Le Ly Hayslip, age 20.
Credit: Le Ly Hayslip.
Le Ly walked to the top of the hill behind their house where her father had once told her Vietnam's history and her place in it. The whole area, as far as the eye could see, was destroyed and the village empty of people her age. Many young men had been killed. Young women who couldn't find husbands, not wanting to burden their poverty-stricken parents, had moved to the city for work as housekeepers and hostesses, many of them, including her sister Lan, living with a string of American GI boyfriends. Others had become prostitutes.
Le Ly grieved to think of all the lives the war had destroyed and all the children who would never be born because of it. She wanted to blame someone and told her father so when she reentered the house.
"Are you so smart that you truly know who's to blame?" Trong asked. Everyone on all sides of the war, he said, had been blaming each other from the start. "Don't wonder about right and wrong," he continued. "Right is the goodness you carry in your heart--love for your ancestors and your baby and your family and for everything that lives. Wrong is anything that comes between you and that love. Go back to your little son. .Raise him the best way you can. That is the battle you were born to fight. That is the victory you must win."
From: "Le Ly Hayslip: Freedom is Never a Gift" from Courageous Women of the Vietnam War.
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