And indeed, more change was afoot. After the 1968 Tet offensive, legislators introduced a bill in the National Assembly to draft all women aged 18 to 25, but it was sunk by conservative assembly members. Still, there were other avenues available: Women who wanted to take up arms could receive training in weapons and military tactics with their local People’s Self-Defense Force unit. Hanh estimated that by 1970, one million women served in these militia units, more than 100,000 of them in combat roles.

Even undertaking advanced training did not make a servicewoman eligible for a combat position. Although women could serve in militia combat positions, Nguyen Hong Nguyet, the commissioner of a Saigon self-defense unit, told Hanh that women were best suited for support roles. In 1970, a group of women in the W.A.F.C. completed the difficult Airborne School program, parachuting out of airplanes wearing fatigues as their male counterparts did. But as Hanh described them in her booklet, the “daredevil girls” would not have careers “dropping into combat zones.” Maj. Ho Thi Ve, commander of the W.A.F.C. training school, said the servicewomen took the airborne course for fitness and fun.

Southern women enlisted for all the same reasons men did. Of the women Hanh interviewed, some wanted to help the war effort, while others saw the military as a viable career path. The lure of adventure also drew women to the W.A.F.C. When Ha Thi Tuoi graduated from high school, she enlisted in the corps and was assigned to an army dependents camp at Tan Son Nhut Air Base. Lieutenant Tuoi enjoyed her work, but she saw it as a temporary detour on the road to a more traditional woman’s life. She was engaged to an architecture student, and she planned to leave the military once she had a child. It was what her fiancé wanted.

Yet even homemakers could support the war effort. Women’s magazines such as Phu Nu Moi (New Woman) encouraged readers to pitch in. The magazine, published weekly in Saigon from 1966 to 1975, mainly ran serial novels, advice columns, and fashion, beauty and celebrity news, but each issue opened with an editorial that dealt with politics, the military and how women could support the war effort. Editorials showcased women in the military, and encouraged women to donate needed items to troops and, after the Tet offensive, participate in their local self-defense units.

Articles also stressed the importance of women’s political action, especially in the lead-up to the 1967 election that put Nguyen Van Thieu in the presidency. An editorial in July 1967 asserted that women were equally important to men in ensuring that democracy would thrive in South Vietnam. A September edition went further in emphasizing the importance of women to the democratic process: Women’s political activism would highlight the progress and maturity of South Vietnam and would advance gender equality.

The new woman was to be politically engaged, aware of the plight of the less fortunate and willing to help out through fund-raising or other types of advocacy. The consequences of the war on rural women should not be far from her mind. It was up to middle-class urban women to demand that the government create programs to help rural women and their families. Bettering rural women’s lives would help counter another social issue new women should be concerned about — the rise of prostitution that accompanied the growth of foreign troops in South Vietnam.

The historian Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen has interviewed W.A.F.C. veterans about their lives after the war, and she found that while they avoided the worst of the anti-Southern crackdown, many of them faced harassment by the new government and its security forces. They watched in fear as their husbands and brothers were arrested and sent to re-education camps. Some women fled Vietnam and spent time in refugee camps before settling in Australia or the United States. Army wives, too, lost their husbands to re-education camps, sometimes for years.

If that was the fate of Dang Nguyet Anh, it would have marked at least the second time she was on her own with her children. But after the war, there were no W.A.F.C. social workers to help her.