Dang Thuy Tram (1943–1970)

Dang Thuy Tram: Last Night I Dreamed of Peace

Mike picked up this book (and a couple of others) during the family trip to Vietnam in December. He had to work at it to find Vietnamese authors available in English. I couldn't find any when we were in Hanoi in 2012.

Dang Thuy Tram was a doctor who volunteered at the age of twenty-four to work in a Vietcong battlefield hospital. She died at twenty-eight, walking down a jungle trail with three others, ambushed by American soldiers. The diary ended up with an American lawyer, Fred Whitehurst, working in military intelligence in the area. His job was to look through captured documents and destroy those of no military value. He almost threw the diaries in a fire, but his translator suggested that they had value and should be kept. Fred took the diaries back to the States. He and his brother, Rob, became obsessed with the dairies and the idea of returning them to Thuy's family in Vietnam. They found the family and everyone met in 2005. Thuy's mother and three of her sisters were still alive. The diaries were published in July, 2005 and within 18 months had sold 430,00 copies in a country where few books sell more than 5,000.

The diaries were unique in presenting for the first time in Vietnam, honest descriptions of the hopes and fears, successes and failures, doubts and commitments of the war against the American "devils" who continued a long line of invasion and war in Vietnamese history. Thuy was a Communist and Vietnamese nationalist and she wanted very much to join the Communist Party to demonstrate her commitment. However, she did not shy from criticism and often commented on self-serving, career-climbing people who put personal advancement paramount, even in the Party.

The universal appeal of the diaries is that they were written by a young woman at the beginning of her professional, adult life, making her way in an incredibly difficult and dangerous world, longing for love and companionship in the midst of the grief of war and destruction. She was disappointed in love. She knew great sadness and self-doubt. She wavered with the loss of friends and colleagues and good friends, but she never gave up belief in the ultimate victory of the North and that the sacrifices were worthwhile to free her country. Thuy certainly did not want to die that sunny morning in June, 1970, but if she could have looked back, she would have accepted the sacrifice and been proud of her role. She was one person among millions in a titanic struggle, but on the personal level, especially as a doctor, she touched many lives, and through the diaries, she has touched many more.… (mehr)

Một cuốn nhật kí nhặt được bên xác của một nữ Việt Cộng đã suýt bị người lính Mỹ ném vào lửa, nhưng người phiên dịch đã khuyên anh ta nên giữ lại vì "trong đó có lửa". Nhật kí Đặng Thùy Trâm là những ghi chép hàng ngày của một người nữ bác sĩ về cuộc sống của chị nơi chiến tuyến. Cuốn nhật kí là thế giới riêng của người trí thức nhạy cảm mà không yếu đuối, tha thiết với cuộc sống mà không hề sợ hãi trước những gian nan. Ở đó ta vẫn gặp những băn khoăn trăn trở trước tình yêu, trước cuộc sống phức tạp hàng ngày, những nỗi buồn, nỗi nhớ nhung, sự cô đơn của một người con gái, nhưng đồng thời chúng ta cũng thấy được một ý chí mãnh liệt, những lời nói tự động viên cảnh tỉnh, một lòng can đảm phi thường - những điều đã làm nên một thế hệ anh hùng.… (mehr)

I've always avoided the Vietnam War as a topic (my Dad's a history buff who almost wound up serving in Vietnam, and it always seemed wiser to avoid the conversation). Learned a lot from this, especially, I think, since I read it after Stockdale's Vietnam Experience). Totally different perspective. I don't think we'd have gotten along if we were somehow to have met, me being a bourgeois North American and her being a, well, admittedly also bourgeois, but dedicated Communist. And she was: there's mention, in the earlier parts of the diary, about her concern about how the local Communist party is being run, but never any hint of treason, or of any doubt about Communism in general or Ho Chi Minh in particular. I admire her idealism, and can't help but think that the time she was writing was more or less when Martin Luther King was saying that someone who has not yet found a cause for which they'd be willing to die has not yet started to live. She had her cause, and she lived, breathed & died for it. Part of me envies her.… (mehr)