Flamboyant Woman Leads Viet Cong

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30338, 14 January 1964, Page 11

Flamboyant Woman Leads Viet Cong

(N.Z. Press Association-Copyright)

SAIGON, January 13. She wears her black hair long and flowing in the traditional Vietnamese style. She is known to be flamboyant, assertive and cruel. Her name is Kim Loan. Some say she is 33 and beautiful. Others say she is 38 and ugly. All agree that Kim Loan is an authentic “pistol-packin’ momma” who is rapidly becoming a legend in the countryside south of Saigon. Kim Loan has two pistols strapped to her tiny waist, and both are carried for the Communist Viet Cong cause. “She is just the sort of symbol you could expect the Communists to come up with in Vietnam,” an American observer noted. “She _ is clever, brash and elusive.

Vietnamese peasants talk of her exploits with humour and awe.” Kim Loan’s rise to prominence has taken just over one year. Her husband, a Viet Cong district chief, was killed by Government forces. A few days later she left her two young children, a boy and a girl, with her husband’s relatives in a strategic hamlet south of the Long An Province capital, Tan An, and headed into the swamps to join the Viet Cong. She soon emerged as a bold guerrilla in a normally allmale territorial unit, winning the right to carry first one pistol and then the other. In recent months she has risen to be the Communists* chief military commander for the Tan An subsector—roughly the equivalent of a regimental commander.

Provincial authorities are well aware of Kim Loan’s operations. They know she travels with a bodyguard of two men armed with submachine guns. She is usually at the head of a 20-man platoon, but sometimes leads large groups. She is responsible for all espionage and subversive work against the Government in her region. In recent months she has recruited 33 men from her old village to join the Viet Cong. Kim Loan has become a legend. As villagers tell it, she climbed a tree to escape pursuing government civil guards and emerged as a monkey. On another occasion she jumped into a river and turned herself into a fish to escape. “The villagers don’t really believe these tales,” said an

American who works in the area. “But her activities have caught their imagination. And for all they know, maybe she is supernatural.” Provincial authorities are anxious to apprehend her. The provincial chief believes he can talk her into joining the Government, and has offered her 5000 piasters and safe conduct, to have lunch with him. In spite of the wild life she leads in the paddies and swamps of the Mekong delta. Kim Loan apparently still finds time to be a woman. Three weeks ago she slipped into Tan An to have her hair waved. The provincial authorities heard about it, but by the time they swooped on the beauty parlour, Kim Loan, with her hair newly set, had gone back to her hide-out