In 1961, at just 8 years old, Nguyen Thi Mai Thanh was ordered by officials in then–South Vietnam to live in a “strategic hamlet,” an attempt to separate rural villagers from the National Liberation Front (which U.S. readers know better as the Vietcong). As much as one-third of South Vietnam’s rural population was sent to the hamlets, which ultimately became a strategic failure, increasing resentment against officials in Saigon.
“It was a very painful process,” she remembers. “People who had close ties to the village suddenly have to uproot their entire existence into these hamlets. It was very heartbreaking.” When the conflict grew more intense in 1968, she joined the Communist forces as a medic at the age of 16, “concocting basic medication, saline solutions.”
