American female writer traveled across 3 regions of Vietnam during the war to help the Vietnamese people

Lady Borton is known as the American woman who understands Vietnam the most thoroughly. She went to all three regions of the North - Central - South during the war against America to help the people. Lady Borton decided to go to Vietnam even though the war was still going on. In 1969, at the age of 27, she was a nurse with the Quaker Service (USA), a humanitarian organization that came to Vietnam to volunteer to help both sides, promote peace and justice, and overcome the consequences of war. She tried to take patients to and from hospitals, and worked in teams to clean up contaminated land. “I was a participant in the peace movement, but I was a direct worker, not a protester. Therefore, I wanted to be there, to do something to help the Vietnamese people. When I went to Vietnam, I was in Quang Ngai, and I saw that the people were too poor and too miserable due to the effects of the war.

I never asked the Vietnamese where they stood politically . We treated everyone equally without taking sides. Our patients were farmers, many of them children who had lost their legs due to landmines while tending buffalo. I also understand the painful loss of the Americans when they participated in this war... Our country also had many young men who were forced by the US to join the army or a few of them joined the army voluntarily but many of them did not return or they were injured, disabled or they went missing... As an honest American woman, I am also very sad", Lady Borton confided. When the war ended, to re-establish relations, there had to be contacts. According to Lady Borton, there were two very special people, Mr. Dave Elder and another person, Mr. John McAuliff. They traveled between Washington and New York, at a time when there was only a representative of Vietnam at the United Nations. In 1977, the US State Department did not allow representatives of the Vietnamese government to go outside the Manhattan area and they had to stay in the United Nations area. "That summer, we also asked the US State Department for permission to invite them to Philadelphia for a weekend picnic with the Americans in the movement peace and also some Vietnamese people in the US to meet each other. Those were not seminars or meetings but just happy gatherings to open up relations. In my opinion, that time was very important, if it were not for the organizers of events like Mr. Dave Elder and Mr. John McAuliff, it would not be possible to celebrate the relationship between the two countries now", said Ms. Lady Borton. Mr. John McAuliff and the Reconciliation and Development Foundation have implemented and planned to connect and increase exchanges between individuals and non-governmental organizations of the US and Vietnam. He has made efforts in people's diplomacy with Vietnam for more than half a century as well as helping Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange/dioxin.

Since her first visit in 1969, Lady Borton has traveled between Vietnam and the United States more times than she can count. She returned for several months in the 1980s to write After Sorrow, a memoir of her time in rural Vietnam during the war that helped to advance understanding and normalization of post-war relations between Vietnam and the United States. Her work resonates with the people of rural Vietnam and is a voice of reconciliation and renewal. In the foreword to Lady Borton’s book After Sorrow, the renowned writer and political activist Grace Paley wrote: “I understand that she has sworn to love and understand the Vietnamese people, all of them.”

It wasn’t until the 1990s that she moved to Hanoi for work. “I love being in America, but when I’m in Hanoi, it’s like a different life. This is my home now. I feel like I have roots here, this is where my friends and my life are,” she said.

From 1993 to 2004, as Head of the Quaker Representative Office in Vietnam, she directed the implementation of irrigation and clean water projects, provided capital for poor women to improve their lives, helped proofread English for press and publishing agencies in Vietnam, and organized many exchanges between American and Vietnamese writers and publishers.

Coming from very different backgrounds, she has made friends with like-minded Americans. Lady Borton met Marine Colonel Chuck Meadows in the late 1990s when he returned to Vietnam to repair the damage caused by the American war. He is the executive director of PeaceTrees Vietnam, an organization that helps Vietnamese people find and safely transport unexploded ordnance left over from the war. When a site is cleared of ordnance, the organization plants trees there. Mr. Meadows said that remediation teams have cleared “tens of thousands of acres of land that are now productive.”

Another friend was Mike Fey, who enlisted in 1967 and served in a U.S. Army division in Quang Tri Province. After the war, he became a dentist. His altruism led him to PeaceTrees Vietnam. She encouraged Mike to make a book of his photos in Vietnam. “I will always be grateful for her encouragement and inspiration,” he wrote in “A Faraway Place: Revisiting Vietnam.”

She and artist David Thomas published the book “Ho Chi Minh - A Portrait” on the occasion of the 113th anniversary of President Ho Chi Minh’s birth (2003) and helped the Ho Chi Minh Museum compile the book “The Nguyen Ai Quoc Case in Hong Kong 1931-1933 (Documents and Images)” with documents she collected from many countries. She was awarded the Friendship Medal by the Vietnamese Government in 1998.

Having been attached to Vietnam for half a century, Lady Borton also has the Vietnamese name Ut Ly. With many jobs such as journalism, book writing, translation, charity work, she has no other wish than to help the world understand more about the history, culture and people of Vietnam. Many people know American female writer Lady Borton by the names: "The ambassador bringing Vietnamese culture to America and the world", "The American woman who understands Vietnam most thoroughly", "The writer who has composed many works about Vietnam"...

Author: Nguyen Bach

Design: Pham Luyen

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