Ideologies of Forgetting

Rape in the Vietnam War

Gina Marie Weaver

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781438429984, 9781438429991
• eBook ISBN: 9781438430003
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: Social Sciences

Rape has long been a part of war, and recent conflicts in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Darfur demonstrate that it may be becoming an even more integral strategy of modern warfare. In contrast to the media attention to sexual violence against women in these recent conflicts, however, the incidence and consequences of rape in the Vietnam War have been largely overlooked. Using testimony, oral accounts, literature, and film, Ideologies of Forgetting focuses on the rape and sexual abuse of Vietnamese women by U.S. soldiers during the Vietnam war, and argues that the erasure and elision of these practices of sexual violence in the U.S. popular imagination perpetuates the violent masculinity central to contemporary U.S. military culture. Gina Marie Weaver claims that recognition of this violence is important not just for an accurate historical record, but also to truly understand the Vietnam veteran's trauma, which often stems from his aggression rather than his victimization.

1

Silencing

Erasure of Rape in the Vietnam War

[A]lthough rape is one of the most widely used types of violation against women and girls, it remains the least condemned war crime.

—Coomaraswamy, Common Grounds

Before we can understand the role rape played in the Vietnam War or the reasons and means by which it has been erased from narratives of that war, it is helpful to contextualize war rape more generally. Especially important is a recognition of the fact that, after many years of work by feminists, war rape has finally come to be recognized as an international war crime. Within the global and historical contexts of warfare, however, women's sexual abuse by soldiers is not a new phenomenon. Throughout history, women's bodies have constituted an important part of the spoils of war. For example in ancient sources such as Homer's Iliad the women Chyseis and Briseis are captured and enslaved as concubines, and Plutarch's Lives details the rape of the Sabine women as part of the founding of Rome. However, the effect of war on women has changed dramatically as warfare in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has become total war. While during World War I “the ratio of military personnel killed to civilians killed was 8:1,” this ratio changed dramatically during World War II to 1:1. In the many wars worldwide since 1945, the ratio has been 1:8.¹ Within the context of total war, women suffer not merely as “collateral damage,” but their bodies have also taken on strategic importance. They have served as “toilets” for the Japanese military,² unwilling child bearers for the Bosnian Serbs and Rwandan Hutus, and symbols of the conquering military's honor (and the dishonor of the defeated), as well as targets in and of themselves. Military sexual slavery has continued throughout the twentieth century, and “systematic” or “strategic” rape as a military policy played an important role in both the Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwandan civil wars (pp. 8–9).

In spite of the increased importance of women to the strategies of modern warfare, however, women's sexual trauma as a result of war has been little studied or even mentioned until recent work by feminist scholars has begun to gather primary accounts of women's abuse in war as well as to publicize and theorize its oversight. Anne Lewellyn Barstow's collection, War's Dirty Secret: Rape, Prostitution, and Other Crimes against Women (2001) seeks to do just that, joining the ranks of such works as Common Grounds: Violence against Women in War and Armed Conflict Situations, edited by Indai Lourdes Sajor (1998), and Mass Rape: The War against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina, edited by Alexandra Stiglamayer (1994). These works mark the increasing attention being turned specifically toward sexual violence against women in war, particularly after the recent horrific and very well-documented sexual assaults on women in Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina, as well as the “coming out” of the Korean comfort women in 1991. This latter group of women includes those impressed (either through trickery or kidnapping) into servitude in Japan's military brothels in World War II.

This recent work finds its foundation in previous feminist research that sought to reveal the importance—both literally and rhetorically—of women to the military. In 1983, Cynthia Enloe recognized the importance of women and their bodies to the military as soldiers, mothers, and victims in Does Khaki Become You? The Militarisation of Women's Lives. Her subsequent work has continued to investigate the strategic rhetorical and physical use of women, particularly in emergent nations, such as the Philippines, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Kashmir.³ Even more foundational is Susan Brownmiller's landmark text, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (1975), which contains an important chapter on the role of rape in war, making this book one of the first to link the law, the military, and the nation's tacit approval of woman abuse, especially in a military situation. Her “War” chapter opens with statement made by General George S. Patton during World War II that he knew, “in spite of my most diligent efforts, there would unquestionably be some raping, and … I [asked] … to have the details as early as possible so that the offenders could be properly hanged.”⁴ Brownmiller thus points out the obvious attitude about rape in war, one that all contemporary feminist critics of war have since worked to prove problematic: the common belief that there shall “[u]nquestionably … be some raping. Unconscionable, but nevertheless inevitable” (p. 31).

