David Jiménez. Excerpt from El lugar más feliz del mundo. Madrid: Kailas, 2013.

Vo Thi Mo doesn’t remember the day she started hating Americans. Was it when she saw the first planes fly over Cu Chi, her village in southern Vietnam? Or maybe after two of her brothers were killed in an air raid? What has remained etched in her memory is the day she stopped hating them. Her Viet Cong unit had come across three marines resting in the jungle. She was aiming her AK-47 at them—her finger on the trigger, the target caught off guard—when one of them pulled a photo of his family out of his pocket. The other two rummaged in their knapsacks and opened battered envelopes and began to read the last letters they’d gotten from America aloud. The young men started crying, and Vo Thi Mo decided to move on without shooting them:

“For the first time, I saw them as people.”

The three American marines evaded death without knowing it. Maybe they died in another attack a few days later. Or maybe they’re taking a walk with their grandchildren in a park somewhere in Wisconsin. Vo Thi Mo kept killing as many enemies as she could and was awarded the Military Victory medal. But after that encounter in the jungle, nothing was ever the same again: she had stopped believing that her participation in the war had any merit. When it all came to an end, with the evacuation of the US embassy in Saigon on April 30, 1975, she did not share her comrades’ euphoria. The greatest army in the world had been defeated by an army of peasants, but Vietnam lay in ruins. Her friends and family had died. Her village had been destroyed.

“It was hard to feel like we had triumphed.”

Decades after the end of the conflict, tourists continue to try to relive it. Some of the blame lies with Hollywood and the hundreds of movies produced on what the locals call “the American war” because, they point out, it wasn’t the Vietnamese who traveled thousands of kilometers to occupy a foreign company. One of the most popular attractions is the Cu Chi tunnels built by the Viet Cong so they could hide and launch attacks from the heart of us-controlled South Vietnam.

In the souvenir shop at the entrance to the tunnels, a postcard catches my eye: the black- and-white image of a beautiful young woman, a seventeen-year-old communist guerrilla fighter. She has long, dark, neatly brushed hair, childlike facial features, and a frank gaze. Her adolescent hands are gripping a rifle. The sales clerk tells me she lives nearby, and a local farmer offers to take me to her house.

Vo Thi Mo is reclining on an opium bed, cuddling her cat and watching a soap opera. She looks like a friendly country grandma; nothing about her evokes the legendary guerrilla fighter from the photo.

“Come in, come in. Would you like some tea? Have you eaten?”

Vo Thi Mo once led the C3, one of the Viet Cong’s most effective battalions. The women in the unit rode behind American lines on motorbikes, were experts in the targeted assassination of officers, carried out some of the riskiest missions in the South Vietnamese jungles, and, in what for many of them was the most difficult assignment of all, slid between the enemies’ sheets to obtain information. They had to go the extra mile if they wanted to convince the men that they could be part of the guerrilla army.

“There was a saying in the camp that said that women were so useless, that we couldn’t even piss above the grass,” Vo Thi Mo tells me. “So one day a group of us climbed to the top of a tree and started to piss from up there. We told the men, See, we can piss above the grass just like you, and fight like you, too.”

The former Vietnamese guerrilla fighter has telephoned her comrades-in-arms, and a few minutes later her house is full of grand- mothers regaling me with fascinating tales of assaults and battles in the jungle. Cao Thi Huong and Truong Hai Thuy recount how they escaped from a column of tanks by racing between them. Tran Thi Neo stepped on a mine in 1973, and they amputated her toes one by one as they became gangrenous. When she had only one left, she threatened to kill herself if they cut it off. She still has it. Le Thi Suong joined the guerrillas with her three sisters to avenge the deaths of all the males in her family. The last one to talk is Thanh, who has to be encouraged by the others to speak.

“Go on, tell him,” they urge her.

Thanh’s mission had consisted of getting dolled up and going to Saigon cafés frequented by American soldiers from the 25th Infantry Division, trying to seduce them to gain access to the base. The women preferred the battlefield, as prostituting themselves for their country meant sleeping with men who might destroy their villages and kill their loved ones the next morning. They had to endure disapproving stares and insults when they strolled with American marines through the streets of Saigon. Thanh bore it all while sketching out detailed maps of the US installations and providing information for an assault. When she was found out and arrested in 1970, the South Vietnamese soldiers tortured her for days, freeing her only when her wounds had become gangrenous and it looked like she was going to die. Five months after one of her arms was amputated, she traded in nights of feigned passion for the battlefront, firing from the back of a motorcycle with her weapon braced against the stump.

“The American soldiers were paralyzed with shock,” she says, laughing. “When the war ended, many women who had fought did their best to hide their wounds. But I was never able to disguise my missing arm. Over time, I have learned to be proud of it.”

Vo Thi Mo was the most famous of the Viet Cong’s women guerrilla fighters. She was named the best soldier in her company and promoted to second-in-command of the C3 battalion. It was said she’d taken out two M-48 tanks in the village of Cay Diep. That she’d killed dozens of enemy soldiers. And that she’d fought in her underwear in one battle after losing her pants. Men who at first had refused to take orders from a woman ended up following her with blind loyalty. The communist government used her image on its official seals, the same image that had brought me to her house four decades later. Vo Thi Mo became a symbol for a people that had forged its independent spirit over long centuries of resistance against the Mongols, the Chinese, the French, and the Americans. Rebelling against foreign powers was in their blood, and women had never stayed on the sidelines in those fights. The first uprising against China, in the year 40 CE, had been led by three women, including Phung Thi Chinh, who is said to have given birth there on the battlefront before charging the enemy, clutching her sword in one hand and her newborn baby in the other.

The final victory against the Americans was already near when Vo Thi Mo bumped into an old flame, a boy she’d known as a girl and lost track of when he was sent north to serve in the regular army. They got married between ambushes and military operations. During the final offensive, with Saigon under siege and the Americans preparing to pull out, the guerrilla fighter was giving birth to the first of her three children. She didn’t care that she was missing a historic moment: giving life seemed much more natural to her than taking it.

“When I think about the mother of those soldiers I found in the jungle, I’m glad I didn’t shoot them,” she says as she lies on her opium bed, recalling the day she stopped hating the enemy. “I can’t stop think- ing about the mothers of the men I did shoot. They were sent to our country. A lot of them were just kids. What fault was it of theirs?”

After the end of the war, Vo Thi Mo and her comrades from the C3 got married and started families. While most of the Viet Cong men were given medals and government jobs, the women returned to their villages in silence. When I review their stories in my notebook, I am surprised not to find a single expression of bitterness. Not toward the Americans who brought war to their land, and not toward the Vietnamese who forgot their contribution to victory. They wanted to leave the days of carrying weapons behind, to go back to being women who had to climb a tree in order to piss above the grass.