TWO WOMEN, ONE WAR

In Griffith’s memoir, two women, one American and the other Vietnamese, share the story of their unlikely friendship.

Reflecting on her half-century friendship with Nguyễn thi Mai, the author notes that the pair “grew to love and understand each other despite [their] countries wanting [them] to be enemies.” Griffith first arrived in Vietnam with her then-husband (David) during the height of the war in 1970 as a co-director of a rehabilitation facility run by the American Friends (Quaker) Service Committee. The rehab center was located in Quảng Ngãi City, an area that was nominally controlled by the American and South Vietnamese militaries but was actually, per the author, “a hotbed of Viet Cong activity” situated just 5 miles from My Lai (the site of the infamous massacre of civilians by U.S. forces). It was there that Griffith first met Mai, a wartime casualty who had lost both of her legs and was at the facility recovering from surgery. Mai was subsequently hired to work for the AFSC, where she became Griffith’s colleague and friend. As the memoir reveals, Mai’s entire family was sympathetic to the communist revolutionary forces (labeled Viet Cong by Americans). The book intriguingly intertwines Griffith’s recollections—which include accounts of anti-war work in America alongside activist and actress Jane Fonda—with Mai’s version of events, which is featured in textbox vignettes interspersed throughout. Both provide rare perspectives of women during the war, and both are remarkably candid. Griffith does not shy away from describing her ex-husband’s affairs, while Mai provides a Vietnamese point of view often absent in American accounts of the war. She describes the numerous men in her family killed by Americans, as well as the ways in which revolutionaries like herself masked their true loyalties; her fiancé, for instance, enrolled in a Catholic high school to obscure his sympathies (many Vietnamese Catholics were loyal to the West). The captivating text is accompanied by a treasure-trove of photographs, historical ephemera, and reproductions of correspondence that chronicle the duo’s friendship and wartime experiences.

A poignant, engrossing story of two women whose bond survived a war.