The Women

Barbara Sonneborn (American):
Bár-bah-rah Sóhn-ah-born

"On my 24th birthday, I got the news that my husband, Jeff [Gurvitz] had been killed in Vietnam. He was trying to rescue his wounded radio operator during a mortar attack. We had been sweethearts from the time I was fourteen. For years I tried to put the war behind me. One morning, the twentieth anniversary of his death, I woke up and I knew I had to go to Vietnam. I didn't know what I'd find there; I just knew I had to go. I feel good about my life now; I'm married to a man I love deeply. Yet Jeff's death and my feelings about the war are still not resolved for me."

"I remember before Jeff left, we talked about how afraid I was that he would get killed. We never talked about the fact that he would have to kill people, maybe even a child. I realized that we hadn't ever talked honestly about what war means."

From a letter Sonneborn wrote her husband years after he died: "Do people ever stop to think that somebody has to prepare these bodies to be shipped back to their families? Perhaps for the undertaker it's rather cold and impersonal. But what merciless human being took your wedding ring off and didn't wash it before it was put into some envelope to be sent to me so that when it arrived, it was encrusted with mud and blood, along with your dog tags, all of which were bloody and filthy. I couldn't believe 'they' sent that stuff back to me without washing it. I remember sitting on the floor and opening up that package, the personal effects of Jeffrey Gurvitz—rings, watch, wallet, my letters to you... But the stuff that was personally on your body, covered in blood, that's what drove me crazy. Your last lifeblood soaked into the ground in Vietnam, Jeff. That land, with your blood in it, belongs a little bit to you."

April Burns (American):
Ay-pril Búrnz

"We met in a Biology class. I was an art and dance major, so I reluctantly went into this class and I saw this young man sitting, and I thought...that's him, hmm, yes. It was real fast and very strong. It was falling in love as I had always imagined it to be."

"I received [a letter from my husband, Bill] after he died [fighting in Vietnam], after I knew he... he was killed. One day I went out and there was this letter. Then I thought, 'Well maybe he's not dead! Oh, they made a mistake—you know—this is proof.' Then I read the date on it and I realized..."

Later, "I received this wallet in the mail, in a package... with some letters in it that I had written to my husband and a few other things. And when I... when I received it, it had mud on it... it had mud on it. And, that was the closest I felt I could get to him physically. Something I got to at least smell the earth of Vietnam and get some sort of feeling of what he might have experienced—what he was surrounded with."

Lula Bia (American):
Lóo-lah Byé-ah

"My husband was a rodeo bull rider. I would go along with him; we'd go to all the reservation rodeos. So we just kind of got close together. He was very proud of being an American. And being a Navajo Indian even made... made him prouder. I was really glad that he could do his duty for his country."

"I only received three letters... and he said that he didn't really want to say anything about what was going on. He didn't want to depress me or worry me and so he said he would just try to tell me how he was doing, how the weather was, that's all he would write. He said he wouldn't write about anything else. I don't know what he meant, but he must have meant something cause that's what it said and I often wondered about that. I often wondered about—what did he have to do?"

"They didn't find his body, they sent just the remains of his body and they identified it, his body by his dental plates, and the remains were just put in a plastic bag and his uniform was on top of it."

"I still have hope... maybe, somewhere he's... he's alive there."

Norma Banks (American):
Nórma Bánks

My husband, Michael, "refused to talk about [his experiences in the Vietnam War] for three or four years after we were married and it was only at me insisting to know just what it was like. I was real curious about what it was like. He really did not like the idea of having to kill, but he didn't have very, you know, any choice."

"It started off with his joints; they bothered him. Then as time went on, he just wasn't well. He started suspecting that it might have been Agent Orange. And he would just say, 'Well, if you're living in the swamps, then you know, Norma, eventually it's going to get to me.' They would always want him to describe what he felt, and he would say it's pain but it's not like a pain of a stab wound or a puncture. He felt that it was on the inside and it would feel like things just creeping, in his blood, creeping just all over him."

"He would just break, break out from the bottom of his feet, just all over his body, and he just itched 24 hours a day, all day, every day."

"I just felt so bad for him, 'cause there was really nothing you could do. He would fall asleep, but he could never sleep very long, he would just jump up... and then, it might wake me up and I could just rub his back and then it would be enough to get him back to sleep again."

"One night Michael got a real bad bout and he vomited and there was all this black stuff and, that was blood."

"Sometimes the effects of a war don't happen right away."

Phan Ngoc Dung (Vietnamese):
Fáhn Nyúk Zúng

"My husband often said that once our country gained independence, life would surely become normal for us."

"Of course, in the United States, sisters, mothers, and wives also feel pain when children and husbands are lost in war. But we lived in the country where the war was going on. The death and destruction were horrible, so painful. We hope that there will never be war again, not anywhere, so that nobody, especially women and children, will have to endure that pain, that misery, ever again. It is very, very painful."

"The city police force, under the American advisors, came to search my house and arrested my husband, my sister, and my daughter. My daughter was just over three years old..."

"We were all put in different rooms and tortured separately. When I saw my daughter, she said to me, 'Mother, I saw father. He couldn't walk. Someone had to help him—he was limping.' That was my daughter's last image of her father."

Diane Van Renselaar (American):
Di-yán Ván Rén-se-lahr

"He went over to fly. He was very patriotic. He'd spent his life playing football, and a navy attack squadron is like a flying football team. He was a member of the team and he couldn't let the team down."

"I don't think he wanted to be an aggressor. And I think he was unwillingly cast in that role the moment that he started flying those missions over North Vietnam, and I think he knew it. I don't think he articulated it to himself, but he knew that that was not something that he, that he wanted to do, even though he was following orders."

