- Posted November 21, 2014 by
- LarryAlton Follow
Seattle, Washington
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War and Women: The Vietnam War (Lai Dai Han)
There was a time when the term Lai Dai Han was rarely voiced or printed. The phrase refers to mixed ancestry children born to a Vietnamese mother and South Korean father during the Vietnam War.
However, recent controversy relating to the concept has brought the issue to the forefront of political conversation. The Lai Dai Han and the fate of women in wartime has become yet another legacy of the long and all-but-forgotten Vietnam War.
Women and the Vietnam War
Women had an unclear but variable role in the Vietnam War. From the U.S. perspective, estimates of the number of American women directly involved in the war efforts vary dramatically.
According to Department of Defense statistics, roughly 7,500 women served on active duty in Vietnam between 1962 and 1973. The Veterans Administration claims the figure is closer to 11,000.
Independent surveys and data banks have generated even higher estimates, and assert that the total number of civilian and non-civilian women who worked in Vietnam during the war may have been in the neighborhood of between 33,000 and 55,000.
The fact that a number can’t be readily settled on is indicative of a much larger issue: a likely and universal lack of equality and fair treatment of women involved in the Vietnam War. Alleged sexual harassment, abuse, lack of proper training, unequal pay, and other issues permeated the experience of American women in the war efforts.
According to one source, “The popular perception of women doing war work is that the men are in the danger zone and the women are safely behind them. This has probably never been true and was certainly not true in Vietnam.”
While American women were certainly treated unfairly, and therefore sometimes referred to as “Unknown Soldiers,” the issue pales in comparison to the controversy with regard to Vietnamese comfort women, sexual services, and Lai Dai Han.
Who were the Vietnam comfort women?
Until now, the term “comfort women” has largely been associated with the estimate of over 20,000 women, which are counter-argued, forced into sexual services by the Imperial Japanese Army before, during, and after World War II. But more recently, the term has been more broadly applied to women of any nationality who were forced into sexual services during World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War.
Comfort women were allegedly forced into prostitution for members of the military. While some prostitutes probably worked voluntarily, many others were coerced, raped, and abused.
These comfort women were often sold by their pimps to the military and forced to operate out of designated stations. The women were sometimes forced to have sex dozens of times each day and examined by U.S. or U.S.-hired officials on a regular basis for sexually transmitted diseases.
The Lai Dai Han legacy
The current raised with regard to Vietnam comfort women is of course directly linked with the Lai Dai Han legacy. As mentioned before, the term refers to a mixed-ancestry individual born to a Vietnamese mother and South Korean father.
While some Lai Dai Han children were born out of mutual relationships, many others were by-products of South Korean soldiers’ abuse of Vietnamese comfort women. Long hidden in the darker shadows of history, the term became popularized in the 1990s and 2000s as Korea and Vietnam raised their business relations.
Making a closer study of the term can provide non-Asian-speaking individuals with a better grasp of what the term actually means. Lai -- either a noun or adjective -- can refer to any type of hybrid.
In the context of this cultural concept, it has a negative connotation, with the connotation of “mixed blood.” The latter two-thirds of the phrase, Dai Han, were commonly associated with South Korea at the time.
While there are no accurate estimates of how many Lai Dai Han children were born, observers believe it to be somewhere between 5,000 and 30,000. The South Korean fathers were usually members of the military, but some were Korean workers stationed in Vietnam for the duration of the war.
The children of these men were usually abandoned by their fathers and raised by their Vietnamese mothers … or comfort women.
The Lai Dai Han problem had many causes. Some children were born of mutual relationships, some from the activities of comfort women, and others from rape.
The Vietnamese people blame it on the brutality of the South Korean soldiers and point to the country’s apparent hypocrisy. The issue in Vietnam has received impetus from the heated controversy in South Korea and Japan in recent years over the use that military invaders from the island nation made of South Korean comfort women in World War II.
The future of Lai Dai Han
Though the issue remained hidden almost as long as the secret of the Second World War comfort women, it is now out in the open as groups of surviving victims and Lai Dai Han seek public awareness and government apologies.
How the various Asian governments will respond to public outcry and legal action remains to be seen.
What do you think of this story?
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