Brownmiller suggests that, unlike other wartime atrocities such as a bomb's hitting a civilian target, rape is qualitatively different in that “rape in war is a familiar act with a familiar excuse. War provides men with the perfect psychologic [sic] backdrop to give vent to their contempt for women. The very maleness of the military … confirms for men what they long suspect, that women are peripheral, irrelevant to the world that counts, passive spectators to the action in the center ring” (p. 32). Though an early critique and a book that lacks nuance in other areas,⁵ current statistical data confirm Brownmiller's analysis of the reasons behind war rape. Madeline Morris notes a clear and significant “rape differential” when comparing military personnel's rates of rape to other crimes. In a study comparing U.S. civilian to U.S. military records from 1944 through 1945 and again from 1987 through 1992, Morris found that enlisted personnel's rates of rape and other aggressive crimes (murder and aggravated assault) were lower than civilian rates of these crimes during peacetime; Morris notes, though, that rape rates did not drop as sharply as did other crimes committed by military personnel. However, “[m]ilitary rape rates in the combat theater … climbed to several times civilian rates, while military rates of other violent crime were roughly equivalent to civilian rates. Thus, in both the wartime and the peacetime contexts studied, a rape differential exists: The ratio of military rape rates to civilian rape rates is substantially larger than the ratio of military rates to civilian rates of other violent crime.”⁶ This research bears out Brownmiller's claim that war provides men an excuse to carry out a peacetime crime, and clearly, as both Brownmiller and Morris suggest, the military's organization or training enables and/or induces men to perform this particular, woman-directed crime much more than other aggressive crimes.

If rape has played an increasingly important role in modern warfare, it has not, until fairly recently, received much attention. Clearly, the budding recognition of war rape in the 1980s and especially the later 1990s correlates with the strides made by the women's movement in the United States, Europe, and around the world since the 1970s in alerting the public to rape as an important issue generally, which, in the U.S. context, can be seen in the establishment of victim's rights legislation and rape hotlines. Another reason war rape in particular has finally begun to garner attention from the media and scholars is the crucial work feminists have done to change international understandings of war crimes; until 2001, rape, while a crime within individual countries, was not considered to be a war crime and therefore not internationally litigable. Thus, the prior lack of interest in women's trauma in war until recent years was enforced by international definitions of war crimes. For instance, though testimony and other evidence indicated that not a little raping occurred in both the European and Pacific theaters during World War II, the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg did not mention “rape” once in its 179-page judgment, subsuming this particular, women-directed crime into the more general category “ill treatment of the civilian population.”⁷ Thanks to pressure from feminists around the world, however, the international community's understanding of war rape and sexual exploitation is slowly beginning to change. During the trials of Rwandan leaders, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda “articulated a broad, progressive definition of rape, defining it as a ‘physical invasion of a sexual nature, committed on a person under circumstances which are coercive’” and declared that rape does constitute torture and is therefore a war crime.⁸ Following this new designation of rape as torture, the first successful international conviction of soldiers (three Bosnian Serbs) for the crime of rape finally occurred in 2001.

In spite of these progressive changes in international law's definition of war rape, unfortunately the sexual abuse of women in war continues to be dealt with inequitably and to be used for varying purposes by states looking to bolster feelings of nationalism or desire for retribution. Looking not only at how an abusing military uses women, but also at how nations rhetorically exploit their own female citizens’ status as victims, Enloe claims that “[r]ape and prostitution have been central to many men's construction of the nationalist cause. They have permitted men to hear the feminized nation beckoning them to act as ‘her’ protectors … Too often missing in this gendered nationalist scenario are the voices of the actual women who have suffered rape or have been compelled to seek an income from prostitution.”⁹ Though such women are “rarely asked to help build the identity of the new nation, … news of their rapes … mobiliz[es] the anger of [the] men” to fight for the nation.¹⁰ Thus, often when war rape has been trumpeted by the states of victimized women, neither the crime itself (and the institutions that enabled it to occur) nor even the victims, is the focus, but rather the victims are symbolic of the nation itself, and the crime symbolic of the undeserved aggression against the nation as a whole.

