Rape during the Vietnam War

During the Vietnam War, U.S. soldiers stationed in South Vietnam engaged in various sexual interactions, including consensual sex, prostitution, and rape. Mixing consenting sexual activity and rape may also be viewed as the outcome of indifference toward a nation at war. A U.S. soldier in Vietnam reportedly said: During the Winter Soldier Investigation, sponsored by Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), some of the testimonies of Vietnam veterans included the rape and murder of Vietnamese women, with some being tortured and sexually mutilated. According to Mark Baker, who interviewed Vietnam veterans for his book, one became a "double veteran" by "having sex with a woman and then killing her." One marine recalled an incident where a Vietnamese girl was gang-raped by members of his unit, with the final perpetrator shooting the victim in the head. In a similar incident, a soldier observed that the female victim "freely submitted" to rape to avoid death. In his controversial study ''The Perfect War: The War We Couldn't Lose and How We did'', James William Gibson contends that raping women was a means by which some soldiers could demonstrate their power over Vietnamese women. According to Gibson, U.S. soldiers would rape Vietnamese girls, then kill them in horrific ways, including allegedly making their "stomachs explode" by sticking "hand flares" inside their vaginas. Prosecutions and notable cases According to one source, only 25 cases of rape committed by army soldiers and 16 by marines involving Vietnamese victims from 1965 to 1973 resulted in court-martial convictions. Daddis argues that the low number of complaints and convictions reported by the UCMJ, the only service that keeps track of its war crimes cases, demonstrates the faults in the UCMJ system. All soldiers involved faced court sentences and were also dishonorably discharged from the Army. almost 20 Vietnamese women and girls, some as young as 13, were raped by the U.S. troops. while interrogating her as a suspected VC member. A general court martial tried the soldier, and he was given a dishonorable discharge and 20 years in prison with hard labor. However, his sentence was reduced to one year upon appeal. In total, he was incarcerated for only seven months and 16 days. According to Daddis, the UCMJ system discriminated against Vietnamese rights in favor of American rights. The court system did not protect local women or listen to their stories. For example, military officials detained a 20-year-old Vietnamese woman who later alleged that 10 American soldiers raped her while she was jailed. The woman could only identify two of her rapists when questioned by investigators. Later, she stated that "she was not sure," and the case was swiftly dismissed due to a lack of sufficient evidence to support her assertions. ==By South Korean personnel==

Approximately 320,000 South Korean soldiers served while fighting in the Vietnam War, with each typically serving a one-year tour of duty. Maximum troop levels peaked at 50,000 in 1968, with all being withdrawn by 1973. In October 2016, it was reported that the head of the Vietnam Veterans' Association of Korea was representing 831 plaintiffs in a defamation lawsuit against for her 2014 interview in the Japanese newspaper Shūkan Bunshun and 2016 interview in The Hankyoreh, as well as her statements in a video. They said that Ku's statements of about the actions of the South Korean military during the Vietnam War were all "falsehoods and forgeries", that the victims were just "Viet Cong disguised as civilians", and that "no sexual violence occurred". Lai Đại Hàn In Vietnamese, "Lai Dai Han" is a derogatory epithet that means "mixed blood." The Vietnamese-Korean children contend their lives have been wrecked by shame in a culture that has not recognized them or their mothers' sexual abuse. Many are illiterate as a result of being denied an education, and they have limited access to healthcare and social services. According to Maeil Business, however, there are 1,000 at least. A 1998 paper which was cited in a 2015 paper said that the South Korean government put the number of Lai Dai Han at 1,500. The Lai Dai Han community continues to face social exclusion due to their mixed ethnicity. Vietnamese women raped by South Korean personnel during the war continue to seek reparations. On 19 October 2015, a petition with close to 29,000 signatures asked South Korean president Park Geun-hye for a formal apology from the South Korean government for the systematic rape and sexual assault perpetrated by South Korean soldiers during the war. According to Nadia Murad, winner of the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize, the Lai Dai Han have long been marginalized in Vietnamese society. She went on by saying that as we collaborate to seek justice, the victims and their families deserve to be acknowledged. Also in 2019, former British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw asked the United Nations Human Rights Council to launch a comprehensive inquiry into sexual abuse during the Vietnam War, and has urged South Korea "to confront a murky period in its past." == Academic commentary ==

According to Gina Marie Weaver in her book Ideologies of Forgetting Rape in the Vietnam War, the role of rape in the Vietnam War has been omitted from the narratives Weaver concludes that "true healing" occurs when the public listens to the victims of the war, and become involved in the recovery of Vietnam. == Prevalence in media ==

According to Mark Heberle, despite the fact that the violence of war is typically depicted in its entirety, with violent battles and atrocities done by all sides, rape and sexual violence are frequently avoided and in some cases purposefully omitted from the majority of films. Although veterans have long given testimony to such crimes, Hollywood war productions have altered or omitted veteran accounts in such a way as to deny their existence or imply that they were the work of deviants instead of typical soldiers. Incident on Hill 192 is covered in a book by Daniel Lang. De Palma's film contains scenes that do not appear in Lang's account of the incident. These sequences include a scene in which the men witness the death of their favorite friend at the hands of VC forces and a scene in which it is implied that these soldiers would not have planned to kidnap and rape a Vietnamese girl if they were permitted to vent their "anger, aggression, and sexual needs on prostitutes". In her memoir When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, Le Ly Hayslip wrote about her experience of being raped by Viet Cong soldiers when she was fourteen years old. The 1993 Oliver Stone film Heaven & Earth was based on her memoir. The books Between Heaven and Earth by Le Ly Hayslip and Then the Americans Came by Martha Hess are said by Elisabeth Wood to provide a voice to women who were sexually abused during the war. In the book Against Our Will by Brownmiller, her chapter on war offers a thirty-page investigation of the sexual exploitation of women in Vietnam, citing information that has come to light since 1975. == See also ==