Rape during the Vietnam War, as well as other acts of wartime sexual violence, was committed against Vietnamese civilians by military personnel from the United States, South Korea, and other combatants. According to American academic Elisabeth Jean Wood, wartime rape was frequently committed by U.S. troops because their commanders tolerated them. Weaver stated that not only were documented crimes against Vietnamese women by United States military personnel ignored during the international legal discourse which occurred immediately after the war, but modern feminists and other anti-war rape campaigners, as well as historians, have continued to dismiss them.
Some American veterans believe that sexual violence against Vietnamese women was motivated by "racism, sexism, or a combination of both," as a result of the strong social movements that were roiling the United States in the early 1970s. According to one source, only twenty-five cases of rape committed by United States Army personnel and sixteen by United States Marines resulted in court-martial convictions involving Vietnamese victims from 1965 to 1973.
Political controversies over children who were conceived as a result of rapes of Vietnamese women by South Korean military personnel continue to plague Vietnamese and South Korean society because the children continue to be subjected to discriminatory treatment by the Vietnamese government and their presence in South Korea is unacknowledged by the South Korean government. In the Vietnamese language, a racially mixed child who was born to a South Korean father and a Vietnamese mother during the war is known as a Lai Dai Han ( in Vietnamese: pronounced [laːi ɗâˀi hâːn]; Korean: ). The extent of the rapes is still debated; one study determined that over half of Lai Dai Han births had resulted from rape.
United States personnel
During the Vietnam War, U.S. soldiers stationed in South Vietnam engaged in various sexual interactions, including consensual sex, prostitution, and rape. In doing so, many commonly failed to distinguish between "available" and "unavailable" women, replacing sex with violence. Mixing consenting sexual activity and rape may also be viewed as the outcome of indifference toward a nation at war. According to Gregory A. Daddis, certain U.S. Army drill instructors assured recruits that they could rape Vietnamese women, which Daddis partially attributed to "Orientalist" beliefs that portrayed Asian women as "creatures of a male power fantasy." Men's adventure magazines contributed to a culture that accepted sexual aggressiveness and violence towards Vietnamese women.
According to Gina Marie Weaver, the primary sources are rich in accounts of violence, including testimony provided in open hearings held during the war, court cases, military investigations, oral reports gathered for publishing both during and long after the war, and literary works, such as poems, novels, and memoirs. Sexual mistreatment of the Vietnamese women during the Vietnam war has been witnessed by numerous U.S. veterans and other eyewitnesses.
According to Kerry Crawford, rape of Vietnamese women was a "normal operating procedure", and brothels were built inside military installations to maintain morale and discipline. Approximately 100 recruits who were interviewed in Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam, had little to say about the war's greater difficulties since "the men’s personal concerns were mostly sexual." Many U.S. servicemen sought local women in hopes of filling the void created by the frustrating war in Vietnam. According to Daddis, military leaders were likely aware of this, as one deployed officer noted that his in-processing briefings covered topics ranging "from the current Viet Cong infrastructure to the common venereal diseases in Vietnam." 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. At a hospital in Da Nang, a nurse was killed after being raped by seven marines.