women into the Army feared it would upset the long-standing
belief that military service is the ultimate measure of masculinity. Oth-
ers considered the WAC a hideout for promiscuous heterosexual women
and for lesbians, endangering traditional values regarding family and
domesticity.29 These anxieties did not disappear after World War II, and
the WAC leadership continued its attempts to calm them into the Viet-
nam era even as the Army requested the deployment of WACs to join
the war effort in Vietnam. The presence of American women in Vietnam
muddled the gendered image of war – fighting men doing America’s busi-
ness overseas, wives and girlfriends waiting back home, and local women
providing the outlet for the pent-up sexual energy of virile servicemen.
These images and corresponding assumptions fed into the already tense
environment of war and undermined the ideals the United States claimed
to defend.
Over the course of the war, a growing number of soldiers and home-
front activists came to recognize these contradictions, and some actively

28 Cynthia Enloe, Does Khaki Become You? The Militarization of Women’s Lives (London:
Pandora, 1988); See also Enloe, The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold
War (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993) and Enloe, Bananas, Beaches,
and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 2000).
29 Leisa D. Meyer, Creating G.I. Jane: Sexuality and Power in the Women’s Army Corps
During World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
14 Beyond Combat

challenged the warrior ethos. Histories of the GI antiwar movement –

notably Richard Moser’s The New Winter Soldiers: GI and Veteran
Dissent During the Vietnam Era, Richard Stacewicz’s Winter Soldiers:
An Oral History of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and David
Cortwright’s Soldiers in Revolt: GI Resistance During the Vietnam War –
have shown how GIs’ and veterans’ rejection of the warrior myth was
a main component of their opposition to the Vietnam War.30 Taken
together, Americans’ Vietnam War experiences and the GI antiwar move-
ment contributed to a multifaceted transformation of Cold War gender
ideology, affecting military culture, men’s and women’s familial roles,
constructions of gender and sexuality, and the symbolism buttressing
U.S. foreign policy.
The meanings embedded in the images of the male warrior, the girl next
door, and the abstract foreign woman continue to linger in U.S. relations
with the world, however. They also remain influential to Americans’
understandings of the armed services and which roles women and men
should hold in them. Beth Bailey’s study of the Army’s transition to an
all-volunteer force found that the post-Vietnam Army both responded to
demands for women’s equality and attempted to maintain outdated gen-
der stereotypes. Even as the Army redefined its image from emphasizing
male citizenship to a promise of educational and professional advance-
ment for both men and women, debates about proper gender roles con-
tinued to influence it.31
Each of the chapters of Beyond Combat explores one aspect of the part
gender played in Vietnam and how the Vietnam experience influenced the
home front. Opening in Saigon, Chapter 1 sets up the gender ideology
current during the war and its use of images of Vietnamese women, high-
lighting the tension between Vietnamese women as symbols and the war’s
impact on women’s lives. If Vietnamese women symbolized the dragon

30 On the GI and veteran antiwar movement, see Richard Moser, The New Winter Soldiers:
GI and Veteran Dissent During the Vietnam Era (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univer-
sity Press, 1996); Richard Stacewicz, Winter Soldiers: An Oral History of the Vietnam
Veterans Against the War (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997); David Cortwright,
Soldiers in Revolt: GI Resistance During the Vietnam War (Chicago, IL: Haymarket
Books, 1975); Gerald Nicosia, Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans Move-
ment (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2004); Andrew Hunt, The Turning: A History of
Vietnam Veterans Against the War (New York: New York University Press, 1999);
and Robert Jay Lifton, Home from the War: Learning from Vietnam Veterans (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1992).
31 Beth Bailey, America’s Army: Making the All-Volunteer Force (Cambridge, MA: The
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009).
 Introduction 15

lady to be tamed or slain, volunteers in the Red Cross Supplemental Recre-

ational Activities Overseas (SRAO) program, the subjects of Chapter 2,
were their antithesis, the girl next door. Known as “donut dollies,” SRAO
women went to Vietnam as morale boosters. They were the embodiments
of the wives, sisters, and girlfriends waiting for the troops back home,
but the thick sexual tension in Vietnam made it difficult to impose rules
forbidding physical intimacy between donut dollies and troops. Donut
dollies were symbols of middle-class domesticity, but by going to Viet-
nam, women escaped or postponed marriage and lived what the women’s
movement was calling for, even though many did not identify with the
women’s movement. Chapter 3 examines the experiences of nurses and
Women’s Army Corps personnel. Despite their military status, WACs
and nurses faced the same tensions and assumptions as donut dollies.
Nurses’ regular dealings with wounded and dying servicemen challenged
what it means to “see combat.” Because of the meanings embedded in
their experiences, military women in Vietnam played a bigger role than
their numbers imply. American women served in Vietnam in many other
capacities, including flight attendants, entertainers, journalists, and civil-
ian employees of the armed services, but I focus on donut dollies, WACs,
and nurses because they had a day-to-day experience in Vietnam, often
working alongside male troops.
Chapter 4 turns the focus to male troops, who grappled with the
contradiction between love and violence as they carried out their ambiva-
lent roles as both gentle warriors and gunslingers. The tensions in what
American servicemen were supposed to be shaped their interactions with
Vietnamese and American women in Vietnam. Chapter 5 discusses the
GI antiwar movement that issued a rejection of the sexism, racism, and
hypersexual masculinity that defined the Vietnam soldier experience.
Some antiwar GIs and vets demanded a reassessment of gender roles
that did not link masculinity with the warrior myth, and they called on
their fellow servicemen to join with women in a struggle for gender lib-
eration. As the connection between military service and manhood lost
credibility in the wake of the Vietnam War, and the draft ended, the
branches of the military reached out to women to fill the ranks of the all-
volunteer force. The conclusion examines the responses to the opening of
the services to women, which reveal both gender changes and resistance
to transformations of established gender roles.
Although Beyond Combat draws on a variety of theories and method-
ologies, its center lies in the images reflecting American diplomatic, mili-
tary, and popular attitudes toward Vietnam, and the stories of the women
16 Beyond Combat

and men whose daily lives revealed the tensions in those images. Each
account contained herein reflects one person’s individual experience and
is important to my telling of the Vietnam War story because it illustrates
either an aspect of America’s gendered war ideology or a challenge to it.
As is the case with any event as far-reaching as the Vietnam War, there
are as many narratives as there are lives touched by it, so the continued
work of collecting Vietnam-era oral histories will only help us paint a
more complete picture of the war’s impact and legacies. What I offer here
are some select portraits that depict the tensions and contradictions in
the war’s central imagery for Americans.
Everyday encounters and images that seemingly lack significance in
ordinary life were charged with meaning in Vietnam, not only for the
individuals who experienced them but also for those of us who are trying
to come to a deeper understanding of how the United States entered the
war, the war itself, and the war’s profound impact on American society.
A cartoon drawing of a Vietnamese woman with a dagger strapped to
her shapely leg; an American woman applying lipstick before heading
out to the Red Cross recreation center where she was stationed; a U.S.
serviceman hugging a Vietnamese baby – taken at face value, these are
simple images and moments. Read in the context of the war, though,
they underscore the importance of both women and gender to Ameri-
cans’ attempts to make sense of and justify U.S. intervention, while illu-
minating the contradictions in the American mission and the beliefs that
motivated it.
 1

Vietnamese Women in the American Mind

Gender, Race, and the Vietnam War

Beauty queen candidates decked out in sequins, black lace gloves, false
eyelashes, and padded bras, cloaked in the scent of hairspray, filled the
Rex Movie Hall in Saigon on a May evening in 1971. As electric fans
tried in vain to cool the packed room, young Vietnamese women, their
made-up faces glistening, paraded across a catwalk for audience mem-
bers who drank Pepsi, smoked, and ate ice cream.1 The spectacle was
Saigon’s first beauty pageant, attended by a crowd of Saigon’s small
but influential middle class, along with American diplomats. The high
ticket prices kept most soldiers – American or Vietnamese – from going.
Rejecting the miniskirt, which had become one of the symbols of an
American cultural invasion, the women in the pageant wore the ao dai,
a traditional Vietnamese outfit consisting of a long dress with thigh-
high slits on either side, worn over loose-fitting pants. As one of the
promoters of the pageant put it, “Saigon is invaded by miniskirts and
hot pants, and we are opposed to it. We think the Vietnamese women
are so beautiful in their own dress they do not need to vulgarly dis-
play their charms.” Despite the attempts to stress Vietnamese cultural
autonomy, the pageant blatantly signified Saigon’s Westernization, from
the audience members’ consumption of American soft drinks to contes-
tants’ desires to become Hollywood stars.2 It was a pageant of contra-
dictions with Vietnamese women at the center, and it encapsulated a set
of images and ideas that had become hallmarks of U.S. intervention in

1 Gloria Emerson, “A beauty contest with a difference: Saigon’s first, and girls didn’t weep.”
New York Times, May 29, 1971, 8.
2 Ibid.

17
18 Beyond Combat

Vietnam. The women were emblems of exotic sexuality, but also of Viet-
namese modernity, objects of desire whose superficial familiarity masked
their intractable otherness. Those contradictions reflected the contentious
notions of masculinity and femininity that shaped women’s roles during
the Vietnam War, pointing to the unresolved ideological tensions that
would play a crucial role in the unraveling of the American military
mission.
By 1971, the United States, deeply entrenched in the Vietnam War, was
slowly extricating itself from the conflict. The ideology that had influ-
enced American intervention in Vietnam had become embedded in the
culture of the war, reflected in a series of images of Vietnamese women,
which dictated their daily interactions with American soldiers. U.S. poli-
cymakers, as well as many ordinary citizens influenced by newspaper and
magazine coverage, viewed Vietnam through the lenses of gender and
race, seeing a land and a people that were at once alluring and danger-
ous. Three images, each with a long history in western attitudes toward
Asia, were particularly important in relation to Vietnamese women. First,
the women represented the dangerous Asia that threatened U.S. interests
in the Cold War world. Second, they were damsels in distress who needed
to be protected. Third, they were sexual objects to be dominated and pos-
sessed. The contradiction between the image of protection and the reality
of domination, justified by the need to ward off the “dragon lady,” com-
pleted a contradictory loop in which the United States dominated what it
was protecting.
Motivated by the Cold War imperative to shape the development
of newly independent nations and draw them into the Western sphere
before the Soviet Union staked its claim on them, U.S. policymakers,
from the Truman administration on, committed money and materiel
in hopes of preventing a communist takeover of Vietnam. The largely
unknown backwater was important not in itself, but as part of a larger
picture. Throughout the decolonizing world, Cold War tensions threat-
ened to erupt into “hot wars” as colonized peoples first fought for inde-
pendence and then struggled to implement stable governments. For the
United States, the decolonizing world posed an opportunity to gain allies
as well as a challenge to prevent communist insurgencies from taking
power in newly independent nations. Throughout the Cold War, U.S.
policymakers repeatedly interpreted local independence movements as
Soviet-backed uprisings. The misunderstandings were further compli-
cated by attitudes toward race and gender that led American policymakers
 Vietnamese Women in the American Mind 19

to see Third World leaders as being incapable of handling their own

affairs.3
When Vietnam declared its independence in 1945 after a defeated
Japan relinquished control, Ho Chi Minh, leader of the nationalist, com-
munist Viet Minh, reached out to President Truman for recognition and
assistance. Viewing Ho as a communist rather than a freedom fighter,
Truman and his advisers, concerned over political instability in Western
Europe, chose to support France, which sought to reinstate the political
and economic control it had established in Vietnam in the 1850s. War
between the French and the Viet Minh broke out in 1946; by the end
of 1950, the Truman administration authorized $100 million to bolster
the French cause. By the time French forces surrendered at Dien Bien
Phu in 1954, ending what is sometimes called the first Indochina war,

