For my final article on the new Sovereign of Discord expansion, I will focus on one of the themes of the Bonus Events that are included for the base game. The expansion includes 40 new Events to be used with the original Fire in the Lake scenarios and the two additional base game scenarios that are provided (“Long 1964” and “Turning Point”). I chose the Bonus Events to reflect some new scholarship on the war since the release of Fire in the Lake in 2014 and to further emphasize a few themes: women’s role in the war, civilian victimization, the effect of the war on South Vietnamese society, North Vietnamese strategies, and the 1964 escalation debate. In this article, we will focus on just one of these themes: women’s role in the war.

Women’s Role in the Vietnam War:

Every faction depicted in Fire in the Lake includes Operations or Special Abilities where women played a key role. The point of the 8 new cards within this theme is to bring attention to women’s participation in the actions that players carry out in every game of Fire in the Lake. For the US player, some of the major contributions of women are represented in the Casualties and Out of Play boxes. Around 10,000 American women served in Vietnam, with around half that number being a part of the Army Nurse Corps, immortalized by the monument on the National Mall in Washington DC. Their work is represented by the return of US Troop cubes from the Causalities box. American women also participated in Vietnam as journalists, donut dollies, and members of the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), and were later involved in anti-war protest movements back home. The title of the base game, Fire in the Lake, is inspired by the book of the same name by journalist Frances Fitzgerald, and the Sovereign of Discord expansion is named after a chapter on Diem from the same book.

Among the Vietnamese factions, women from North Vietnam played crucial roles manning air-defense in the North and helping ensure the flow of supplies down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, often facing relentless bombing by the US Air Force. Shifts in the Trail Track best reflect their contribution. Women in the liberated areas of South Vietnam participated in the Women’s Association established by the Viet Cong to encourage youths to join the Front and to protest ARVN shelling and operations in nearby towns. As the demands of the escalating war sent more and more of the young men of the liberated areas to fight in Main Force units, women increasingly had to take over agricultural production to maintain the Viet Cong taxes, and also served in local guerrilla units. After the death of Ho Chi Minh in 1969, women’s contribution in the Viet Cong even prominently extended beyond South Vietnam, with the new international face of the Vietnamese communist movement becoming Nguyen Thi Binh, the foreign minister of the National Liberation Front. She would negotiate on behalf of the Front at the Paris Peace Accords in the 1970s. Women’s participation in the Viet Cong is folded into many of the mechanics in Fire in the Lake such as Rally, Tax, and Agitate. Finally, the war and the large-scale American presence had profound effects on Vietnamese society. As large amounts of US Aid poured into the country, many in the South Vietnamese government were able to enrich themselves and their supporters through corruption. Many of the wives of South Vietnamese generals were said to be actively involved in running the corruption schemes, such as those modeled by the Govern Special Activity that transfers Aid to Patronage.

The war also presented opportunities and hardships for everyday South Vietnamese women. The vast devastation in the countryside from the war and the influx of American aid and personnel drove urbanization, as young people flocked to the city either as refugees or seeking opportunity. Besides serving at times in the self-defense militias, National Police, or guerrillas, women found several new jobs ranging from translators to secretaries to bar girls. The most controversial of these in both the United States and South Vietnam was the rise in prostitution. In 1966, Senator Fulbright famously claimed that “both literally and figuratively, Saigon has become an American brothel”, in response to the rising industry in many South Vietnamese cities. Among Vietnamese critics in both the South Vietnamese government and Viet Cong, the issue became, according to historian Heather Marie Stur, symbolized by their condemnation of the rise of miniskirts over the more traditional ao dai dress. In their eyes, the former reflected the worst of American debauchery introduced by US intervention.

I hope the new bonus Events included in this theme will illustrate that women are participating behind nearly every major mechanism of Fire in the Lake. For those looking to learn more about the role of women in the Vietnam War, I recommend Taylor’s Vietnamese Women at War or Heather Marie Stur’s Beyond Combat: Women and Gender in the Vietnam War Era.

The Events in Volko and Mark’s original design already do an excellent job of covering many of the broader effects of the war on South Vietnamese society, but I hope the discussion of one theme gives some idea of the new Bonus Events included in the expansion. We didn’t cover all the new content included in Sovereign of Discord in this article series, but I must leave some surprises for players to discover themselves, and we look forward to bringing this Fire in the Lake expansion to your tables soon.

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Previous Articles:

Sovereign of Discord: Sink or Swim with Ngo Dinh Diem

Sovereign of Discord: The Strategic Hamlet Program

Sovereign of Discord: External Support