Women Fighting In Vietnam

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30842, 30 August 1965, Page 2

Women Fighting In Vietnam

(N.Z. Prut Ann.—Copyright) SAIGON, Aug. 29. Women are invoked in the war in Vietnam —some as active combatants, others as spies or saboteurs, and others as innocent bystanders. Both the Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong deal harshly with hostile women they catch. Some are . executed, and others tortured in an effort to extract information. The Viet Cong relies the most heavily on women, although South Vietnam recently announced plans to induct those between 20 and 25 into a reserve army to help defend villages. Pravda says the deputy commander of the Viet Cong guerrillas is a widow, Mrs Nguyen Thi Dinh.

The United States Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade report that women in a 200member Viet Cong force threw grenades at them in an operation 25 miles north of Saigon. Combat women, when caught, cannot expect gentle treatment at the hands of the Vietnamese Army. A Vietnamese regiment sweeping a mangrove swamp on the South China Sea flushed two women, one armed with a Russian rifle. A soldier held his knife at the breast of one woman. Other soldiers wrestled the second woman to the ground. At knifepoint, the women refused to say how they came by the rifle and documents found on them. They said they were just civilians. They were bound, blindfolded, and taken away as prisoners. Many Vietnamese women are enlisted as spies or sabo-

teurs by the Viet Cong. Some ply the bars of Saigon, hoping to prey on United States soldiers.

Last month, a laundress tried to smuggle powerful explosives in her girdle into a United States helicopter base at Soc Trang. Vietnamese security police caught and questioned her, and then took her out into a nearby rice field and shot her. On the, other side, the Viet Cong has been known to torture women to try to get information from them. United States infantrymen interrupted a Viet Cong torture in a village east of Pleiku. The Viet Cong had carved flesh from the body of the village chiefs wife, but she was still alive. The wives of two soldiers had been shot repeatedly in their legs in an effort to force them to tell who in the village supported the Government