3 A sample of the growing body of literature on decolonization during the Cold War
includes Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence
and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002);
David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of
an American World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); Michael
Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and ‘Nation Building’ in
the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Christo-
pher J. Lee, Making a World After Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political
Afterlives (Ohio University Press, 2010); Jonathan Nashel, Edward Lansdale’s Cold War
(Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005); David F. Schmitz, The United
States and Right-Wing Dictatorships (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006);
Schmitz, Thank God They’re on Our Side: The United States and Right-Wing Dictator-
ships, 1921–1965 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Jeremi
Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2003); Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005). Scholars who have focused specifically on race and
gender in the history of decolonization include Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and
the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2003); Mark Bradley, Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making
of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919–1950 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina
Press, 2000); Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of Ameri-
can Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); Van Gosse, Where the
Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War America, and the Making of a New Left (London: Verso,
1993); Michael Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1987); James H. Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Americans and
Africa, 1935–1961 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Brenda
Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935–1960
(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Penny Von Eschen, Race
Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1997); Window on Freedom: Race, Civil Rights, and Foreign Affairs,
1945–1988, ed. Brenda Gayle Plummer (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina
Press, 2003).
20 Beyond Combat

the United States had spent approximately $1 billion, footing the bill for
nearly 80 percent of the war’s cost.4 In the wake of the Viet Minh’s deci-
sive victory, the Geneva Accords divided Vietnam into two temporary
nations, the Republic of Vietnam (or South Vietnam), a non-communist
state headed first by former emperor Bao Dai and then by Ngo Dinh
Diem, and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (or North Vietnam), a
communist-controlled nation led by Ho Chi Minh. An election was sched-
uled for 1956 to reunite the two halves of Vietnam, but, aware that Ho
would certainly have won, the United States and the South Vietnamese
canceled the election. Determined to contain communism above the 17th
parallel, the United States assumed responsibility for the development
and support of South Vietnam.5
Efforts by the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations to build a
noncommunist alternative to Ho Chi Minh’s North Vietnam centered on
Ngo Dinh Diem, South Vietnam’s president from 1955 to 1963. Diem’s
appeal to the United States was not simply political. As historian Seth
Jacobs has demonstrated, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and other
important members of the Eisenhower administration committed U.S.
support to Diem because he seemed less “Asian” than other potential
South Vietnamese leaders who were equally opposed to communism. In
a primarily Buddhist nation, Diem was Catholic at a time when Catholic
church membership was on the rise in the United States. He had lived
at seminaries in New Jersey and New York under the sponsorship of
Francis Cardinal Spellman, who became one of Diem’s staunchest allies.
Most importantly, he seemed comfortable among the men responsible
for U.S. foreign policy. Support for Diem continued into the Kennedy
era, with then-Vice President Lyndon Johnson calling him “the Win-
ston Churchill of Southeast Asia.” In anticipation of Johnson’s trip to
Saigon in 1961, Colonel Edward Lansdale, another major Diem sup-
porter, described him this way: “Diem’s feet barely seem to reach the floor
when he is seated. However, he is not defensive about his short stature
and is at ease around tall Americans. He has a very positive approach to
Westerners, not the least bit concerned about differences such as Asian-
Caucasian background. When the vice president sees him, he will find

4 Mark Philip Bradley, Vietnam at War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 56.
5 For surveys of the Vietnam War, see George Herring, America’s Longest War: The United
States and Vietnam, 1950–1975 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001); Stanley Karnow,
Vietnam: A History (New York: Penguin, 1997); and Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam
Wars, 1945–1990 (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991).
 Vietnamese Women in the American Mind 21

him as interested in cattle an any Texan, and as interested in freedom as

Sam Houston.” Although U.S. policymakers viewed a generalized Asia
as untrustworthy and effeminate, Diem was a man.6 As U.S. relations
with South Vietnam soured during Kennedy’s presidency, the image of
Diem changed. Conversations and correspondence between Kennedy and
his advisers increasingly cast Diem as weak, ineffective, and too eas-
ily swayed by his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, and sister-in-law, Madame
Nhu.
The evolution of Diem’s image was part of a larger pattern of political
discussions, media coverage, and government propaganda, in which Viet-
namese women, presented in both positive and negative images, became
the symbols of South Vietnam. In the “positive” scenario, as depicted in
magazine features about economic development in urban South Vietnam,
young, educated Vietnamese women working in modern office buildings
in Saigon represented a nation flourishing under the guidance of the
United States. The danger lay in the alternative – the “dragon lady” – a
cunning, beautiful Asian woman who transformed from seeming friend to
deadly foe at a moment’s notice. From Madame Nhu – the most publicly
visible member of Diem’s family – to prostitutes and bar girls, women
symbolized South Vietnam in the American mind. The images of them
circulating in the media and in the minds of policymakers were deeply
embedded in the justifications for U.S. policies. Even when women were
not explicitly part of references to South Vietnam, descriptions of its rela-
tionship with the United States were explained using sexual metaphors.
Undersecretary of State George Ball described American fascination with
South Vietnam this way: “As I knew from experience with my French
friends, there was something about Vietnam that seduced the toughest
military minds into fantasy.”7
Those images were interwoven with anxieties about gender relations
in the United States during a time of rapid social change. Emerging
from, and part of, Cold War culture, the Vietnam War coincided with
a period in which anxieties about acceptable expressions of masculinity
and femininity informed foreign as well as domestic policymaking. John
F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson perceived foreign relations in gendered
terms, linking military strength with masculine power. Kennedy was par-
ticularly concerned about the softening effects of suburban comforts on

6 Jacobs, 16.
7 Howard Jones, Death of a Generation: How the Assassinations of Diem and JFK Pro-
longed the Vietnam War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 114.
22 Beyond Combat

middle-class American men; his well-publicized physical fitness agenda

was designed in part to ensure that America’s future soldiers would be
physically ready for combat in Third World jungles. In this context, Amer-
ican and Vietnamese women played symbolic roles in the implementation
and conduct of U.S. diplomatic and military policy in South Vietnam. As
the nation was recruited into the Western sphere, American men became
both defenders against the threat of the dragon lady and protectors of
Vietnamese women as representatives of an American-style femininity,
even though that gender label was undergoing change at home.

Dragon Ladies, Geishas, and Roses

These images marked extensions of a tradition of feminizing Asia that had
been particularly clear during the recent reconstruction of Japan, and that
was intensified by South Vietnam’s role as a testing ground for America’s
Cold War policy. From the highest levels of policymaking to the masses of
ordinary citizens, Americans viewed South Vietnam through stereotypes
of Asians that had been part of American culture since the nineteenth cen-
tury. Robert G. Lee has described how American definitions of “Asian”
and “Oriental” related to economic imperatives, immigration issues, and
diplomatic concerns which presented Asian nations or peoples of Asian
descent as threats to America’s domestic status quo or its international
interests. Images such as the Chinese “coolie” laborer developed in the
late nineteenth century amid class and race tensions stemming from indus-
trialization, immigration, and emancipation. Designating Chinese immi-
grants as a racial “other” allowed working-class European immigrants to
claim a white – and thus American – identity, raising themselves up on
America’s racial hierarchy above Chinese workers of the same economic
status.
Ambiguous sexuality, at once taboo and alluring, characterized white,
middle-class views of Asian men and women, classifying them as offer-
ing an alternative to the strictly contained Victorian heterosexuality. As
the United States became increasingly interested in Pacific markets and
concerned about the rise of Japanese power at the turn of the twenti-
eth century, the racial and sexual threats were combined in the notion
of the “Yellow Peril.” Although the male villain Fu Manchu of the Sax
Rohmer novels was the most common articulation of the Yellow Peril in
the early twentieth century, Fu Manchu aspired to bring the entire globe
under the rule of an “Asian empress.” The success of this insidious plot
would disrupt both the international political/economic order and the
 Vietnamese Women in the American Mind 23

Anglo-American gender structure that linked whiteness, masculinity, and

power.8
Constructions of Asia as feminine, sexualized, and dangerous were
staples of twentieth-century popular culture. In the 1930s, the “Dragon
Lady” debuted to American mass audiences through Milton Caniff’s syn-
dicated comic strip, “Terry and the Pirates.” When Caniff approached
Joseph Patterson, editor of the Chicago Tribune–New York Daily News
syndicate, with some samples of his work in 1934, Patterson suggested
that Caniff draw a strip about Asia, musing that “adventure can still hap-
pen out there. There could be a beautiful lady pirate, the kind men fall
for,” an embodiment of the mysteries of the Orient. With that, “Terry
and the Pirates” – and the Dragon Lady character, the first villain Caniff
drew for the strip – were born.9 The Dragon Lady’s real name in the
strip was Lai Choi San. She was a Chinese pirate, a villain Caniff believed
to be “ten times more interesting” because she was a woman. Caniff
described her as “the strongest of all because she had the double weapon
of beauty and absolute ruthlessness, which everybody, man and woman,
dreads and anticipates with shuddering pleasure.” By 1940, Caniff had
transformed the Dragon Lady from a pirate to a guerrilla fighter, creating
one of the definitive images of the conflict some thirty years before the
Vietnam War.10
A second image of Asian women, as helpless damsels in need of pro-
tection, existed in uneasy proximity to that of the dragon lady. The
contradictions between and within these images can be seen in the Amer-
ican media’s treatment of Madame Chiang Kai-Shek. When the United
States supported China in the 1930s and in World War II, American sup-
porters of Chinese leader Chiang Kai-Shek often lauded his wife as well,
comparing her to Joan of Arc and Florence Nightingale for her work
with Chinese orphans. In a July 1942 Life magazine article, Clare Booth
Luce, wife of publisher Henry Luce, called Madame Chiang the world’s
“greatest living woman.” Several months later, Texas Representative Sam
Rayburn praised her as “one of the outstanding women of all the earth.”
Focusing on her physical beauty, media coverage of Madame Chiang set
her up as a contrast to her American counterpart Eleanor Roosevelt, a

8 Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia, Temple

University Press, 1999).
9 “Escape artist,” Time, Jan. 13, 1947, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/
0,9171,855598–1,00.html.
10 Milton Caniff: Conversations, ed. Robert C. Harvey (Jackson, MS: University Press of
Mississippi, 2002), ix, 20, 162.
24 Beyond Combat

woman known for her brains more than her looks and suspected of leftist
leanings. In the symbolic imagery of the relationship between the United
States and China, Madame Chiang was, as Laura Tyson Li writes, “a
mysterious and exotic Asian female. She projected the image of a tiny
woman, frail yet valiant, being rescued by tall, strong, chivalrous male
senators. China was the damsel in distress and America the knight in
shining armor.”11
During the occupation of Japan after World War II, the images of
both the dragon lady and the damsel were deployed to justify military and
diplomatic policies. The gendering of Japan as female – a geisha, as Naoko
Shibusawa explains it – was a key element in the postwar relationship
between Japan and the United States, its occupier. Whereas the face of
wartime Japan in American media was that of a vicious, bloodthirsty man,
Japanese women symbolized the defeated postwar nation. Feminizing
Japan allowed the U.S. occupation to appear benevolent and paternal, but
the sexual stereotyping of Japanese women suggests that the benevolence
masked the desire for and reality of domination. The Far East edition
of Navy Times regularly published a cartoon that featured “Baby-san,”
a curvaceous, sexually-suggestive Japanese woman who symbolized the
fantasy of some American servicemen. At the same time, the idealized
Japanese woman – shy, pliant, submissive – represented an alternative
to the increasingly politically active American woman. Anxieties about
women who had entered the workforce during the war and refused to go
quietly back into the home played out in articles that depicted Japanese
women as preferable to American women, who were the “white man’s
burden,” in the words of photographer Carl Mydans.12 As would be the
case in Vietnam, the gendered images connected with the U.S. occupation
of Japan reflected both the tensions between men and women on the
home front and the contradiction between protection and domination at
the core of U.S. foreign policy.
The best known incarnation of the dragon lady was Tokyo Rose, the
name U.S. troops gave to the group of Japanese women who broad-
cast propaganda aimed at demoralizing American servicemen. The best-
known Tokyo Rose was Iva Toguri d’Aquino, an American of Japanese
descent who was living in Japan when the war started. D’Aquino

11 Laura Tyson Li, Madame Chiang Kai-Shek: China’s Eternal First Lady (New York:
Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006), 180–204.
12 Naoko Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 4–5, 26, 36, 42.
 Vietnamese Women in the American Mind 25

became the human face of Tokyo Rose when she was convicted of
treason in 1949 and imprisoned for six years for disseminating enemy
propaganda.13 Like the Dragon Lady of Milton Caniff’s cartoons, the fic-
tional Tokyo Rose represented a dangerous yet alluring Asia whom the
United States must tame or slay to protect its power and security in the
world. Although d’Aquino herself was a slightly bookish, plain-looking
woman, portrayals of Tokyo Rose in American media presented her as
an “oriental Ava Gardner,” fulfilling the expectation that the source of
the voice broadcast to U.S. troops in Japan was a mysterious, sexu-
ally alluring woman. As journalist Russell Warren Howe has written,
in the context of American sexual anxieties at the dawn of the Cold
War, it was nearly inevitable for “the little typist to become a dragon
lady.”
The image of Tokyo Rose, as that of the dragon lady, feminized the
Asian threat and justified the masculine power of U.S. occupation troops’
political mission.14 Attitudes toward race, gender, and sexuality, which
had little or no relation to the lives of actual Asian women, converged to
create a character that bolstered U.S. diplomatic and military endeavors, a
pattern that recurred as the United States became embroiled in Vietnam.
There was no better embodiment of the contradictions than Madame
Nhu.