Even when feminists have fought to have rape recognized as a serious war crime, brought to light, and punished, they have often silenced unintentionally the women who have experienced war rape, the very women they hoped to help. As Karen Engle reminds us, feminists who argued that the rapes of Bosnian women in the Bosnia-Herzegovina war were acts of genocide tended to view all Bosnian women as victims, not only “incapable of fighting in the war, but also of speaking truthfully about whether they had been raped.” Similarly, activists who emphasized rape as a gendered crime (rather than as a part of genocidal strategy), focused on women of all sides of the Bosnian-Herzegovinian war as victims, again shutting down possibilities for any of these women to have been active agents in the war.¹¹

America's Dirty Secret: Rape in the Vietnam War

Complicating recognition and prosecution of war rape is the obvious fact that not all militaries that commit this crime will find themselves subject to an international war crimes tribunal; additionally, when the “losers” of a war have been the victims of such crimes, these rape victims do not garner the same recognition as more sympathetic victims. A case in point is German women who were raped after World War II, primarily by occupying Soviet forces. Though numerous rapes (some historians describing them as being of “massive incidence”)¹² of German women occurred, they have not received much attention from international audiences. Hesitation to recognize crimes against German women is surely due to the legitimate suspicion of historians of the German past toward “any narrative that might support postwar Germans’ self-perception as victims insofar as it might participate in a dangerous revival of German nationalism, whitewash the Nazi past, and normalize a genocidal war.”¹³ Thus, this case provides an excellent working example of historians’ fearing the very purpose of a nation's open discussion of rape that Enloe pointed out—a revitalization of nationalism. However, in this case fear of the symbolic utilization of the crimes doubtless stymies research into the real, sociohistorical conditions that precipitated these rapes and their effect on their victims.

Not unrelated are the war rapes committed by militaries that never find themselves forced to submit to the jurisdiction of international tribunals. This is the circumstance that describes the widespread rapes by American GIs against Vietnamese civilians and POWs that occurred during the Vietnam War. However, not only did international juridical discourse overlook these crimes against Vietnamese women by U.S. forces directly after the time of the war, but recent feminists and other activists working against war rape as well as historians have continued to ignore this well-documented crime. In the aforementioned War's Dirty Secret, in which sex crimes against women in World War II, Bosnia-Her-zegovina, and Rwanda are discussed in some depth and in which there are independent chapters devoted to non-American military brutality toward women in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Haiti, the crimes against Vietnamese women are given only cursory notice in the introduction (Barstow, p. 5). After criticizing Seymour Hersh's convenient forgetting of the rapes that occurred at My Lai as an example of the ubiquitous omission of rape from histories of war, the editors then themselves neglect to include further information on the frequent rapes committed in Vietnam. In spite of the fact that there is certainly enough information on this subject to fill an entire section of chapters and that it is a much more recent occurrence than the sexual abuses of WWII, not even one chapter is devoted to discussing the sexual exploitation of women in the Vietnam War. Even more astonishingly, this oversight occurs in a book whose purpose is to change the trend in research and reportage to overlook, forget, or deny violence against women!

To my knowledge, Brownmiller's chapter on war in Against Our Will contains the most in-depth exploration (at thirty pages) of the U.S. military's sexual exploitation of women in Vietnam, a rather revealing fact since much more evidence of this exploitation and abuse has become known since 1975. Thus, Brownmiller's work demands recognition for its willingness to bring accusations against the U.S military (and implicitly the government) for its participation in this world-wide phenomenon. Her work is the exception, however, to a persistent inclination not to make sexual violence in the Vietnam War a topic of research or discussion, even though a wealth of irrefutable evidence of such violence exists in the primary sources, including testimony given in public hearings during the war, court proceedings and military investigations, oral accounts collected for publication both during and many years after the war, and literary works—including poetry, novels, and memoirs. These sources will be discussed in detail in the following chapters in an effort to reverse the trend toward academic erasure of these acts. Although precedent for erasing women's sexual assault during war has continued to exist despite recent feminist intervention, I will claim that none has remained as unrevealed as that of the Vietnamese women by U.S. armed forces. This refusal to recognize abuse by American GIs is important because the longer Americans do not acknowledge this history, the greater the potential grows for such abuses to recur and the longer veterans will remain unhealed from unexplored sources of traumatization.¹⁴ Importantly, as pointed out in the preface, the refusal to address the fact of American war rape and its causes has surely had devastating consequences for a large percentage of our female GIs, who will only find themselves further victimized as their numbers increase in the U.S. military.

One is left to wonder what has precipitated, even in an era of burgeoning interest in women's war-related sexual trauma, this odd silence about and erasure of Vietnamese women's sexual abuse at the hands of American GIs and their allies. It is especially troubling that even well-meaning academics, such as Barstow and colleagues, uphold the same patterns of disremembering. One might claim that there is a lack of evidence from the Vietnamese women themselves. While it is true that extensive interviews with abused women, such as the kind conducted by aid workers in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda, do not exist for the Vietnam War, it is not true that there is a complete lack of evidence. On the contrary, there are at least two very important sources—Le Ly Hayslip's Between Heaven and Earth and Martha Hess's Then the Americans Came—giving voice to women who were sexually abused during the war. While the amount of evidence written by the women themselves is not nearly as great as it is for the atrocities that occurred during the 1990s, there is clearly enough to warrant further inquiry into the matter and more extensive information gathering from the women involved.

