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Long-Haired Women’s Army of Đồng Khởi
Extremely Rare Original Vietnam War Badge
Extremely Rare Badge - Vietnam War - Viet Cong
Very Rare - Female Combatants
Measures - 1.2 inch high (3 cms) - Badge - Excellent Rare Viet Cong / NLF Badge.
The story of women in the Vietnamese revolutionary struggle is inseparable from the rise of the Viet Cong, and nowhere is this clearer than in the Đồng Khởi uprising of 1960, where thousands of peasant women helped ignite one of the most significant insurrections in South Vietnam.
Women had been involved in Communist-led resistance since the earliest days of the Indochina Communist Party in 1930, when the party formed a Women’s Union to mobilise half the population into the national struggle.
By 1945, figures like Hà Thị Quế were already raising all-female guerrilla units against the French, and by 1954 women across the country had become political workers, organisers, porters, messengers, and guerrillas embedded within the Viet Minh system.
Whilst many did, most, did not fight in open combat; instead, they focused on the political front, teaching, recruiting, mobilising, gathering intelligence, and sustaining the supply networks that fed the armed resistance. Their ability to move freely through villages, markets, and roads, often unnoticed, made them indispensable.
This tradition reached its defining moment in early 1960, when the Communist movement in the South launched a coordinated uprising throughout Bến Tre Province.
This became known as the “War of Đồng Khởi,” and its engine was the mobilisation of women at a scale previously unseen.
Under the leadership of Nguyễn Thị Định, peasant women organised themselves into a disciplined, militant force that came to be known as the Long-Haired Women’s Army.
Working initially with little more than bamboo poles, conical hats, and fierce determination, they confronted government outposts, staged mass demonstrations, cut communications lines, blocked roads, and forced ARVN garrisons to surrender or withdraw.
Their actions were not symbolic; they directly contributed to collapsing the Diệm government’s authority in large swathes of the countryside.
The Long-Haired Army’s most important weapon was political pressure. These women flooded markets, village squares, and district offices with coordinated protests that authorities struggled to disperse without creating propaganda disasters. They harassed government forces, surrounded outposts with unarmed crowds, shamed soldiers into deserting, and forced arrests that backfired by stirring deeper local resentment against Saigon.
Their tactics were deliberately gendered, Diệm’s troops were reluctant to fire on women, and the government was embarrassed internationally when it did. This allowed the insurgents to gain ground quickly while portraying themselves as the legitimate representatives of rural suffering. The uprising spread like wildfire across the Delta, and the Đồng Khởi movement became the catalyst for transforming scattered resistance cells into the organised Viet Cong insurgency.
Nguyễn Thị Định herself rose from these events to become one of the highest-ranking female commanders in the VC, eventually a general.
She embodied the dual military-political nature of the movement, showing how women could do far more than support roles, they could command, organise, and inspire total village mobilisation.
By the early 1960s, up to 40 percent of VC regimental-level political cadre positions were held by women. They took part in ambush preparation, courier work, medical treatment, intelligence gathering, booby-trap construction, village agitation, and covert attacks.
They excelled at clandestine operations because neither American nor South Vietnamese forces typically suspected women of being hardened VC operatives. Their ability to move quietly, their deep integration in rural society, and their ideological commitment made them central to the insurgency’s survival and growth.
Parallel to this grassroots mobilisation was the rise of the Women’s Liberation Association, which by 1965 claimed over a million members in South Vietnam. This organisation carried the spirit of Đồng Khởi into every province, spreading political indoctrination, encouraging ARVN desertions, sustaining VC communication networks, and performing essential logistics such as preparing food, moving supplies, and constructing defensive works.
They created a parallel civil society beneath the official Saigon state, and in many rural districts the women’s networks had more influence than local government officials.
The Long-Haired Women’s Army of Đồng Khởi remains one of the most striking examples in modern history of how mass female mobilisation can transform a conflict.
Their uprising fractured the authority of the Saigon regime in the countryside, provided the spark that launched the Viet Cong into a nationwide insurgency, and demonstrated that political and psychological warfare could be just as decisive as armed attacks.
They were organisers, agitators, logisticians, spies, fighters, leaders and ultimately, the backbone of the early southern revolutionary movement.