Madame Nhu – “Joan of Arc or Dragon Lady?”

When the October 1962 issue of Life magazine hit the stands, readers
encountered a picture, taken by English photojournalist Larry Burrows,
that depicted a fascinating evolution in the Dragon Lady’s political his-
tory. Clad in a pale satin ao dai and flanked by Vietnamese women in
military uniforms, Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu raised a gun and, with one
eye closed as she focused on her target, pointed it as if she were prepared
to shoot (Figure 1). Her face bore the calm confidence of a seasoned
gunslinger, and the crucifix that hung from a chain around her neck
dared her critics – and the majority-Buddhist Vietnamese population –
to attack her, a member of South Vietnam’s most prominent Catholic
family. The object of her aim could have been the philandering husband
of a fellow Vietnamese woman; a Buddhist protesting the government of

13 Caroline Chung Simpson, An Absent Presence: Japanese Americans in Postwar American

Culture, 1945–1960 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 76–112.
14 Ibid., 85, 111.
26 Beyond Combat

figure 1. Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu fires a .38 pistol as members of her women’s
paramilitary force look on. The photograph, taken by Larry Burrows, ran in the
October 26, 1962 issue of Life. Getty Images.

her brother-in-law, Ngo Dinh Diem; or an American man attempting “to

seduce Vietnamese women into decadent paths.”15 Describing her style
of dress, a French journalist described Madame Nhu as “molded into
her . . . dress like a dagger in its sheath.”16 Although this imagery echoes
that surrounding the stereotypical dragon lady, Madame Nhu attempted
to redefine the role as one of protector, adding to the confusion U.S. diplo-
mats and soldiers experienced when trying to categorize Asian women.
The photograph of Madame Nhu with a gun illustrated one of the ways
in which gender shaped U.S. encounters with South Vietnam. Similar to
the Asian woman in the “Terry and the Pirates” comic strip, Madame
Nhu appeared both seductive and dangerous – a metaphor for Vietnam.
In the early 1960s, she graced the covers of Time and Life magazines,
highlighting the American public’s fascination with her. Even Diem did
not receive such exposure in the U.S. media. Foreign policy documents

15 Telegram from the Embassy in Vietnam to the Department of State, Saigon, April 13,
1963, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963 (Washington, DC: U.S. Gov-
ernment Printing Office, 1991), 3: 225 [Hereafter FRUS, followed by year and volume].
16 Howard Jones, Death of a Generation: How the Assassinations of Diem and JFK Pro-
longed the Vietnam War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 293.
 Vietnamese Women in the American Mind 27

make it clear that U.S. political leaders during Kennedy’s presidency mon-
itored Madame Nhu’s media appearances and were acutely aware of her
influence on Vietnamese relations with the United States. It is unclear
how much power Madame Nhu actually had in shaping South Vietnam’s
policies, but Kennedy administration records and U.S. media coverage
reflect a belief that she did.
As one of nine women in the National Assembly of the Republic of
Vietnam in the early 1960s while Diem was president of South Vietnam,
Madame Nhu considered herself part of a long tradition of Vietnamese
women warriors who fought invaders and oppressors throughout Viet-
nam’s two-thousand-year history.17 She commissioned a statue of the
Trung sisters – Vietnamese heroines from a war with China in the year
40 AD – to be built in her likeness in Saigon. In the late 1950s, she
established the Women’s Paramilitary Corps, and when her daughter, Le
Thuy, turned eighteen, Madame Nhu attempted to make her a warrior
by giving her a gun – “the better to shoot Viet Cong with.”18 Although
Madame Nhu positioned herself in the history of Vietnamese fighting
women, she also represented a modernizing South Vietnam, one that the
Kennedy administration hoped would develop into a stable, capitalist
democracy with American guidance. As someone who both charmed and
angered Americans, Madame Nhu stood for the tensions in U.S. mod-
ernization efforts. The Kennedy administration cast the United States as
protector of South Vietnam against communism, but Madame Nhu had
already claimed the role of protector for herself, the legacy of the Trung
sisters. She did not fit into America’s ideological vision, and U.S. media
portrayals gradually shifted from damsel to dragon lady in their largely
unsuccessful efforts to understand her.
The Life magazine picture of Madame Nhu aiming a gun was just one
of several photographs that manifested the contradictions. In January
1959, Time called Madame Nhu a “dainty emancipator” in explain-
ing her work in the National Assembly regarding women’s issues. The
article noted that Madame Nhu, “a Christian, is not only the first lady
of a Buddhist land; she is also the most determined feminist since the
late Emmeline Goulden Pankhurst,” a comparison to the leader of the
British women’s suffrage movement. The article used Madame Nhu as
the symbol of a free South Vietnam under the leadership of Diem, stat-
ing that although Vietnamese women had few rights in the past, “when

17 Milton Orshefsky, “Joan of Arc or Dragon Lady?” Life, October 26, 1962, 55.
18 “Girls Under Fire,” Time, July 23, 1965, 23.
28 Beyond Combat

South Vietnam became independent, the women found a champion” in

Madame Nhu. As a member of South Vietnam’s first family, she han-
dled “a bewildering assortment of visitors and letters asking every sort
of favor, from help in curbing an abusive husband to advice on a Latin
essay.”19 Overall, the article portrayed Madame Nhu as an industrious,
devoted member of the Ngo family and a concerned citizen of Viet-
nam, characteristics that also defined a good American woman in the
Cold War era. Just as they had used Time and Life to support Madame
Chiang Kai-Shek, Henry and Clare Booth Luce published laudatory cov-
erage of the Catholic, anticommunist Madame Nhu. As time went on
and U.S. relations with the Diem regime grew strained, the tone of
media coverage of Madame Nhu shifted from supportive to suspicious to
hostile.
Throughout the course of Diem’s presidency, American policymak-
ers and journalists were at a loss regarding how to deal with Madame
Nhu. Magazine articles revealed fascination with this “fragile, exciting
beauty who stands only 5 ft. 2 in. in high heels.”20 In contrast to the
damsel image, the media at times presented her as a threat to gen-
der norms. An article in Time declared that she “rules the men who
rule the nation,” and the reporter deemed her a “flaming” feminist.21
Kennedy’s advisers called her everything from “beautiful” to “bitchy” to
“brutal.” As relations between the Kennedy and Diem administrations
deteriorated, assessments of Madame Nhu became more hostile, and the
agenda underlying the U.S. role as benevolent protector became clearer.
Edward Lansdale and Maxwell Taylor, prominent U.S. advisers to Diem,
accused her of alienating Saigon’s educated and professional classes – the
very groups on which Diem should have been relying for political sup-
port – by speaking out against Diem’s critics and rivals and attempting to
push legislation without going through the National Assembly’s official
procedures.22 State Department officials noted that Madame Nhu’s public
comments attracted attention because she was “unfortunately too beau-
tiful to ignore,” and officials at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon called for her
complete removal “from the public eye in view of the adverse effects . . . of

19 “Dainty Emancipator,” Time, January 26, 1959, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/

article/0,9171,892087,00.html.
20 Charles Mohr, “The Queen Bee,” Time, August 9, 1963, 21.
21 Ibid.
22 Briefing Paper Prepared by the Embassy in Vietnam: “Possible Actions by GVN as Quid
Pro Quo for Additional U.S. Support,” Saigon, October 17, 1961, FRUS, 1961–1963,
1:387.
 Vietnamese Women in the American Mind 29

her activities on the political standing of the (Diem) government.”23 Even

her supporters chafed at the way she disrupted the U.S. agenda. Wesley
Fishel, head of the Michigan State University Vietnam Advisory Group, a
consulting organization to the Diem regime, described Madame Nhu as
“brilliant, vivacious, bitchy, and brutal . . . and with the purest of inten-
tions she is succeeding in alienating substantial segments of the population
from her brother-in-law’s regime at a time when it needs the enthusiastic
support of everyone.”24
American policymakers’ concerns were not necessarily unjustified,
given the importance they placed on maintaining a positive international
image in hopes of obtaining Third World allies. In addition to speaking
out against Diem’s critics, especially Buddhists, Madame Nhu did not hes-
itate to attack the U.S. government, military, and media. She charged the
Kennedy administration with not providing enough military and financial
aid, and she accused U.S. servicemen of attempting to “seduce Vietnamese
women into decadent paths.”25 She regularly clashed with reporters and
eventually banned Newsweek entirely from South Vietnam.26 As the
Kennedy administration attempted to mold Diem’s South Vietnam into a
model of U.S. Cold War success in the Third World, Madame Nhu’s pub-
lic presence threatened the American mission by making it look as though
the United States supported an antidemocratic, oppressive regime.
Conversations about Madame Nhu frequently were connected to talk
of Diem’s masculinity, which implied his inadequacy as a representative
of the United States’ masculine power. Letters, records of conversations,
and other foreign policy documents indicate that American advisors to
Vietnam were preoccupied with Diem’s sexuality. They fixated on his
unmarried status, often referring to him as the “bachelor president.”
Major General Tran Van Don, acting chief of South Vietnam’s Joint Gen-
eral Staff, told American advisors that Diem had never engaged in a sexual

