we all know about most of the horrors visited on the Vietnamese people by the US military: the agent orange, the napalm, the torture, the endless bombing, and the massacres of civilians. something we don't often hear mentioned is the widespread use of rape against Vietnamese women
Rape of Vietnamese women by US troops “took place on such a large scale that many veterans considered it standard operating procedure.” It was “systematic and collective”; an “unofficial military policy”. One soldier termed it a “mass military policy.” Indeed, rape followed by murder of Vietnamese women was “so common that American soldiers had a special term for the soldiers who committed the acts in conjunction: a double veteran”. Examples of soldier testimony regarding rape include: “…they raped the girl, and then, the last man to make love to her, shot her in the head” (Weaver notes the phrase “make love” here speaks in part to the military and general culture’s conflation of love, sex, and violence); two US soldiers dragged a young, naked woman out of a “hootch”. The reporting soldier said rape was “pretty SOP [Standard Operating Procedure]”. The woman was then tossed onto a “pile” of “19 women and children”, and soldiers around the pile “opened up on full automatic on their M-16s, and that was the end of that”; soldiers pulled a girl out of a bomb shelter and raped her in front of her family. The reporting soldier said he knew of “10 or 15 of such incidents at least.” The platoon leader “condone[d] rape”; female prisoners were “raped, tortured, and then were completely destroyed – their bodies were destroyed”; one sergeant reportedly told his platoon, “if there’s a woman in a hootch … rape her.”
Weaver explores the military and civilian culture of the period that produced these behaviors. Soldiers generally cited racism and sexism, noting these were “pre-existent” and then “heightened” in military training. One soldier said “the military was just an exaggeration, a caricature, of all that had gone before”. Weaver notes there was a conflation of “enemy” and “race”; the “enemy” – i.e. the population being invaded by foreigners and slaughtered – does not have uniforms, but is an entire race of “gooks”, or evil, sub-human “objects”. US culture and military training also encouraged the idea that women were inferior and the feminine was something to be hated and violently rejected. Masculinity was defined through violent hostility to femininity. Women, like the Vietnamese people, were objects – in the case of women, detestable objects that existed to serve men sexually. Thus, Vietnamese women, Weaver notes, were doubly inferior, doubly hated. Training essentially demanded men become misogynist predators. Further hostility towards the feminine arose due to the prominence of women in the Vietnamese forces; the idea of being killed by a woman made the threat of the feminine that much more potent, and aggression against the feminine that much more common and extreme. There was also an idea in the culture that men simply “had” to have sex; that they could not abstain during their tours of duty.
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