Vietnam Women

What is the price of honor? It took 10 years for Vietnam War Nurse Diane Carlson Evans to answer that question - and the answer was a heavy one.

When she was 18, she joined the army to finance her nursing education. With less than six months of nursing experience, she was assigned to the 24th Evacuation Hospital in South Vietnam. True tales of the war that are by turns horrifying and humorous, told with an eye for detail, by a woman who was in the thick of it.

As a journalist Paxton Andrews would experience Vietnam firsthand. We follow her from high school in Savannah to college in Berkeley and then to work in Saigon. For the soldiers she knew and met there, Vietnam would change their lives in ways they could never have imagined. For the men in her life, Vietnam would change their lives in ways they could not escape or deny.

On 12 February, 1973, 116 men who, just six years earlier, had been high-flying navy and air force pilots, shuffled, limped or were carried off a huge military transport plane at Clark Air Base in the Philippines. These American servicemen had endured years of brutal torture, kept shackled and starving in solitary confinement, in rat-infested, mosquito-laden prisons, the worst of which was The Hanoi Hilton.

Saigon, November 1978. Under the cover of darkness, a desperate family leaves home and friends, hoping to escape the harsh regime of Communist Vietnam. Their goal is to reunite with the four oldest children sent ahead to the United States, but first they must evade ruthless communist patrols.

This haunting memoir tells the brutal story of the Vietnam War from the perspective of an innocent victim whose childhood was dominated by violence, devastation, and conflicts between the teachings of her culture and the realities of war. Le Ly Hayslip—the youngest in a close-knit Buddhist family—was 12 years old when U.S. helicopters landed in her village. She was raped and "ruined" for marriage by Viet Cong soldiers, imprisoned and tortured by the South Vietnamese, and sentenced to death by the Viet Cong.

Donut Dolly puts you in the Vietnam War face down in the dirt under a sniper attack, inside a helicopter being struck by lightning, at dinner next to a commanding general, and slogging through the mud along a line of foxholes. You see the war through the eyes of one of the first women officially allowed in the combat zone.

From award-winning journalist and children’s book author Mary Cronk Farrell comes the inspiring and fascinating story of the woman who gave a human face to the Vietnam War. Close-Up on War tells the story of French-born Catherine Leroy, one of the war’s few woman photographers, who documented some of the fiercest fighting in the 20-year conflict. Although she had no formal photographic training and had never before traveled more than a few hundred miles from Paris, Leroy left home at age 21 to travel to Vietnam and document the faces of war.

Leaving the safety of America, Teera returns to Cambodia for the first time since her harrowing escape as a child refugee. She carries a letter from a man who mysteriously signs himself as "the Old Musician" and claims to have known her father in the Khmer Rouge prison where he disappeared 25 years ago. In Phnom Penh, Teera finds a society still in turmoil, where perpetrators and survivors of unfathomable violence live side by side, striving to mend their still beloved country.

From the beginning of World War II through the early days of Vietnam, groundbreaking female photojournalist and war correspondent Dickey Chapelle chased dangerous assignments her male colleagues wouldn’t touch, pioneering a radical style of reporting that focused on the humanity of the oppressed. She documented conditions across Eastern Europe in the wake of the second world war. She marched down the Ho Chi Minh Trail with the South Vietnamese Army and across the Sierra Maestra Mountains with Castro.

Nineteen-year-old Jesse McGowan kills to stay alive. As a Marine gunner in Vietnam, he knows the gun team is the heart of every battle. Meet the gun team. They serve in a place called Con Thien, “The Hill of Angels”. Learn what gives them the courage to fight another day. Will Jesse prove worthy? Will the gun team? Will they survive their 13-month tour? In her war-torn country, Tweet, a Vietnamese nurse who believes in democracy, works to save American soldiers. With war’s end, there is no one to protect her or her young daughter.

This is the true account of one Black female veteran's experience in the military during the Viet Nam War to this present day and how she won over fear, intimidation, rejection during and after her military service. It took her many decades to write the book, because she wanted the book to be a blessing to many people, male and female, who have served their country and not been recognized.

It’s 1943. The war rages. The newly launched WASP program is recruiting. And barnstormer fan Georgeanne “George” Ector’s dream is to take to the skies. Grit is what she inherited from her mother, an Oklahoma farm girl at the turn of the century who preferred taking apart an engine to stitching linens for a hope chest. She taught her daughter well. George isn’t the only woman about to follow her calling.

I Did Not Miss the Boat is the coming of age story of an adolescent girl who struggled to help her family & assimilation into a new country while searching for her own identity. From surviving the vast South China Seas, pirate raids, and uninhabited Indonesian islands to surviving high school and family life, Lea Tran did not experience a typical American upbringing.

A searing chronicle of wartime experiences, Even the Women Must Fight probes the cultural legacy of North Vietnam's American War. Unflinching in its portrayal of hardship, valor, and personal sacrifice, this wrenching account is nothing short of a revelation, banishing in one bold stroke the familiar image of Vietnamese women as passive onlookers, war brides, prostitutes, or helpless refugees.

Finally, A Parade for You is a collection of mini-biographies of United States war veterans who served their country during the Vietnam War. These brave people sacrificed their peaceful lives and joined one of the many life-changing cultural upheavals of the mid-20th century. They were not famous, nor from privileged backgrounds. Today, most of them still battle Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and far too many are ill with such diseases as diabetes, cancer, and other related disorders. They now find peace, and though they struggle with it, grace.

In the early morning hours of January 31, 1968, New Year's fireworks gave way to gunfire and bombs. Eleven-year-old Minh watched in horror as her father and two siblings were gunned down by the Vietcong in their backyard. Though she escaped death that night, abuse, prison, and torture would follow. A dramatic escape by boat on the South China Sea finally takes Minh out of communist Vietnam, but the tragedy of her childhood would continue to haunt her. Minh’s powerful story of escape, as well as dangerous and unhealthy relationships, is told with raw sincerity.

Tiger Woman depicts a brief period of unconventional warfare that tests the boundaries of humanity in a haunting tale of unremitting evil no ordinary soldier ever trains to face. Captain Christen, a dedicated intelligence officer with the 25th Infantry Division, directs an all-out hunt for a roguish female who leads a small guerrilla force with chilling efficiency as she employs depraved acts of psychological warfare to instill terror in those she opposes.

When some of America's military men are captured or go missing during the Vietnam War, a small group of military wives become their champions. Never had families taken on diplomatic roles during wartime, nor had the fate of our POWs and missing men been a nationwide concern. In cinematic detail, authors Taylor Baldwin Kiland and Judy Silverstein Gray plunge you directly into the political maneuvering the women navigated, onto the international stage they shared with world leaders, and through the landmark legacy they created.

"Was hat mich getrieben? Hoffnung! Hoffnung für die Vertriebenen, für die Verlassenen, für die Einsamen und für die, die an den Himmel glauben." (Dau-Thi-Cúc, die sich Loan nannte). In "Loan - Aus dem Leben eines Phönix" erzählt Isabelle Müller die wahre Emanzipationsgeschichte ihrer Mutter Loan, einer eigenwilligen und rebellischen Vietnamesin, die mit knapp zwölf Jahren vor einer Zwangsverheiratung flieht, um auf einer langen und oft gefährlichen Odyssee durch Vietnam, Frankreich und Algerien den Weg zu sich selbst und zu einem freien selbstbestimmten Leben zu finden.