23 Memorandum From the Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization

Affairs (Cleveland) to the Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs (Hilsman),
Washington, October 2, 1963, FRUS, 1961–1963, 4:335–36. Memorandum from the
Counselor of the Embassy in Vietnam (Mendenhall) to the Public Affairs Officer in
Vietnam (Anspacher), Saigon, November 22, 1961, FRUS, 1961–1963, 1:659.
24 Letter from Wesley R. Fishel of the Michigan State University Group in Vietnam to
President John A. Hannah of Michigan State University, Rangoon, February 17, 1962,
FRUS, 1961–1963, 2:150–51.
25 Telegram from the Embassy in Vietnam to the Department of State, Saigon, April 13,
1963, FRUS, 1961–1963, 3:225–26.
26 John Mecklin, Mission in Torment: An Intimate Account of the U.S. Role in Vietnam
(New York: Doubleday, 1965).
30 Beyond Combat

relationship with anyone.27 That Diem’s sexual activity – or lack thereof –

was a topic of conversation in policymaking circles is itself revealing.
U.S. officials closely scrutinized Diem’s relationship with Madame Nhu.
Because Diem had no wife, his sister-in-law became known as the unof-
ficial first lady of his administration. In describing the personal relation-
ships among the Ngo family members living in the presidential palace,
Tran Van Don explained to American advisors that “for the past nine
years, Diem has Madame Nhu to comfort him after day’s work is done.
She is charming, talks to him, relieves his tension, argues with him, nee-
dles him, and, like a Vietnamese wife, she is dominant in the household.”
However, Don stressed, Diem and Madame Nhu did not have a sex-
ual relationship. She was Diem’s “platonic wife.” Noting that “Madame
Nhu can be extremely charming,” Don explained that she was able to
charm Diem into saying “yes when he wants to say no.” Therefore, Don
warned that it would be “practically impossible” to remove Madame
Nhu from Saigon, which Secretary of State Dean Rusk, U.S. Ambassador
Henry Cabot Lodge, and other Kennedy administration officials consid-
ered repeatedly as political conditions in Saigon collapsed.28
The descriptions of Madame Nhu’s role in the presidential household
and her relationship with Diem echo the explanation of Vietnamese family
structure in a handbook published for U.S. Army personnel deployed
to Vietnam. In describing the status of men and women in Vietnamese
families, the handbook notes that although custom required wives to
respect and submit to their husbands and in-laws, “many Vietnamese
wives are in fact extremely powerful and exercise a strong formative
influence on their husbands’ opinions and actions.” Both village women
and urban educated women typically managed the family income, and
some owned land or businesses. The handbook states that village women
often worked harder than their male counterparts, and an urban wife
usually was “accepted as an intellectual equal by her husband, entering
into literary discussions with him and listening as he recites poetry.”29
A pamphlet published by the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) stated

27 Telegram from the Central Intelligence Agency Station in Saigon to the Agency, Saigon,
August 24, 1963, FRUS, 1961–1963, 3:615.
28 Telegram from the Central Intelligence Agency Station in Saigon to the Agency, Saigon,
August 24, 1963; Further Rusk Cable to Lodge on Diem-Nhu Relationship, New York
Times, July 1, 1971, 9; Memo on Washington Meeting in Aftermath of August Plot,
New York Times, July 1, 1971, 10.
29 Harvey H. Smith et al., Area Handbook for South Vietnam (Washington, D.C.: U.S.
Government Printing Office, 1967), 115.
 Vietnamese Women in the American Mind 31

that “the philosopher-king or poet-king is still the basic masculine ideal”

for Vietnamese men.30 Engaged in pursuits such as poetry, which did
not fit the mainstream American definition of masculinity, Vietnamese
husbands such as Diem were not necessarily masters of their households,
or even of their thoughts. Contradicting Cold War American ideas about
the husband’s role within a family, this set of characteristics allowed
U.S. policymakers to define American power in opposition to perceived
Vietnamese social and cultural inadequacies. As part of a framework that
established a patriarchal relationship between the United States and South
Vietnam, the Army handbook depicted Vietnamese men as unmasculine
and thus in need of protection.
American perceptions of Vietnamese gender were intertwined with atti-
tudes grounded in Cold War sexual anxieties and deep-seated Orientalist
images. Obsessions over “proper” expressions of heterosexual masculin-
ity and femininity revealed themselves in foreign relations metaphors that
linked deviant sexuality to race. Robert Lee maintains that the “combina-
tion of submissive innocence and assertive sexuality is the epitome of Ori-
entalist fantasy.”31 Analyzing portrayals of Asians in film and literature,
Lee notes a common pattern in American popular culture, in which Amer-
icanization transforms Oriental women from “dangerously transgressive
into a symbol of domesticity. . . . Meanwhile, Asian men remained outside
the American family, marginalized, invisible, and racially Other.”32 This
pattern played out clearly in relation to Madame Nhu, who represented
the domesticated nation being brought into the American sphere while
Diem was relegated to the shadows. At the same time, Madame Nhu sym-
bolized the “dangerously transgressive” aspect of Asia – not only did she
appear sexually suggestive, but her outspokenness was also dangerous to
the American mission in South Vietnam and international perceptions of
the United States–South Vietnam alliance. Part of the dilemma Kennedy’s
advisors faced was how to contain Madame Nhu, symbolically domes-
ticating her and placing her in a space that would not disrupt America’s
nation-building efforts. Ultimately, the attempt would fail, and she would
be removed from the public eye.33

30 Chester Baines, “Vietnamese Individual Behavior, the Family, and Social Values,” U.S.
Army Civil Affairs School, Fort Gordon, GA, December 1968, Glenn Helm Collection,
Folder 08, Box 12, The Vietnam Archive, Texas Tech University.
31 Lee, Orientals, 169.
32 Ibid., 162.
33 Throughout Diem’s regime, articles and photographs in U.S. media expressed fascina-
tion with Madame Nhu as someone inherently foreign and enigmatic. The continued
32 Beyond Combat

By the time American voters elected John F. Kennedy to the presi-

dency in 1960, U.S. support for Diem had begun to falter as a result
of a variety of factors, including antagonisms between the Diem gov-
ernment and Buddhists, disagreements between Diem and his American
advisers, and Diem’s unwillingness to remove the Nhus from their posi-
tions of political influence. In that year, some members of the American
Friends of Vietnam (AFV), a lobby group dedicated to the conviction
that “the U.S. had a unique ability, even an obligation, to lead the peo-
ples of Asia into a modern, democratic world,” had begun to lose faith
in Diem. They blamed Diem’s increasing unwillingness to listen to them
on Ngo Dinh Nhu and Madame Nhu, who they said had alienated much
of South Vietnam’s population and created what critics claimed to be a
“family dictatorship.34 Undoubtedly, Madame Nhu played a significant
role in creating disaffection among the South Vietnamese population by
accusing Buddhists of being communists who deserved persecution by
the Diem government. In 1962, Wesley Fishel of Michigan State Univer-
sity lamented that the “evil influences” of the Nhus had rendered Diem
unable to build a democracy in South Vietnam. In a letter to John B.
Hannah, president of Michigan State, Fishel wrote that “unless what
I have termed the ‘evil influences’ are removed from the scene, in one
way or another, Ngo Dinh Diem’s government is not going to make the
grade.”35 It was as though the problem was not Diem, the man U.S. pol-
icymakers had anointed to head an anti-communist South Vietnam, but
rather the irresistible influence of Madame Nhu that prevented Diem from

interest in Vietnam was a legacy of what Christina Klein describes regarding Americans’
attraction to Asia in the early Cold War. In the late 1940s and through the 1950s,
Asian-themed novels, plays, news articles, and other cultural forms aimed to foster fond
feelings among Americans for Asians, with a broader purpose of garnering public sup-
port for the expansion of U.S. power into the Pacific. Klein ends her study in 1961,
stating that at that time Vietnam began to be the Asia focal point for U.S. policymakers
at the expense of the rest of the Far East. This led to a lessening of cultural productions
depicting sentimental images of Asia, but it did not disappear from the American psy-
che. Media depictions of Madame Nhu illustrate the transition from sentimental images
Klein describes to the animosity between Kennedy administration officials and the Diem
regime that marked the end of America’s attempt to build an ally and the beginning
of full-scale war. See Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow
Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003).
34 Morgan, The Vietnam Lobby: The American Friends of Vietnam, 1955–1975 (Chapel
Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), xiii, 62; George C. Herring, Amer-
ica’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975 (New York: McGraw-
Hill, 2002), 82.
35 Ibid., 84.
 Vietnamese Women in the American Mind 33

developing his political regime along the lines designated by the United
States.36
The author of a March 1962 article in Time wondered if Madame
Nhu were more akin to an “Asian Joan of Arc” or an “Oriental Lucrezia
Borgia,” a reference to a powerful and corrupt Catholic Italian family
of the Renaissance era. No longer viewed as an emancipator, Madame
Nhu had become a “puritanical feminist” and “South Vietnam’s most
bitterly debated female,” the reason Diem’s regime was so oppressive.
By that point, she had begun to criticize the United States for not doing
enough to stop the spread of communism in Vietnam, and it is clear that
her outspokenness had a negative impact on media coverage.37 Later in
1962, Life published a feature about Madame Nhu titled “Joan of Arc or
Dragon Lady?” with accompanying photographs illustrating her various
personalities. The lead image depicted Madame Nhu standing beneath a
statue of the Trung sisters, situating her in the tradition of the Vietnamese
independence struggle, but the accompanying caption included a quote
from Madame Nhu that indicated that she, in a way, rejected the sisters’
work in favor a type of heroism rooted in Catholic ideology – “Getting
on an elephant and putting on a suit of armor as old heroines did doesn’t
attract me at all. I prefer the silent, everyday struggle of the saints.” The
reporter described Madame Nhu as “the most controversial, powerful,
unloved, devious, single-minded, interesting, difficult beauty not only in
southeast Asia but anywhere east of the Suez.” A photo spread showed
her talking with the press, interacting with government officials, and
teaching members of the Women’s Paramilitary Corps how to shoot a
gun. In contrasting photos, Madame Nhu played darts with her husband
and two children in what appeared to be a pleasant day out for a nuclear
family. The final picture showed Madame Nhu praying during Mass in a
Catholic church.38
The images of Madame Nhu in the U.S. media in the months leading
up to the assassination of Diem in November 1963 reflect the increasing
difficulty of resolving her symbolic functions. Time placed Madame Nhu
on the cover of its August 9, 1963 issue. She was seated for a portrait,
with what appears to be the stained glass window of a church behind
her. Her hands are folded in front of her, displaying her long, polished

36 Morgan, 93.
37 “Joan or Lucrezia,” Time, March 23, 1962, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/
0,9171,829109,00.html?promoid=googlep.
38 Orshefsky, 55–64.
34 Beyond Combat

fingernails. Facing the camera, she looks directly at the reader, her face
difficult to decipher – neither smiling nor frowning nor blank. A picture
accompanying the article shows Madame Nhu inspecting the cadets in
the Women’s Paramilitary Corps, her pale ao dai a sharp contrast to
the cadets’ dark uniforms. The picture’s caption notes that “a rap of
her fan is the roll of kettledrums.”39 The next month, Time ran another
article about Madame Nhu, referring to her as “Dragon Lady.” The
reporter stated that, at a press conference, she “displayed an incredibly
fascinating feminine charm. Whether twirling a parasol or hiding shyly
behind an ivory fan, she both attracted and annoyed.” A French reporter
told the Time writer, “I had a strong desire to slap her, but from very,
very close.”40
A few journalist friends remained supportive of Madame Nhu, includ-
ing Clare Booth Luce; Marguerite Higgins, a veteran war correspondent;
and Eugene Gregory, an officer in the U.S. Information Service (USIS)
who, along with his wife, Ann, edited the Times of Vietnam, an English-
language newspaper published in Saigon. However, as Diem continued
to fall out of favor with the Kennedy administration, Madame Nhu’s
relationship with most American reporters grew openly hostile, a pat-
tern exacerbated by the arrival of young journalists such as David Hal-
berstam, Neil Sheehan, and Malcolm Browne, who went to Vietnam
expecting full access to military and government intelligence while also
being unafraid to criticize U.S. policies or the Saigon regime. Halberstam
described Madame Nhu:
Madame Nhu was a strikingly beautiful woman, and she was well-aware of it.
Yet she looked too perfectly manicured . . . to be leading a country at war. Her
speeches rang with appeals to sacrifice, but there was nothing about her that gave
any indication of sacrifice. To me she always resembled an Ian Fleming character
come to life; the anti-goddess, the beautiful but diabolical sex-dictatress who
masterminds some secret apparatus that James Bond is out to destroy. She liked
power and it showed. . . . In contrast to Diem, who was shy and ill at ease in
public, and Nhu, who often seemed indifferent, Madame Nhu had a real zest for
the ceremonies of leadership. She was the only one of the family who walked the
way a dictator should walk – with the flair and obvious enjoyment, trailed by a
line of attendants – turning first to the right, then to the left in acknowledging the
crowd. It was always a virtuoso performance, and a reporter watching felt this
was the way Mussolini must have done it.41

39 Mohr, 21–25.
40 “Dragon Lady, Dragonfly,” Time, September 20, 1963, 33.
41 Antoinette May, Witness to War: A Biography of Marguerite Higgins (New York:
Penguin Books, 1983), 240.
Other documents randomly have
different content
 "Kun nyt pari vuotta sitten (vuonna kuusikymmentä kuusi)
kiellettiin viinan kotipoltto ja viinapannut hävitettiin, lankesivat
muutamat heikkoluontoiset miehet tässäkin saariseurakunnassa
entistä runsaammassa ja yhä lisääntyvässä mitassa harjoittamaan
tuota maallisen ja jumalallisen lain kieltämää häpeällistä
salakuljetusta."