This work therefore contests the claim that inadequate information exists, demonstrating that literary and testimonial accounts from Vietnamese women as well as American veterans make sexual violence a topic often enough to warrant extended investigation. In fact, it is this very abundance of material that reveals the ideological underpinnings at the heart of forgetting women's trauma. The underlying reason for the lack of coverage of Vietnam War sexual violence is (usually) an unspoken decision by producers of cultural narrative—be they historians, filmmakers, literary critics, journalists, or politicians—to keep silent about and even deny such atrocities. To restore the comfortable myths of American exceptionalism, it has been necessary for such producers to “forget” particular instances of racial and gender hatred and violence that are evident in the history of the Vietnam War. For to admit these violences would demand that the militarized American exceptionalism from which such behavior sprang was problematic at its very core.

Even in academic circles, where attention to such events should be represented because they are part of the historical record, acknowledgment of Vietnamese women's sexual abuse is conspicuously lacking. Thus, even those whose special job it is to remember such events participate in this erasure. Seymour Hersh, who won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on My Lai, provides an example of this tendency toward disremembering. As Barstow notes, although the Peers Commission investigation and the court martial records of Lt. William Calley revealed that at least twenty women were raped during the massacre and confirmed that rape was a widespread practice, when Hersh wrote a thirtieth anniversary piece, he did not recall the rapes. Writing about the mass murder of civilians, especially of children, and dwelling on the mutilation of corpses, Hersh neglected to mention the rapes at all (p. 5). Thus, even the most celebrated reporter of the Vietnam War seems to have fallen prey to an ameliorated narrative of the war.

It is one of the large claims of this work, then, that, though a central fact of the war, rape and sexual violence against Vietnamese women have been effectively written out of historical scholarly critical memory and, even more consequential for popular memory, filmed out of the national narrative of the Vietnam War. I will show that these acts of forgetting have been necessary steps in the rehabilitation of the Vietnam War veteran. As cultural critic Keith Beattie argues, representations of the veteran in the early seventies “crudely depicted [him] as an inarticulate psychopath.”¹⁵ In the late 1970s and especially during the eighties and Reagan era, however, the Vietnam veteran was reconstructed. He became “an authentic [and sympathetic] spokesperson” on the war, though “he was permitted only a limited range of topics, predominantly … concerned with the common-sense notion of cultural unity. In this way the veteran emerged as a hero, valorized, in effect, not for his war experience but for his ability to contribute to the maintenance of cultural homogeneity and holism” (p. 61). Beattie argues that this rehabilitation and use of the veteran as a ventriloquist for messages of unity was one of three strategies of unity, terminology he uses to evoke the work and material effects of the ideology of unity within national culture since the later sixties. The strategy of veteran as ventriloquist was used to successfully “heal the wound” wrought by the Vietnam War, the wound being cultural division, which although it had long been a characteristic of U.S. culture, became widely attributed to the war and its effects (p. 7).

With Beattie's assessment in mind, it will be my goal in this book to posit an additional role for the veteran, one beyond that of cultural unifier; I am speaking of the role of valiant and true victim. Not only is he the only authentic spokesman on the war. More important, the Vietnam veteran is a traumatized guerilla warrior, victimized both by the “old, white men” who drafted him and sent him to a war with “one hand tied behind his back” and by the “spitting” countercultural protestors who did not support him.¹⁶ As Arthur Egendorf put it in 1985, Vietnam vets by the early eighties were “tragic victims of a war that went bad, in a time of cultural change and conflict … Anyone could root for the good guys who did their duty and didn't get a fair shake. These feelings were stirred by the media … [And] [s]ympathy for the Vietnam veteran … joined motherhood and apple pie as a hallmark of true Americanism.”¹⁷ The conception of the veteran-as-victim is not without cultural or political significance; ra...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• 1 Silencing: Erasure of Rape in the Vietnam War
• 2 Vietnamese Voices: Accounts of War-Time Sexual Trauma
• 3 “Already Bullets”: American Witnesses to Wartime Rape and Sexual Abuse
• 4 Naming Themselves: Sexual Abuse in Vietnam Veterans' Antiwar Literature
• 5 Victimized Veterans and Disappearing Women: The Vietnam War Film
• Afterword: Legacies
• Notes
• Bibliography