Interviews with a Top North Vietnam Army General and Two Former Soldiers

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Dang Thi Phuong
Dang Thi Phuong is the wife of Nguyen Van Khien. I interviewed her on the same day. A shy woman, and a little reluctant to be interviewed, Phuong smiled and was cheerful, but spent much of the interview hiding her face behind her hands. As a woman of the old school, she was hesitant to speak before the men present. Moreover, Bac, my interpreter, informed me that I was the first foreigner she had ever seen, let alone met and spoken with. Phuong may have been shy and demure, but there is no mistaking the fact that physically she was very tough. Although in her 50s, she was fit, and had the deep tan of a Vietnamese farm woman.

VN:When did you serve in the army?

Phuong:From 1970 to 1979.

VN:Did you wear a uniform?

Phuong:Yes. A North Vietnamese Army uniform.

VN:What did you do?

Phuong:At first I worked in the rear area, cooking rice for the army. Then I worked on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. There were many young girls like me who worked on the trail. We were cutting down trees and widening the trail for trucks. This was near Laos.

VN:Were you ever bombed?

Phuong:No. Never.

VN:What was your life like while you worked on the Ho Chi Minh Trail? Where did you sleep?

Phuong:We slept under trees, or in caves, or in the mountains. We had a blanket, but it was never enough to keep me warm.

VN:I don’t ask this to embarrass you, but were the female soldiers bothered by the male soldiers?

Phuong:No. We had very strict army rules about that, so I was very safe in the group.

VN:Where did you meet your husband?

Phuong:We met at the hospital in Hue. I had become an army nurse, and because he was a first-level injury, my husband was assigned a personal nurse to be with him 24 hours a day — that was me. That was in 1978, and after two years we got married.

VN:What qualities attracted you to him?

Phuong:It was a very special love. [At that point Phuong spoke to my interpreter directly, and Bac informed me that Phuong wanted to end the interview soon.]

VN:Is there anything else you would like to say?

Phuong:Only that we love each other and have sympathy for each other.

As we prepared to depart, Bac suggested to me that since this was such a very poor household, I might like to make them a small money gift beyond the sack of fruit we brought them. To avoid humbling the man and his wife, he advised me to hand the money (the Vietnamese equivalent of $20) directly to their four-year-old granddaughter and indicate it was for her.

William L. Adams, Ph.D., is a member of the social sciences department of the University of Texas at Brownsville. He is the author of the book Valley Vets II: Korean and Vietnam Veterans of the Rio Grande Valley. For additional reading, see Eric Hammel’s Khe Sanh: Siege in the Clouds and Phillip B. Davidson’s Vietnam at War.

This article was originally published in the October 2005 issue of Vietnam Magazine.

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Tags: 20th - 21st Century, Historical Conflicts, Vietnam War

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