Lisäksi hän selvitti, että kun Korkea Esivalta kielsi viinan kotipolton,
tarkoitti se synninpesien hävittämistä, tapojen parantamista ja
yhteisen kansan onnea. — "Tämä on Jumalan tahto, ja tämä on
Esivallan tahto. Mutta Perkeleen tahto on toinen; sen tahto on, että
kansa elää synnissä ja hekumassa ja menee helvettiin. Niin tapahtui
vanhan testamentin aikana Sodomassa ja Gomorassa. Siellä vallitsi
Perkeleen tahto: Ihmiset siellä söivät, joivat ja naivat — mutta missä
he nyt ovat? Heidän sijansa ei tunne heitä. Minä kysyn: kussa he nyt
ovat? — ja vastaan: heitä ei enää ole maan päällä, eikä heitä ole
saapunut taivaaseenkaan, vaan ovat he kaikki helvetissä. — Niin on
käyvä tämänkin saaren, jonka kansan keskuudesta Perkele on
löytänyt muutamia heikkoluontoisia himonorjia sijaisikseen, jotka nyt
hänen kutsumustaan täyttäen eivät muuta tee kuin kokoavat
itsellensä väärää rikkautta synnintiellä — salakuljetuksella, ja niin on
synti soaissut näiden miesten ja koko heidän perhekuntansa mielet,
ettei sellaista toimintaa enää häpeänäkään pidetä, vaan mies se,
joka enimmän lakia rikkoo ja enimmän salakuljetuksella hyötyy!"

Kirkossa oli syntyä täydellinen hämminki ja häiriö, sillä papin

huutaessa korkealla äänellä: "vaan mies se, joka enimmän lakia
rikkoo ja enimmän salakuljetuksella hyötyy!", kiljaisi Sepän Jere, joka
istui Juuson vieressä parvella: "Niin onkin! Sen sinä kerrankin oikein
sanoit!", josta oli seurauksena seuraava sananvaihto:
 Pappi: Kuka siellä parvella huutaa ja häiritsee jumalanpalvelusta?

Jere: Minä se olen!

Pappi: Kuka minä?

Jere: Sepän Jereksi minua sanotaan.

Pappi: No mitä sinä, Sepän Jere, sitten tahdot?

Jere: Sitä vaan, mitä tässä kaikki miehet tahtovat, että saarnaa
sinä Jumalan sanasta, äläkä salakuljetuksesta, sillä hyvää se tekee
sinullekin ja koko yhteiselle kansalle — se salakuljetus, ja miesten
miehet siihen vain pystyvätkin.

Pappi: Rohkenetko sinä, koira, huutaa tässä kirkossa, että

salakuljetus tekee minulle hyvää, ja sinultako minun on kysyttävä,
mistä minä saan saarnata ja mistä en.

Jere: Ei sinun tarvitse minulta lupaa kysyä, mutta kiellon saat kun
sattuu, ja nyt se sattui, ja tekee se salakuljetus hyvää sinulle,
niinkuin muillekin juopoille!

Miesten puolelta kirkosta kuului useampia huudahduksia: "Oikein!

Se on oikein, Jere!" — sillä seurakunta ei ollut tyytyväinen pappiinsa,
koska hän sen mielestä liian usein kajosi ihmisten yksityiselämään:
milloin kortinpeluuseen, milloin tanssiin, milloin yökulkuun, milloin
juoppouteen, panetteluun, kateuteen ja milloin mihinkin, ja kun
pappi lisäksi itsekin oli juoppo, oli jokaisesta selvää, ettei hänellä
ollut oikeutta saarnata ainakaan juoppoutta ja siihen kuuluvia asioita
vastaan.
 Papin huutaessa: "Tästä tulee käräjäjuttu! Tästä tulee käräjäjuttu!
Oikeuden edessä saatte vastata kirkkorauhan rikkomisesta!", alkoi
kirkosta virrata ulos naisia ja arempia miehiäkin, päästäkseen
joutumasta oikeuteen todistamaan.

Saarnan jatkumisesta ei enää tullut mitään ja siksi pappi heti

käräjäjulistuksensa perästä lausui: "Amen!", siirtyen senjälkeen
lukemaan rukouksia, kuulijakuntanaan vain muutamia miehiä sekä
suntio ja lukkari.

Kirkonmenojen loputtua oli rantaan luotsisillan juureen

kokoontunut noin nelisenkymmentä miestä rantakäräjiä pitämään.

Siinä oli nyt molempien kylien miehiä yhdessä ryhmässä.

Tämä seikka oli harvinaista, sillä kylät olivat alinomaisessa riidassa

keskenään.

Vielä harvinaisempaa oli se, että keskustelu oli aivan yksimielistä,

ja tämä yksimielisyys johtui siitä, että kylien välinen viha ei ollut niin
suuri kuin viha niitä ajatuksia kohtaan, jotka tämänpäiväinen saarna
oli synnyttänyt.

Keskustelu oli järjestymätöntä jupinaa siihen asti kun saapuville

tuli saaren puujalkainen lukkari keppi kädessä ja ontuen. Hän oli
menettänyt jalkansa jo nuoruudessaan eräässä laivarikossa, ja kun
hän ei sittemmin enää kelvannut enemmän laivankannelle kuin
kalahaapioonkaan, lähetettiin hänet kunnan kustannuksella
opiskelemaan lukkariksi. — Köyhä kun hän oli, oltiin varmat siitä,
että hän joka tapauksessa joutuisi kunnan elätiksi, jolloin, jos hän
kauan eläisi, se koituisi kalliimmaksi kuin talven kestävä opiskelu
hiippakunnan pääkaupungissa. Erikoisia laulajan lahjoja hänellä ei
ollut, ja kun hänet ensikertaa vietiin kouluuttajansa eteen ja kun
tämä ensi töikseen oli koettanut hänen laulutaitoaan ja julistanut
saattomiehille että: "Eihän tämä osaa laulaa lainkaan!", olivat
saattomiehet vastanneet: "Eihän sitä olisi tänne tuotukaan, jos se
nyt jo osaisi! Siitä syystähän se juuri tänne tuotiinkin, kun ei se
laulaa osaa ja kun me tarvitsemme lukkarin. Ja koska tältä on toinen
jalka pois, eikä kykene merelle, jäisi se kunnan elätettäväksi — nuori
mies — eksä ymmärrä?" — "Kyllä ymmärrän, kyllä ymmärrän, kyllä
ymmärrän", oli vastannut se päälukkari, lukkarien kouluuttaja,
"mutta minä luulen ettei tästä miehestä laulajaa tulekaan, vielä
vähemmin soittajaa." — "No koettaa nyt vaan!" olivat saattomiehet
sanoneet, ja niin hän jäi kuin jäikin "peluukouluun", kuten hän itse
myöhemmin, etenkin humalapäissään, nimitti sitä laitosta
hiippakunnan pääkaupungissa, missä hän oli yhden talvensa
viettänyt.

Lukkaria nimittivät omaiset ja ystävät puusedäksi ja vihamiehet

kämpäksi — johtuen molemmat nimet hänen puujalastaan — tai
oikeastaan kahdesta puujalasta, sillä hänellä oli aina keppi
välttämättömänä toverinaan — kun taas Kämpän nimi erikoisesti
muistutti hänen omituista, "kämppäävää", joka toisella askelella
nytkähtävää kävelyään.

Lukkari oli ollut pahoissa vihoissa papin kanssa jo toistakymmentä

vuotta. Mistä lieneekään riita alkanut, mutta ainakin pappi
puolestaan koetti pitää sitä yhä eteenkin päin vireillä, panemalla
lukkarin laulettavaksi sellaisia virsiä, joita tämä ei osannut edes
laulaa, saati sitten soittaa.

Tähän aikaan lukkari oli vanha mies, kuudenkymmenen korvilla.

Hänellä oli iso perhe ja jonkin verran varallisuuttakin. Viimemainittu
seikka on erittäin merkittävä, sillä useammin kuin yhden kerran on
sanottu, ettei mennyt hukkaan se raha, mikä pantiin lukkarin
koulutukseen: kunta säästyi yhdestä vaivaisesta ja sai
mukiinmenevän — saarelaiskannalta katsoen mainionkin — lukkarin,
ja lisäksi vaatesepänkin, sillä lukkariksi opiskellessaan oli hän koko
talven käynyt väliaikoinaan erään kaupunkilaisen ompelijamestarin
luona opiskelemassa ompelua ja saavuttanutkin siinä ammatissa
sellaisen kätevyyden, että kykeni pitämään saaren sulhaset ja muun
mieskansan vaatteissa. Lisäksi hän oli teräväpäinen ja luki ahkerasti
lainopillisia kirjoja ja oli senvuoksi saarensa ainoa lakimies ja
asiakirjojen kirjoittaja, sekä vielä kaiken kukkuraksi ainoa apu
tapaturmissa, milloin sattui luun murtumisia, tai joltain meni jäsen
sijoiltaan, saatiin haavoja, tapahtui käärmeenpuremia, pyörtymistä,
tarvittiin virvoittaa hukkuneita tai mitä muuta hyvänsä. Toimipa hän
myöskin jok'ainoan kuolinpesän selvitysmiehenä ja
perunkirjoittajana. Vieläpä hän sai kokoonpanna yksityiskirjeitä,
tyttöjen kirjeitä merimiehille, ja monenmoisia muita, ja koska hän
jokaisesta pienimmästäkin työstään otti palkan, kerääntyi hänelle, ei
ainoastaan iloisia ja terveitä lapsia ja lasten lapsia, vaan myöskin
maallista mammonaa: tavaraa ja rahaa.

Hän oli keskikokoinen mies. Hänen kasvonsa olivat punakat

vanhuksen kasvot. Parta oli valkea ja poskilta ajettu. Hiukset olivat
myös valkeat — nimittäin siellä missä niitä vielä oli: pieni seppele
korvasta korvaan takaraivon yli.

Laulumiehenä hänen oli oltava läsnä kaikissa häissä, hautajaisissa,

ristiäisissä ja muissa juhlissa.

Ensimmäisen totilasin juotuaan hän sekoitti puheeseensa

vironkieltä.
 Toisen lasin juotuaan hän puhui pelkkää viroa ja kolmannen lasin
lopulla sekä sitä seuraavan lasin aikana ranskaa, joksi nimitettiin
hänen omituisia nenä-ääniään, joita ei kukaan ymmärtänyt.
Viidennen lasin aikana hän itki sitä mikä hänestäkin olisi tullut, ellei
olisi joutunut peluukouluun: "Kunnanvaivainen — uu uu —
kunnanvaivainen!"

