Karen Gottschang Turner, Phan Thanh Hao
1998
I was born in Thai Binh province. My family were farmers. In 1948 my father was killed in the French War. My mother was with child when he died and she raised us four children alone. In 1968 I volunteered to be a people's soldier, bo doi, and I spent five years in the field during the most terrible time of the war. Why? Four people in my family died when the Americans bombed the Hanoi suburbs. I was angry and I believed that what men could do, I could do too. Life was hard. In the jungle, we kept the telephone lines open, and at first I was homesick and afraid. But I wanted to avenge my family, to kill Americans for what they did. I survived and when the war was over, my spirits soared. But life was still not easy. My husband is a career military man, who served in the South during the American War and then in Cambodia. He carries a bullet in his body and he is not well after sixteen years in the battlefields. We are lucky because we have two children, a boy and a girl. -Anonymous
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