By David McNeill
More than 35 years after returning home from the
Vietnam War, a former US soldier has returned a
poignant diary he recovered from a young Vietcong
military doctor. The diary has sparked a patriotic
revival in Vietnam, turning the two former enemies
into national heroes.
"I had to do an
appendix operation without enough medicine. Only a
few tubes of Novocain, but the wounded young
soldier never cried out or yelled. He continued to
smile to encourage me. Looking at the forced smile
on his dry lips, knowing his fatigue, I felt so
sorry for him ... I lightly stroked his hair. I
would like to say
to him: 'Patients
like you who I cannot cure cause me the most
sorrow, and their memory will not fade'."
So begins the diary of Dang Thuy Tram, an
army doctor who fought Americans in the Vietnam
War and died defending her hospital from a US
attack. Since its reemergence this year after 35
years in the hands of a US veteran, the diary has
become a phenomenon, selling more than 300,000
copies (mostly in Vietnamese), generating numerous
translations and a television show, and sparking a
wave of patriotic nostalgia among young
Vietnamese.
Those who have read it say it
is the most compelling, honest account yet of a
conflict that killed an estimated 2 million to 3
million Vietnamese and other Asians, as well as
58,000 Americans. "She was my enemy but her words
would break your heart," said Fred Whitehurst, the
ex-soldier who saved the diary from the
incinerator. "She is a Vietnamese Anne Frank. I
know this diary will go everywhere on planet
earth."
The daughter of a prosperous
family of doctors, Dang volunteered for duty in a
military hospital in the killing fields of Quang
Ngai Province in central Vietnam in 1967. The
diary begins there the following April, just after
the Tet Offensive; a turning point that convinced
many Americans that the war against the communists
was unwinnable, and an event that was instrumental
in forcing president Lyndon Johnson to abandon
plans to run for a second term. Nevertheless,
president Richard Nixon would widen the war by the
1970 attack on Cambodia, and it would not end
until 1975.
As the bombing edged closer to
her hospital, the diary records the mounting
horrors that Dang witnessed in prose that is by
turns worldly, compassionate and enraged. Worn out
treating badly wounded comrades with aspirin and
bandages, she writes in June 1970: "The dog Nixon
is foolish and crazy as he widens the war ... How
hateful it is! We are all humans, but some are so
cruel as to want the blood of others to water
their gold tree." In another entry, she writes
"death was so close" as the bombing "stripped the
trees bare" and "tore houses to pieces".
Shortly before she died at age 27, that
same month bombs killed five of her patients. Dang
helped move the remaining patients and staff to
safety and fought an American ground unit as it
approached the now deserted hospital. "She was
shot in the forehead," Whitehurst said. "She was
told to surrender but laid down a field of fire.
She was killed protecting her patients and nurses,
fending off the heavily armed US Army with an old
Chinese SKS single-shot rifle."
As a
22-year-old intelligence officer, Whitehurst's job
was to review recovered enemy documents; he was
about to burn Dang's apparently worthless diary -
"about the size of a pack of cigarettes" - when
his translator stopped him: "Don't burn this one
Fred, it already has fire in it."
"I was
so moved that he respected his enemy that much
that I kept it," said Whitehurst, who later had it
and several other diaries translated. "It was
obvious to me that this was a very beautiful
person. I thought: 'I've got to get this back to
her family'."
So began a remarkable
journey that ended this year when Whitehurst was
welcomed by the family of his old enemy "like a
son" and feted as a national celebrity in Vietnam.
A less likely candidate for a project of
reconciliation would be hard to find. Whitehurst
was, by his own admission, the gung-ho son of a
military family who, unlike many drafted US
soldiers, volunteered to fight the Vietnamese
communists. "I'm a loyal American and I was raised
in a very strict military family. I believed in
the domino theory [which held that if one country
came under the influence of communism, others
would follow like dominos, unless stopped]. Well
it didn't happen."
Whitehurst said his
respect for authority began to disintegrate in
Vietnam and was destroyed during his subsequent
career as a Federal Bureau of Inevestigation (FBI)
chemist, which ended when he exposed corruption
and malpractice in, among other investigations,
the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The
uber-patriot became one of America's most
celebrated whistleblowers. "The FBI HQ is like
something out of an old movie about the Soviet
Union," he wrote afterward. "Everybody is
terrified to breathe."