"'Is your husband a hero? Is he a murderer? What is he? Did he kill people over there?' Yes, he probably did. 'And were these people a threat to his country?' No, they were not. I don't see my husband as a murderer, but at the same time we have to look at it for what it is and... it is murder and is it justifiable?"

Grace Castillo (American):
Gréys Kas-tée-yo

My husband, David, "insisted on going [to Vietnam]. You know he had this crazy notion that he always wanted his son to be proud of him. And I would tell him: 'He is proud of you.' One day he came home, and said, "I enlisted."

"I was asleep and... it was like a dream, and I saw David, and he was walking and there was a field or a jungle or something, lots of shrubbery. And I kept trying to tell him, 'Don't go. Don't go any further, stay away.' And then there was an explosion."

"I dropped my son off at preschool, went to work and that dream haunted me all day. So that night, there's a telegram and the telegram read, 'This is to inform you that your husband, Private First Class, David Reevus Castillo, had been wounded.' And it tells me that they've amputated the left leg above the knee, removed the right eye, he's still in a coma and he has shrap-metal in the brain. And I contacted my physician, and he told me, 'Grace, pray... pray he dies.'"

Dr. Nguyen My Hien (Vietnamese):
Win Mé Hén

"The bomb dropped on top of the house, trapping my husband in the shelter. After the bombing, the people on the ground heard his cries for help. But the debris was so heavy, it took hours to reach him, and he was already dead. And to think, as a doctor I saved so many lives, but I couldn't save his... "

"Once I had a dream that my husband came home, and he asked me, 'Why are you so sad, darling? Why do you keep crying?' I asked him what he wanted me to do. He said, 'You must stop crying and go on with your life.'"

"Because of the war here in Vietnam we got used to being without our husbands. We just have to go on with our lives and make the best of it. That is our strength and courage as Vietnamese women."

Nguyen Ngoc Xuan (Vietnamese/American):
Win Nyúk Swán

"I was born in the south of Vietnam and lost my first husband in the war. I left Vietnam in 1972 with my second husband, an American soldier.

One day, when I was a teenager in Vietnam, "I was trying to run for my life, then I walk by my neighbor, an old man. He tries to reach to get water, and his legs were wiggling up, and he calls for help—help him to get out. I can't stop to help him. I pretend that I never heard his voice, crying for help."

"I decide who live and who die. I'm going to live; my neighbor die. My girlfriend was hiding with me and she wounded. And we don't have a lot of food left. I took her portion, because I'm going to live. She badly wounded—she going to die—so I took her food for me. I'm fourteen-years-old, why do I have to force to make the decision like that? I don't even trust my 24 year-old son with a lawn mower sometime, but I have to decide who gonna live, who going to die."

Today, "I look at my husband. He has a scar on the face. I don't have a scar. It's so deep. Sometimes my pain comes up... right, and sometimes my pain comes up wrong. Sometimes it comes up and it makes me think positive, and sometimes it comes up it just make me go into this stage that I don't want to talk to anybody. I was so cold. I shut down everything."

"In Vietnam, my neighbor's husband died. My neighbor's son died too. Sometime you ashamed to cry, because what makes my pain greater than my neighbor?"

Charlotte Begay (American):
Shár-laht Beh-gáy

"My husband's name was Calvin Harvey... He wanted to be patriotic. He wanted to help. But once he saw all of the killing of all the group, the Vietnamese, just looking like him—just about the same skin color, the same height—I think that really made him think, 'What is he doing here?'"

When he came home from Vietnam, "he would just be physically there and not really concentrating on what you're saying and the conversation would be so brief and then he'd say: 'Oh, I gotta go now.'"

"And it was December, by Christmas, that he came home again all just—and it was snowing and it was cold. He came home, he says: '...I'm drunk again.' And we just sat there talking about it, and then, too, in his condition he couldn't really think about it. He says: 'No, I really mean it. I'm gonna stop,' he says. There was too many promises. Seems like that it's never gonna happen and so I sat there all night outside just warming up his vehicle. And I just walked back in. The next day was Christmas day. I said, 'I'm sorry. I think that I can't handle it anymore. You have to go your way and I'll go mine.' "

"I think it was good that we broke up because it had gotten to the point where he wanted to commit suicide."

Tran Nghia (Vietnamese):
Tcháhn Nee-áa

"I have lived in war since my childhood. I grew up and married, but life was still hard. My husband died in the war. One child died from sickness. My other child was shot early one morning. After the Americans left, I returned to bury him. All the younger women had to run and hide. They were afraid of being raped."

"When I was young, I had hatred in order to defend my country and my people. Now there are not many days left in my life and there is peace. I can see that we are all the same, people there and people here. But if the war had not ended, the younger generation would be fighting just as I did."

Nguyen Thi Hong (Vietnamese):
Win Tée Hówng

"The Americans ambushed and captured me, and handed me over to the South Vietnamese army. They tortured me mercilessly. They hung me upside down from the ceiling by my ankles, and tied my big toes to a pole. They passed electrodes through the tips of each of my fingers, and through both my nipples. The cruelty that we experienced was longer than a river, higher than a mountain, deeper than an ocean."

"I was walking on this road once and the [U.S.] planes came over; drenching me with Agent Orange. Lots of us were sprayed several times. We have many health problems. I have terrible arthritis and strange skin problems. Many people here have died young of cancer—sick suddenly, then dead. Lots of deformed babies. Lots."

To filmmaker Barbara Sonneborn: "I am deeply touched by your visit and by your concern. I would like to send with you all the beautiful scenes that happened today. And please take them home to your people. And I hope there will be a good result—to help Vietnam heal the wounds of war. But the road from here to there is very difficult. But please try. And not just for us, you do that for yourself. And it will make us feel better that you tried."