Loan is 75 years old, with the hollow face and slight build of a young girl. She crouches down to greet two little dogs that jump up at her, licking her hands. Those hands, worn down by arthritis, which once knew the swollen blisters of someone who spends days emptying the earth, digging the tunnels that still run beneath Ky Anh, a village of a thousand souls in north-central Vietnam.

Loan is one of the last Viet Cong guerrillas. One of the many women of the resistance who, fifty years ago, helped defeat the South Vietnamese regime backed by the United States and reunify the country.

The Vietnam War, a brutal war

The Vietnam War (1955–1975), sadly remembered as one of the longest and most brutal conflicts of the twentieth century, pitted the army of South Vietnam — controlled by the anti-communist regime of Ngo Dinh Diem backed by the United States — against that of North Vietnam, led by the communist revolutionary Ho Chi Minh, founder of the League for the Independence of Vietnam. It caused the deaths of approximately 3.8 million people and gave rise to vast waves of pacifist demonstrations and protest.

Fighting against the communist bloc backed by China and the Soviet Union, the United States military dropped more than 14 million tonnes of bombs and shells on Vietnamese soil over twenty years (nearly three times the amount used in the Second World War, according to data from the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City), and sprayed approximately 80 million litres of chemical substances — such as the infamous Agent Orange, a defoliant used to flush out northern forces sheltering under the vegetation — across 25 per cent of Vietnamese territory.

It is estimated that at least three million people, including many children, still suffer today from serious illnesses associated with exposure to chemical weapons.

Vietnam has spent decades trying to clean up the toxic legacy of the war, with the United States only beginning to contribute in the 2000s, after long ignoring the evidence of the toxic effects. And today, with the cuts imposed by the Trump administration on funding for USAID, the United States agency for international aid, contributions towards decontamination are more at risk than ever.

During that atrocious war, which ended on 30 April 1975 with the fall of Saigon and the defeat of the pro-American regime in South Vietnam, hundreds of thousands of women also fought in the ranks of the resistance. Young girls, often very young, who played a fundamental role in establishing revolutionary bases and forming female military units, as well as in intelligence activities and logistical and administrative work.

According to data from the Vietnamese Women's Museum in Hanoi, during the 1960s approximately twenty million women joined the military and political struggle for the reunification of the country. Many of them were arrested, tortured and killed.

During the conflict, American soldiers committed brutal war crimes, such as the My Lai massacre in March 1968, which caused the deaths of hundreds of unarmed civilians, including women and children, some of whom were raped and mutilated before being killed.

Accounts from those years

"When the war ended, we were so happy we couldn't sleep. I remember the tears of joy on people's faces. It was like a dream," says Loan, giving one of the two dogs a gentle pat and getting back to her feet. A few metres away, an enormous tree casts its shade over a commemorative stone bearing an affixed plaque. "This tree is 500 years old," says Loan, raising her cataract-clouded eyes. "During the war we used it as a lookout point. We would climb right to the top to peer out at the American base that was just two kilometres from where we're standing now. Luckily, at least it survived the bombing."

During the war, the village of Ky Anh where Loan lives was considered a strategic point: it lay along a transit route used to transport food, medicine and fighters heading towards the heart of the revolution.

That is why the Saigon government wanted to conquer and invade our village — because it was a strategic point. We had the task of protecting it. And the only way was to build tunnels beneath our homes to stop the enemy and maintain control of the area.

Loan

To this day, beneath the gravel and dirt paths connecting the low houses of Ky Anh, 32 kilometres of tunnels wind their way underground, dug by Loan and her comrades between 1965 and 1967. It took two years and the hands of three thousand people to create that cramped network of galleries, which can be entered through two trapdoors set into the floor of a low lemon-yellow building that served as a revolutionary base during the war.

"In this building we gathered to plan our battles," explains Kim Ta, 67, a village elder who lost his mother, father and brother during those years. "We decided to dig two tunnels directly beneath this building: one was used to store food, the other led to a first-aid bunker where we brought the wounded."

A little further on, beneath haystacks raised off the ground on wooden poles, other trapdoors are visible: these are the secondary entrances to the tunnels, which can only be entered on all fours. "The days spent down there were hard and steeped in death," says Kim Ta, who today has three children and three grandchildren, some of whom work in the nearby textile factories that employ a large share of the village's residents. "But we fought side by side to defeat the enemy and unify the country," Loan echoes, tucking her grey hair back behind her head.

Women's contribution to the resistance

In South Vietnam too, women made up a significant portion of the guerrilla forces — around 40 per cent — while in rural and mountainous areas there were at least fifty all-female squadrons. Some of the exploits of these guerrilla fighters are commemorated today at the Vietnamese Women's Museum in Hanoi: "On 8 March 1969, female artillery units at Binh Duc and My Tho (two localities in the southern Mekong region, ed.) destroyed 12 aircraft, three 105 mm cannons and a fuel depot, and killed or wounded more than a hundred American soldiers," the museum records. And further: "During the 1968 offensive, a group of eleven female militiawomen from the citadel of Hue (on the central coast) defeated a battalion of Marines, killing more than a hundred soldiers."

Across various parts of the country, underground tunnels as deep as 10–30 metres were dug, used as shelters, hospitals, kitchens and military positions. Inside them, nurseries and maternity wards were often set up as well, and it is estimated that at least a hundred children were born in those narrow passages.

The heroic mothers of Vietnam

Leaving the village of Ky Anh, past the school, you come across a small shop-house facing directly onto the road, its gate thrown wide open. There, together with her son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren, lives Tinh, an 87-year-old woman who lost her husband and five other family members during the war. For this she was awarded the title of Heroic Mother of Vietnam, the honour bestowed upon women who have lost sons and husbands in combat. In the village of Ky Anh, 237 Heroic Mothers are counted. In 2008, across the entire country there were around 50,000.

"Every time the Saigon forces approached our village, we took shelter in the tunnels. But there were also days, when they moved away again, when we lived normally," recounts Tinh, stretching her lips into a sad smile that reveals the few teeth she has left. "When they came the first time looking for my husband, I helped him hide under the trapdoor of a tunnel. That time he was saved. But when they came back again, there was nothing to be done."

Why Vietnam holds no grudge