His bitter fight
with the FBI cleared a path for the publication of
the diaries. "My desire all these years was to get
the words back to her family, her country. Beyond
this blasted thing called government there is
humanity and damn it if there isn't, we're all
going to hell. Maybe I could publish a book and
use any funds for some good, you know? But the FBI
wouldn't allow its agents to collaborate with
communists. In the end I didn't give a damn about
the FBI."
Now working as a lawyer,
Whitehurst showed the diaries to his brother
Robert, also a Vietnam veteran who had married a
Vietnamese. Robert became "obsessed" with the
diaries and returning to Vietnam, but like many
vets, Fred was terrified of going back. "I had a
lot of issues when I came home," he said. "I saw
and did a lot of crap. The memories left me crying
and upset, and for five years I screamed in my
sleep all the time."
The brothers took the
diaries to a conference on the Vietnam War at
Texas Tech University in March, where they met Ted
Englemann, another vet looking for what he calls
"closure" to the war and who was traveling to
Hanoi the following month. He made digital copies
of the diaries and with the aid of local Quakers,
tracked down Dang's family, including her
81-year-old mother. By the time the Whitehurst
brothers visited the family this summer the
diaries had been published and Whitehurst and Dang
were famous.
Initially fearful of what was
waiting for them Whitehurst was astonished at the
welcome they received. "We did to Hanoi what the
Germans did to London in World War II. We were the
invaders, for whatever reason. But the nation
embraced us. The prime minister met us and thanked
us. As for the family, their father went into
shock after his daughter's death from which he
never recovered, and that burdened the family
enormously. They loved their daughter so much and
still adopted me. I was treated better there than
I was by my own country."
The diary has
since caused a sensation, with everyone from the
legendary General Vo Nguyen Giap, who led the
Vietnamese resistance from the 1940s until the
liberation of Saigon in 1975, to Prime Minister
Phan van Khai having read it. Whitehurst was
interviewed on state television and said the diary
"belongs to the world". Asked to explain why he
would fall in love with an enemy soldier he
replied, "I said the tears on your face are the
same as the tears on mine. We all cry together."
Although not the first Vietnam War diary,
many Vietnamese say Dang's account has struck a
chord with young people because it comes raw with
human emotions and unvarnished by government
propaganda.
Dang's diary records the
passage from the lovelorn teenager who desperately
misses the mysterious "M" to earnest
revolutionary. Recalling the words of "Uncle Ho"
(Vietnam communist leader Ho Chi Minh) and Lenin,
she writes, "The revolutionary is a person with a
heart very rich and filled with love," adding, "I
am that way already."
"She writes the
truth about her feelings, and despite everything
she loved people," said Nguyen Duc Tinh, a radio
announcer from Hanoi. "It comes straight from her
heart. I think a lot of young Vietnamese are
impressed at the way she was ready to sacrifice
her life. I hope people around the world will read
it to understand the truth about the Vietnam War."
The last entry in the diary, written days
before Dang was shot, is unbearably poignant: "I
am grown up and already strong in the face of
hardships, but at this minute why do I want so
much a mother's hand to care for me, or really the
hand of a close friend, or just that of a person I
know who is all right? Please come to me and hold
my hand when I am so lonely, love me and give me
strength to travel all the hard sections of the
road ahead ..."
The youngest Dang sibling,
Kim Tram, is fielding requests to publish the
diary in English, Japanese, Korean, Chinese and
French. Next month she will travel to the US with
her mother to finally pick up her sister's diaries
from an archive in the Texas Tech University. Just
14 when her sister died, she remembers her as
"gentle and fragile".
"I never imagined
how hard and dangerous her life was," she said. "I
was not surprised to know her longing for our
parents, for our home in Hanoi. But now I've read
her words I can sense her loneliness."
Kim
Tram said she is "grateful" to have met Fred
Whitehurst. "I consider him a kind-hearted and
honest man with a mind of great depth. I really
respect him. And like him."
And the man
who held onto the diaries for all those years
wonders how much the world has changed since. "I
know that an Iraqi mother will one day be in the
same position as Mother Dang. Why are we in Iraq?
I don't know. You can't know the vulgarity of war
until you've been there, until you've been
splattered with your friend's blood."
David McNeill is a Tokyo-based
journalist who teaches at Sophia University. A
regular contributor to the London Independent and
a columnist for OhMy News, he is a Japan Focus
coordinator.