Yöllä, häistä kotiinpalatessaan, hän hukkasi keppinsä häätalon

ulkoportaissa, ja kompastui suin päin lähimpään puroon, joka, alkaen
ylhäältä vuoristosta, virtasi läpi kylän ja jonka yli aivan lukkarin talon
lähellä johti kaiteeton kivisilta. Kompastuessaan hän pudotti
puujalkansa puroon joko kivisillan ylä- tai alapuolelle, saaden sitten
kulkea ryömimällä loppumatkan kotiinsa, jonka oven takana hän
alkoi huutaa apua. Itkukohtauksensa jälkeen hän nimittäin
varustautui lähtemään salaa yksin kotiinsa, sanomatta siitä mitään
vaimolleen, tyttärelleen, pojalleen tai muille läsnäolijoille. Näin kävi
aina. Se oli hänen tapansa. Lukkari siis tulla kamppaili pitkin
rantakujaa kotoaan päin ja lähestyi miesjoukkoa.

— No. Mitäs tuumasitte papin saarnasta tänään? kysyi lukkari.

— Mitäs sinä itse siitä tuumasit?, kysyi joku joukosta.

— Mitäs minä tuumasin muuta kuin että taisi se ukkopaha sanoa

vähän liikaa.

— No olikos mielestäs se sitten liikaa, mikä parvelta kuultiin? kysyi

Sepän Jere nauraa höröttäen, ja toiset miehet, varsinkin nuoremmat,
nauroivat samalla tavalla ja kovasti kiljahdellen kuten Jerekin.
Kohteliaisuudesta Jereä kohtaan, joka oli päivänsankari, he sen
tekivät.
 Lukkari: No no! No no! Liika on aina liikaa!

Jere: Olinkos mielestäs väärässä?

Lukkari: Enhän minä sitä ole sanonut kumpiko oli väärässä sinä vai
pappiko. Minä vain sanoin että liika on aina liikaa ja sanon sen
vieläkin. Olkoon asian laita niin tai näin — enkä minä sitä väitäkään,
että sinä väärässä olisit ja pappi oikeassa — mutta se on liikaa, että
kuka hyvänsä avaa suunsa jumalanpalveluksen aikana. Minä ja pappi
- se on toinen asia, mutta sinun pitäisi tietää pitää suusi kiinni
kirkossa, paitsi virren aikana.

Ääniä joukosta: Jere oli oikeassa!

Lukkari: Oikeassa! Enhän minäkään sitä ole sanonut, ettei hän olisi
oikeassa.

Matsedän Jyri: Kuulkasta pojat! Minä olen sitä mieltä, että meidän
olisi kiellettävä pappi saarnaamasta salakuljetuksesta. Eihän ne
sellaiset asiat kuulu papille eikä kirkkoon.

Lukkari: Ei kuulukaan. Siinä sinä olet oikeassa, mutta minkäs sille

teet. Saarnaa mistä haluaa.

Matsedän Jyri: Onhan täällä kirkkoneuvosto ja onhan sitäpaitsi

tuomiokapituli, johon voi valittaa.

Sepän Jere: Vallasväen metkuja kaikki! Saarnuuttavat papilla

omaksi hyväkseen ja meillä maksattavat palkan! Kyllä tämä virsi jo
osataan. Ja mitäs luulet lukkari sen lain olevan, jolla viinankeitto
kiellettiin? Ei mitään muuta kuin herrojen metkuja. Koiranhäntää ne
sillä kansaa tahtovat parantaa! Omaksi hyväkseen tekivät lain, jonka
turvissa saavat laittaa olut- ja viinatehtaitaan joka kaupunkiin.
Pelkkää vääryyttä! Vai mitä arvelet, lukkari?

Lukkari: Mitäs minä arvelen. Enhän minä mitään muuta arvele,

kuin että eivät ne viina- ja oluttehtaat menestyisi, jos kansa saisi
polttaa viinaa itse.

"Eivät menestyisi, eivät menestyisi"! huusi koko joukko.

Lukkari: Ja siitä syystä se on väärin, että pappi, jolle me

maksamme palkan, saarnaa ja saarnaa salakuljetusta vastaan, siis
vallasväen hyväksi. Eiköhän asia ole niin, että kun vallat yrittävät,
niin talonpojan on myöskin yritettävä! Laki hävitti talonpojilta
kotipolton, jotta sensijaan viinatehtaat eläisivät. Kun kotipoltto oli
lainmukaista ja kun se meiltä vietiin vääryydellä pois, niin ei minun
ymmärtääkseni salakuljetus ole kuin hyvä ja laillinen asia. Sillä
tavalla minä sen lain ymmärrän.

"No, sinähän sen paremmin ymmärrät. Kukas tässä sitä paremmin

ymmärtäisi", kuului taas joukosta.

Sepän Jere: No ja mitäs tämä pappi sitten menee saarnaamaan

sillä tavalla, että se laki tahtoo parantaa kansaa!

Eräs ääni: Omia kukkaroitaan ne tahtovat parantaa — on ne niin

viisaita.

Sepän Jere: Ja siitä syystä tämä salakuljetus on kansan asia.

Tullisyökärit ja muut sellaiset ovat vain vallasväen juonia meitä
vastaan!

"Se on oikein! Se on oikein", huusi koko miesjoukko kuin kuorossa.

 Lukkari: Ja onkos tämäkin oikein, että pappi rettelöi ja sekaantuu
asioihin, jotka eivät hänelle kuulu! Saarnatkoon mitä papin pitää
saarnata, älköönkä sekaantuko tähän meidän asiaan. Kyllä minä
vielä sanon sille kovat sanat. Maltahan, kun ensi kerran hänet
tapaan, niin kyllä minä hänelle sanelen, että muistaa. Minullekin hän
on tehnyt vääryyttä. Mitäs kun tänäänkin pani sellaiset virret, joita ei
lauleta missään kirkossa! Ja monta muuta konnankoukkua —
pelkkää kiusantekoa! Olen jo monta kertaa aikonut sille antaa
sellaisen läksytyksen, että muistaisi ja tietäisi kenen kanssa on
tekemisissä, mutta tähän asti olen sitä vielä armahtanut. Mutta on
minunkin sydämeni jo niin täynnä kiukkua, etten enää voi sitä sietää.
Minä en jätä sitä haukkumatta, ensi kerran tavatessamme — vaikka
sitten sakastissa tai vaikka kaiken kansan kuullen avonaisen haudan
partaalla tai häissä tai missä hyvänsä. Minä en sitä pappia enää
armahda — en totta vie armahdakaan! Mutta mitäs tuumaat,
Hinterikin Juuso, sinä itse pääluntreijari?! Sinähän olet ollut ääneti
koko ajan?

Juuso: Minä olen tässä vain tyytyväisenä kuunnellut, että jopa

alkavat muidenkin silmät aueta näkemään, että salakuljetus on
kunniavirka. Minä olen sen tiennyt jo aikoja sitten! Jos tässä olisi
puhuttu salakuljetusta vastaan, niin kyllä sitten minäkin olisin suuni
aukaissut ja olisittepahan silloin kuulleet! Mutta mitäs minulla nyt on
sanomista? Ei mitään. Minä olen tyytyväinen, ja tyytyväinen on vaiti.
Mutta sinua, lukkari, minä vähän ihmettelen, kuinka sinä jaksat
sietää tuota pappia vuodesta vuoteen ja annat hänen menetellä
kanssasi miten hän vain ikinä haluaa. Sinä olet raukka! Kun pappi on
kaukana niin silloin sinä kyllä olet mies uhkailemaan, mutta kun hän
on edessäsi, olet sinä valmis vaikka suutelemaan hänen
kengänkärkiään. Jos pappi sakastissa sanoisi: 'Lukkari! Ryömi
nelinkontin täältä urkuparvelle!' niin sinä ryömisit. Niin, jumalaut'
ryömisitkin! Sinä olet melko arka mies. On noita sinun uhkauksiasi
ennenkin kuultu!

Lukkari: Arka mies. Arka mies! Ei se arkuutta ole, vaan

kärsivällisyyttä. Minä olen hyväluontoinen mies, enkä hanki riitaa,
mutta nyt on sydämeni niin täysi, etten enää voi vaieta. Minä
menenkin nyt suoraa päätä pappilaan, ja jos haluatte lähteä
kuuntelemaan mitä minä hänelle sanon, niin saatte kyllä tulla
mukaan.

Lukkari oli niin kiukkua täynnä, että häneltä lopulta sanat tahtoivat
salpaantua kurkkuun. Hän änkytti ja tavoitteli ja kertaili sanojaan
sekä huitoi ilmaa käsillään ja kepillään.

Hänen viimeisten sanojensa aikana nähtiin papin tulevan pitkin

rantakujaa samalta suunnalta mistä lukkarikin oli saapunut äsken.
Hän oli tavallisella kirkkokahvin jälkeisellä virkistyskävelyllään ja
lähestyi nyt miehiä. Usein hän teki niin. Hän olisi halunnut kuulla,
mistä miehet rantakäräjillä juttelivat, mutta siinä yrityksessään hän
ei koskaan onnistunut. Kun papin tulo huomattiin, sanoi joku
lukkarille:

— No — muista nyt uhkauksesi ja pane se kerrankin täytäntöön!

— Kyllä mi…

Pappi pysähtyi miesten eteen.

Naapurikylän miehet olivat aikoja sitten hiipineet haapioihinsa ja

soutivat jo poispäin satamasta. Osa kirkonkylän miehiä oli myöskin
poistunut paikalta. He kävelivät kuka millekin suunnalle kotejaan
kohti, kädet housuntaskuissa ja piippu hampaissa. Paikalle jäi vain
lukkari ja neljä, viisi muuta vanhempaa miestä, kirkkoneuvoston
jäseniä, joten eivät siis iljenneet paeta pappiaan.

Tämä aloitti puheen:

— Jaaha. Hyvää päivää, hyvää päivää! Mitäs ne miehet tässä

tuumivat?

— Jumal'antakoon!

Seurasi pitkä vaitiolo. Sitten lukkari sanoi:

— Tässä vain katsellaan säätä, että tuleeko verkkoilma ensi yöksi.

Mitä pastori luulee, tuleekohan siitä yöksi tormi?

— Tjaa! Minä en osaa siihen asiaan sanoa mitään. Niin tyhmä olen
vielä näissä meriasioissa. Minun täytyy todellakin tunnustaa, etten
osaa sanoa kerrassaan mitään.

— No — eihän se kuulu pastorin ammattiinkaan. Me tässä kyllä

olemme katselleet ja tuumineet, että kun veti tuon taivaan noin
hikiseksi ja umeaksi ja päiväkin paistaa kuin avannosta, ja kun
merikin on noussut koko aamupäivän, niin ei siitä muu voi tulla kuin
tormi. Tormia ja sadetta se nyt hakee, ei taida olla ihmisillä ensi yönä
asiaa verkoille.

— Jaaha, jaaha. Voihan se niinkin olla. — Parhaitenhan sen

ymmärrätte te, jotka olette koko elämänne olleet meren kanssa
tekemisissä. — Minun tässä pitää vähän vielä terveydeksi kävellä
ennen päivällistä, että ruoka maittaisi paremmin. — No niin. Hyvästi
vaan ja Herran haltuun, Herran haltuun!
 Hän kätteli kutakin erikseen ja alkoi sitten hitaasti kävellä
eteenpäin pitkin rantatietä.

Miehet jäivät ääneti tupakoimaan ja katselemaan merelle päin.

*****

Juuso tovereineen souti hyvää vauhtia kotiinpäin.

Heillä oli edessään runsas tunnin soutu.

Oli miltei tyyni ja täytyi siis soutaa koko matka.

He soutivat ääneti.

Heillä ei ollut mitään keskusteltavaa. Kukin hautoi omia

ajatuksiaan. Alussa he nauroivat lukkarin kiihkoilulle ja uhkauksille.
Se oli niin hänen tapaistaan ja täysin vaaratonta.

Sen jälkeen he luultavasti kaikki miettivät aivan samoja asioita,

nimittäin kokemuksiaan ja kuulemiaan kirkossa sekä äskeistä
keskustelua rannalla. Ne ainakin pyörivät Juuson aivoissa.

Hän ajatteli veljeään Anterusta ja sitä mitä pappi kirkossa oli

puhunut salakuljetuksesta. Sattuivat niin hyvin yhteen se mitä pappi
oli sanonut ja mitä veli oli kirjoittanut. Olihan velikin kirjeessään
nimittänyt salakuljetusta 'meriemme häpeäksi' sekä lausunut: 'Ensi
keväänä luulen tuon inhoittavan salakuljetuksen loppuvan'.

Helkkarin hyvin se todellakin kävi yhteen papin tämänpäiväisen

saarnan kanssa, ajatteli Juuso. — Velimiehellä mahtaa jo olla
osuuksia viinatehtaissakin, sillä mitäpä muutakaan varten hän niin
kiivailisi salakuljetusta vastaan ja ennustelisi sen pikaista häviämistä.
Hän on herra ja hänellä on herran ajatukset. Hänen etunsa eivät ole
minun etujani, vaan ne ovat aivan samat kuin muidenkin herrojen!

Juusosta tuntui, että hän etääntyy veljestään yhä kauemmaksi ja

että he jo nyt kuuluvat eri joukkoihin, jotka taistelevat keskenään.
"Ja nytpä sitä vasta yritetäänkin!" hän vihdoin sähähti miltei ääneen.

Sitten sekaantui hänen ajatuksiinsa toisia kokemuksia ja

mielikuvia, jotka saattoivat hänet alakuloiseksi.

Hän oli istunut koko kirkkoajan miesten parvella.

Santra oli istunut alhaalla kirkossa Juusoa vastapäätä.

He olivat katselleet toisiaan koko ajan.

Juusosta oli tuntunut, että Santra katseli häntä lempeänä ja

surullisena ja näytti ikäänkuin hän olisi tahtonut sanoa: "Minä ikävöin
sinua ja minulla olisi sinulle paljon sanottavaa, ja sinullakin
luultavasti on sanottavaa minulle."

Juuso tuli yhä enemmän vakuutetuksi siitä että Santra tulisi hyvin
iloiseksi, jos saisi tilaisuuden puhella hänen kanssaan kahdenkesken.
Senvuoksi Juuso piti tarkoin silmällä milloin Santra lähti kirkosta, ja
hän riensi heti perässä, koettaen kohdata hänet kirkkotarhassa.
Siellä Santra seisoikin ulkona, naisten puoleisen oven luona eräiden
kirkonkylän tyttöjen seurassa. Juuso läheni tyttöjä ja yritti puhutella
Santraa, mutta tämä kääntyi selin Juusoon ja alkoi nauraa tyttöjen
kanssa. Sen vain ennätti Juuso kuulla, että muuan tytöistä kysyi:
"Mutta tunsitteko, tytöt, sitä naapurikylän poikaa, joka yritti ruveta
saarnaamaan kilpaa papin kanssa? Hahaha!" Ja sitten alkoivat tytöt
kävellä poispäin nauraen minkä jaksoivat. Silloin oli Juuso päättänyt,
ettei hän sinä ilmoisna ikinä enää tästä lähtien ole niin tuhma että
pyrkisi Santran puheille. Tämän päätöksensä hän nyt vielä
soutaessaan kertasi mielessään vannomalla vannoen, että niin se
asia olkoon — ja souti jotta airot norjuivat.
VIII.

EUPPE.

Neljä vuotta on kulunut.

Tällä aikaa on Juuso menestynyt hyvin. Hän on ansainnut paljon

rahaa, mutta on myöskin sitä runsaammin menettänyt, sillä hän on
yltynyt entistä enemmän juomaan, jonka vuoksi hän on viime
aikoina tuonut kotiin paljon vähemmän kuin ennen. Hän on liikkeellä
varhaisesta keväästä myöhään syksyyn. Heinäkuun puolivälissä hän
kuitenkin aina säännöllisesti on pari viikkoa kotona. Silloin vedetään
jaala maalle, se raapataan sisältä ja ulkoa sekä tervataan ja
maalataan uudestaan. Mastot ja muut purjepuut raapataan myös
huolellisesti ja sivellään hylkeenrasvaöljyllä.

Keväällä Juuso lähtee jaaloineen jo jäiden sekaan. Ensimmäiset

retket keväällä ovatkin tuottavampia kuin matkat keskikesän aikaan,
jolloin valoisat yöt ja kauniit ilmat ovat haittana. Kaikkein
tuottavimpia ovat kuitenkin loka- marras- ja joulukuu. Kerran,
saavuttuaan jouluksi kotiin, Juuso puheli siitä seikasta miehille
rannassa ja sanoi: "Muita kuukausia ei almanakassa tarvitsisi
ollakaan!"
 Syksyisin ei Juuso koskaan tullut kotiin ennenkuin juuri päivää tai
useinkin vasta vain muutamia tunteja ennen meren jäätymistä.
Monasti oli jo merenpinta täynnä lumisohjua, joka teki aallon
raskaaksi ja voimakkaaksi. Viimeisen paluunsa kotiin hän tavallisesti
teki koillistuulella, läpi hyytävän meripöllyn. Tavallisesti meni sitten
meri jäähän jo seuraavana, tai ainakin sitä seuraavana päivänä.

Toiset jaalat olivat useimmiten jo silloin kaikki talviteloillaan, ja kun

miehet jonain joulukuun aamuna seisoskelivat jonkin ranta-aitan tai
saraimen varjossa, jolloin kylmä koillisviima puhalsi, meripölly liiteli
sen mukana ja aaltojen hyrskyt jäädyttelivät alempia teloja,
rantakiviä ja kallioita ja jolloin näköala merellepäin supistui enää vain
muutamiin kymmeniin syliin, voi joku heistä lopettaa äänettömän
jörötyksen lausahtamalla piippunsa ohi:

— Tämä on jo kolmas meripölly tänä syksynä. Eiköhän tuo jo ala

jäädyttää merta?, johon toinen, viitsimättä hänkään ottaa piippua
suustaan — kädet olivat niin mukavasti lyhyen turkin taskuissa —
vastaa:

— Jokos Hinterikin Juuso sitten on tullut kotiin?

— Ei kuulu vielä tulleen.

— No, älä sitten puhu mitään jäätymisestä! Eivät ne enää tähän

maailmanaikaan sellaiset vanhojen merkit kuin meripöllyt ja muut
pidä kutiaan. Hinterikin Juosepista nyt kaikki riippuu! Sitä se nyt
seuraa jääkin, eikä suinkaan meripöllyä. Luulek'sä, että meri jäätyy
ennenkuin Hinterikin Juoseppi ennättää kotiin! Nyt ovat toiset
merkit, ek'sä sitä ymmärrä! Kun jonain kauniina päivänä näet
meripöllyn katoavan ja huomaat merellä jaalan, jota et vielä äsken
meripöllyltä eroittanut, täysin purjein, keula vaahtoavana, tulevan
kotiinpäin, niin voit arvata, että se on Hinterikin Juoseppi. Ja silloin
vasta — ei ennen — sanotaan: "Nyt tyyntyy ja tulee talvi." — Eivätkä
ne jäät keväälläkään taas ota oikein meressä sulaakseen, ennenkuin
Hinterikin Juoseppi ennättää jaaloineen sinne sekaan. Mutta
silloinpas heti ne alkavat sulaa ja hävitä. Sillä on hyvä onni, tällä
Hinterikin Juosepilla. Harvoin se joutuu tullimiestenkään kanssa
yhteen, ja jos sattuukin, niin aina hän selviää niistä ilman käräjiä.

— Se antaa rahaa tullimiehille.

— Sitä minä en usko.

— Usko tai ole uskomatta, ei se asiaa muuta. Minä tunnen

sellaisen miehen, joka on itse nähnyt, kun Juoseppi kerran Viron
reisun aikana antoi kaksi tuhatta Kipuna-Syökärille.

— Sinun luullaksesi Juoseppi varmaan antaa rahaa merellekin,

sanoen: Älä hyvä meri jäädy vielä, ennenkuin saan tämän
jaalankantamuksen turvaan! Hö-hö-hö!

Ja koko miesjoukko rannalla yhtyy nauruun.

— Entä jos antaakin! Hänen suvussaanhan, kuulemma, on

edesmenneinä aikona ollut noitia, jotka luovuttivat merelle hopeaa
tarvitessaan tuulta tai tyyntä tai halutessaan saada meren jotenkin
muuten noudattamaan tahtoaan. En minä yhtään epäile, etteikö
Juusokin jotain konstia meren kanssa pitäisi, koska hänelle aina käy
niin hyvin sielläkin missä toisille sattuu huonosti. Jotainhan siinä
täytyi olla!

*****
 Mikko purjehtii yhä edelleen Juuson kanssa yhdessä, pysyen
Juuson uskollisena seuralaisena loppuun asti — nimittäin tämän
kuolemaan saakka.

Sepän Jere sen sijaan on jättänyt "Vesan" — eikä ainoastaan

"Vesaa", vaan koko saaren ja Suomen vedet. Hän purjehtii
ulkomerillä ja hänet on viimeksi nähty San Franciscon
merimieskapakassa. Siellä oli hänet tavannut puolen tusinaa
suomalaista, kaikki tuttuja hänen edelliseltä merimiesajaltaan.

— Hoo! Täällähän on vanhoja tuttuja koko pöytäkunta! oli Jere

huudahtanut ja sitten toisten pyynnöstä kertonut:

— Purjehdinhan minä jo siellä kotipuolessa muutamia vuosia

luntreijarina ja ansaitsin koko hyvin, mutta muuten kävi elämä
sietämättömäksi…

— No?!

— Täytyi asua kapteenin kanssa kajuutassa, kun siinä laivassa ei

ollut skanssia, ja niinkuin tiedätte, en minä voi sietää sellaista
seuraa.

— Hahahaha!

— Ja pahinta oli se, että siinä virassa joutui joskus seilaamaan

jäälautalla monia vuorokausia — ja se oli vähän ikävänpuoleista
hommaa, koska jäälauttaa ei voi ohjata. Kerrankin tehtiin
luntreijausretki Suomenlahdelta Danzigiin jäälautalla myrskyssä,
pakkasessa ja lumipyryssä. — Minä jätin sen homman tuhmemmille
miehille. — Sitten olin puoli vuotta eräässä yksimastoisessa, mutta
kun se kulki niin helkkarin huonosti ja kun minä en ole tottunut
seilaamaan yksimastoisessa, ja kun — ajatelkaa! — kuuden
kuukauden perästä oltiin siinä samassa paikassa kuin minun siihen
lotjaan tullessani, niin minä kyllästyin olooni siinä, laskin veneen
vesille ja karkasin. Nyt sitten olen tässä. — No, kippis pojat!

Yksimastoisella Jere tarkoitti Ruuskeria, kahdeksantoista kilometrin

päässä hänen kotisaarestaan, sen länsipuolella olevaa pientä,
soikeata karia, jossa on korkeatorninen loisto. Jere oli ollut siellä
loistonvartijana kolmen muun miehen ja päällikön kanssa, mutta
palveltuaan näin syksystä kevääseen, kuusi kuukautta, hän aikaiseen
keväällä ensi avovedellä, eräänä sumuisena yönä karkasi.
Myöhemmin elämässään ei Jere Ruuskeria koskaan maininnut muulla
nimellä kuin "Yksmastoinen".

Eskon Mikko sen sijaan pysyi uskollisena Juusolle kesät talvet:

kesät purjehtimassa ja talvet apulaisena metsässä hakkaamassa
kotitarvehalkoja. Myöskin oli Mikko aina hänen yhtenä toverinaan
hylkeen pyyntiretkillä, joihin Juuso otti osaa joka talvi samoin kuin
Mikko auttoi häntä myöskin viinan ja silkin kuljetuksessa Heikkilän
toisella hevosella jäisin yli meren.

*****

On myöhä syksy, joulunalusviikko, vuonna kahdeksantoistasataa ja

kaksi kahdeksatta.

Puhaltaa kylmä koillistuuli ja keskellä merta on jouduttu niin

sakeaan meripöllyyn, että on pimeämpää kuin synkimmässä
sumussa. On mahdotonta nähdä mitään. Jaalan keularyöhä, joka
nopeasti kulkevan jaalan keulassa syntyy ja jakautuu vinosti ulospäin
sen molemmille puolille, häipyy näkymättömiin meripöllyn taakse.
 Juuso ja Mikko istuvat alhaalla kajuutassa. Juuso käy toisinaan
pilkistämässä kajuutan luukusta tuulta, purjeita ja aluksen kulkua,
jota ohjaa aluksen nuorin mies, Sepän Jeren seuraaja, Mikon
veljenpoika, Eskon Api, yhdeksäntoistavuotias nuorukainen, jolle
Juuso ennustaa loistavaa tulevaisuutta salakuljettajana, mutta joka
itse uneksii mennä ulkomerille, päästä merikouluun ja saada laivan
päämiehen lakki.

Alhaalla kajuutassa keskustelivat Juuso ja Mikko vakavista asioista.

Juuso valitteli yksinäisyyttään ja odotettavissa olevaa ikävää talvea
sekä että "ei tämä elämä ala olla minkään arvoista".

— Mitä tämä oikeastaan hyödyttää? Kuljetaan tällä tavalla kylmissä

säissä, myrskyissä, sateissa ja sumuissa ihan kuin tyhjää takaa-
ajamassa! Ihmisen elämä on sentään kummallista! Joudutaan tänne
maan päälle eleskelemään mikä maamiehenä peltoa kyntämään,
mikä kalastajana verkkoja vetämään, tai mikä minäkin tulemaan ja
menemään. Sitten kuluu muutama vuosikymmen, ja maan päällä on
taas kokonaan uudet kyntäjät ja uudet verkonvetäjät. On somaa
pyörimistä tämä elämä! — Alamme jo tässä mekin vanheta, Mikko, ja
se on pahinta!

— Mitäs pahaa siinä on! Eilen vanheni isäni, tänään vanhenen

minä. Sinä ajattelet ja tuumit turhan paljo! Kuulehan! Minun
mielestäni sinulle olisi hankittava eukko, ja nyt jo tänä talvena.

— Sehän ei ole niin yksinkertaista.

— Ovathan tuon osanneet muut tuhmemmatkin!

Tästä asiasta riitti sitten keskustelua koko loppumatkaksi.

 Vähän väliä tokaisi Mikko, päätään ravistellen:

— Ei, mutta muija sinulle on etsittävä jo ensi talvena mistä

hyvänsä! Katsohan, sinä, niinkuin sanottu, et enää ole varsin nuori,
vaan alat jo vanheta. Sinä perit isäsi rikkaudet — mutta kuka ne
sinulta perii, sitä et tiedä, ellei sinulla ole lapsia.

— Mitä sinä puhut isän perimisestä? Muistahan, että minulla on

velikin, Anterus nimittäin.

— No, vaikka onkin, niin eihän Anterus kaikkea saa — osa se on

sinullakin. Sitäpaitsi, jos isäsi on oikeudenmukainen, niin hän antaa
kaiken omaisuutensa sinulle, sillä sinähän sen olet hankkinutkin.
Anterus — mikä hän on? Hunsvotti ja lesken kapteeni! No no, älä
pane pahaksesi, vaikka sanonkin veljestäsi sen, mikä hän
todellisuudessa on! Pitäisi vaan sanoa enemmänkin. — Jos minä
olisin isäsi, niin kirjoittaisin testamentin näin kuuluvaksi: "Koska
poikani Anterus ei ole ollut kotona sitten kuin varhaisessa
lapsuudessaan, eikä ole tuonut taloon muuta kuin harmia…"

— Soo! Mitä harmia?

— … "muuta kuin harmia, määrään minä poikani Juosepin, joka on

kaiken ikänsä luonani asunut, nuhteettomasti minua palvellut ja
kaiken rahan ja omaisuuden talooni hankkinut, yksinperijäkseni". —
No niin. — Niin minä kirjoittaisin. — Jaa, että mitäkö harmia? Sitä en
minäkään tiedä, mutta ne sanat pitäisi välttämättä testamentissa
olla. Ja eiköhän hän vaan harmiakin liene tuottanut! Sinun äitisi ei
koskaan valita. Ääneti hän kulkee askareillaan, keittiössä ja
navetassa. Aamulla on ensimmäisenä ylhäällä ja illalla menee
viimeisenä vuoteeseen. — Harmia! No niin. Kirjoitetaan sitten vaikka
"surua", sillä kyllä kai äidilläsi on Anteruksesta surua ollut!
 — Kyllähän sinä testamentteja kirjoittaisit — jos osaisit ja ne sinun
tehtäviksesi jätettäisiin.

— Piru vie! Minä sinun sijassasi vaatisin juuri sellaisen

testamentin.

— Älkäämme nyt puhuko siitä! Sen sijaan voisit jo vihdoin

ilmoittaa, kun kerran olet minulle viimeaikoina niin kiivaasti eukkoa
tyrkyttänyt, ketä sinä oikeastaan aiot minulle eukoksi tarjota. — No,
annas kuulua!

— Olisihan tuo teidän entinen palveluspiikanne Santra komea

ihminen ja hyvä työntekijä, ja iloiset sillä on silmätkin sekä
ruumiiltaan terve ja norja…

— Ei kelpaa! Muita!

— Kerrotaan muuten, että sinä jo olet kosaissutkin sitä, mutta sait

rukkaset, ja siitä syystä Santra teiltä läksi.

— Hahahahah! Johan sinä lörpötät kuin akat!

— Akat!?

— Niin niin.

— No — minä nyt annan sen sanan sinulle anteeksi. — Vai akat!

— Niin niin. Anna tulla muita vaalipappeja, niin äänestetään!

— No — onhan siinä sitten tuo naapurin Euppe.

— Naapurin Euppe! Olek'sä ihan hullu!

 — Jaa — jos et sinä häntä nai, niin nain minä!

— Ha ha ha ha — älähän uhkaile! Ei se tässä auta mitään!

Tämän keskustelun aikana oli Juuso loikoillut koijassaan ja Mikko

istunut lähellä kamiinaa keittämässä iltapäiväteetä. Juuso lopetti
keskustelun sanomalla Mikolle:

— Lopeta jo nuo naimapuheesi, ja katso, eikö se tee jo ala

valmistua!

— Valmista on. Nouse vain juomaan! — Kyllä minä puhemieheksi

rupean. Sano vain, milloin on tarvis, niin kyllä tämä poika on valmis
sinulle kosimaan vaikka omaa morsiantaan.

Mikko otti pöytäkaapista kolme mukia ja sokeriastian ja asetti ne

pöydälle, kaataen höyryävää teetä kuhunkin mukiin.

Vaikka kello olikin vasta kolme, alkoi meripöllyn vuoksi jo niin

hämärtää, että täytyi sytyttää rasvalamppu palamaan. Samoin
sytytettiin kompassilamppu peränpitäjää varten.

Tuntia myöhemmin selveni meripölly niin paljon, että voitiin nähdä

oman saaren loistot ja ohjata alus niiden johdolla satamaan.

Kosimisesta ei kuitenkaan tullut sinä talvena mitään.

Tansseissa Juuso kuitenkin kävi tavallista useammin ja tapasi

niissä
Eupen joka kerta.

Eräänä iltana maaliskuun lopulla läksi Juuso tanssien päätyttyä

saattamaan Euppea kotiin.
 Euppe sattui kävelemään yksin, joka oli harvinaista. Tavallisesti
häntä seurasi joukko poikia ja tyttöjä.

Kuu paistoi korkealla taivaalla.

Juuso joudutti askeleitaan, mutta Euppe joudutti myös — hän jo

miltei juoksi.

— Minne sinulla on kiire!, huusi Juuso.

— Sinua pakoon — hihihi, nauroi Euppe ja alkoikin tosissaan

juosta.

Kilpajuoksu jatkui typö tyhjiä kujia pitkin Eupen kotiportille asti.

Siinä sai Juuso siepatuksi hänet kiinni ja he jäivät portille seisomaan
sylitysten.

Kovan juoksun vuoksi oli molempien hengitys nopeaa. Kului pitkä

aika ennenkuin kumpikaan alkoi puhua. Lopulta sanoi Euppe:

— No?

— Mitä no? kysyi Juuso.

— Miltäs tuntuu?

— Mikä?

— No, tämä seisominen?

— Sei-so-minen?

— Niin niin. Tuntuuko mieleltäsi hyvältäkin?

 — Mitäs tuntumista tässä olisi?

— Ihan turhan vuoksiko sinä sitten juoksitkin? Minä ajattelin, että

sinä et tee mitään, josta et hyödy.

— Tuntumisen vuoksiko sinä itse sitten asetuit tähän seisomaan?

— En.

— No mitäs varten?

— Saadakseni sanoa sinulle erään asian kahden kesken. Kuulehan!

Minä olen tänä talvena usein tavannut kirkonkylässä Santran.

— Santran!

— Niin. Taisit vähän hätkähtää! No, ei se ole mitään vaarallista.

Olen käynyt usein tänä talvena kirkossa, saadakseni jutella Santran
kanssa. Kun viimeksi, viikko tapakerin, puhelin hänen kanssaan —
Santra saattoi minua lähes puoli matkaa — kerroin hänelle kuinka
sinä viikko viikolta ikävöidessäsi häntä laihdut ja kuihdut niin, ettei
sinua enää kohta tunne entisekseen. Silloin Santra, tuo pienokainen,
rupesi sen johdosta niin kovasti itkemään, että minä pelkäsin hänen
vallan taittavan niskansa. Sitten ei Santra enää jaksanut edes
kävellä, vaan jäi istumaan kivelle tien viereen. Ei kättänsäkään
antanut minulle jäähyväisiksi. Niin suuri on rakkaus — Juuso!

— Mutta eihän tuo voi olla totta! Minulla ja Santralla ei ole

toistemme kanssa mitään tekemistä. — Ja minäkö ikävöisin! Oletko
sinä ihan suunniltasi? Minullehan on ollut tämä talvi iloisin kaikista
edellisistä.

— Puhutko totta?
 — Puhun, puhun!

— Miehiin ei ole luottamista. Minustakin näyttää kuin sinä olisit

tänä talvena muuttunut iloisemmaksi kuin ennen — minun
ansiotaniko lie vai muiden! Kyllä minä sen näen, mutta minun täytyi
narrata Santraa, saadakseni selville hänen suhteensa sinuun.

— Millä oikeudella?

— Elämisen ja olemisen oikeudella! — Hän tunnusti minulle kaikki.

— Kaikki?

— Niin — kaikki. No, taaskin sinä hätkähdit, ja kuitenkin sanoit

äsken, ettei sinulla ole mitään tekemistä Santran kanssa.

— Mitä hän tunnusti? Sano!

— Hän itki.

— Eihän se ole mikään tunnustus.

— Vai ei ole! Hänellä siis sinun luullaksesi olisi kyllä ollut

puhuttavaakin — soo'o! No, koska en saanut kuulla sitä Santralta,
haluaisin nyt kaiken — kai-ken — kuuletko! — kai-ken!! — kuulla
sinulta itseltäsi, muuten saa meidän väliltämme kaikki loppua tähän.
— No?

Juuso tunsi Eupen lämpöisen vartalon nojaavan itseään vasten ja

kuuli korvassaan Eupen kuiskauksen:

— Suutelitko sinä häntä?

— En.
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