[Marxism] A Vietnamese "Diary of Anne Frank" or "Uncle Tom's Cabin"

[Brian Shannon <brian_shannon@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

My apologies for posting the whole review, but readers will see how  
difficult it would be to cut anything from this extraordinary  
summary. It will soon be in English.

It will be interesting to see what political and social effect it  
will have when it is translated into Arabic and Farsi. There would be  
a huge market in both Egypt and Iran. Once published in Egypt, it  
would quickly spread to other nations.


Brian Shannon

==================

Day to Day Among the Viet Cong
A young doctor kept an intensely personal journal of her life on the  
front lines before she was killed in 1970. It's a bestseller in Vietnam.

By Richard C. Paddock
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

August 4, 2006

"No, I am not a child. 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? … 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."

— Final diary entry of Dr. Dang Thuy Tram, Duc Pho, Vietnam, June 1970

HANOI — As a young doctor in a country at war, Dang Thuy Tram chose a  
life of sacrifice. She spent three years at the front lines in South  
Vietnam treating wounded Viet Cong guerrillas, battling sorrow and  
self-doubt, until she was killed by American forces. She was 27.

Now, more than 35 years later, she has come to life again with the  
publication of her diary. Written in the field hospitals and foxholes  
of the Vietnam War, its honest portrayal of a young woman seeking  
love while eluding the American "pirates" has made it a runaway  
bestseller in Vietnam.

A kind of Vietnamese version of "The Diary of Anne Frank," Tram's  
heartbreaking journal has the same kind of personal insights and  
observations on the hardships of daily life, overlaid with a sense of  
impending doom. At times, she comes across as a romantic schoolgirl  
seeking love from the boys around her, at others like a battle- 
hardened veteran who wants vengeance against the foreign invaders.

"Sadness soaks into my heart just like the long days of rain soak  
into the earth," she writes in April 1968 after treating several  
seriously wounded Viet Cong fighters, the communist insurgents in the  
South. "Oh! Why was I born a girl so rich with dreams, love, and  
asking so much from life?"
. . .

An emotional account of sacrifice, love and bloodshed, the diary  
humanizes an enemy of America once demonized as ruthless and sneaky.  
The young doctor, sometimes addressing herself by name, confides her  
hopes, ambitions and fears. At times, she is overwhelmed by the death  
of so many people she knows and the destruction wrought by the  
Americans' awesome firepower.

"Why do they enjoy shooting and killing a good people like us?" she  
asks. "How can they have the heart to kill all those youngsters who  
love life, who are struggling and living for so many hopes?"

The 322-page diary, published last year, has become Vietnam's  
bestselling postwar book, with 400,000 copies sold, said its  
publisher, Vuong Tri Nhan. Typically, a book is considered a success  
here if it sells 2,000 copies.

An English-language version is scheduled for release in the United  
States next year.

In a society increasingly consumed with economic growth and material  
goods, the book has revived a sense of idealism. Written in a simple  
but powerful style, it reminds war veterans of their sacrifices and  
educates a new generation — born after the war's end — about the  
hardships their elders faced.

"This is the first book to talk about the lives of people during the  
war," said Nhan, 63, who went to high school with Tram in the North  
and later served as a North Vietnamese army journalist. "Old people  
want to relive memories. Young people want to know how their parents  
lived during the war."

The diary also has struck a nerve because so many Vietnamese don't  
know what happened to their loved ones during what they call the  
American War. Of the estimated 3 million Vietnamese who died during  
the conflict, 1 million remain missing.

"I will perish for the country, tomorrow's victory song will not  
include me," Tram writes after surviving an artillery attack that  
killed five others. "I am one of those people who give their blood  
and bones in order to take back the country. But what is so special  
about that? Millions and millions of people like me have fallen  
already yet have never enjoyed one happy day, so I am never sorry."

Since the publication of the diary, the family has received thousands  
of emotional phone calls and letters from readers moved by Tram's  
account. Visitors to her grave in Hanoi have filled three large  
notebooks for her family with outpourings of sympathy and compassion.  
A fourth is nearly full.

"Many of them are young people," said Tram's sister Dang Kim Tram.  
"They say that before reading the book, they didn't believe their  
parents' stories about the war. Now they understand how difficult it  
was."

She says she typed the diary for publication and wept with every  
page. "I typed it while I cried," she said.

She was 15 when her sister died. Now 50, she remembers her as "very  
beautiful, very gentle and very fragile. I cannot imagine her working  
in such difficult conditions."

Nhan, the publisher, recalls that Dang Thuy Tram was popular in high  
school and believes her interest in literature as a student helped  
her as a writer.

"She understood other people's feelings," he said. "She could put  
herself in others' shoes."

After taking the diary home to America at the end of his tour,  
Whitehurst always hoped to return it to Tram's family. But he soon  
joined the FBI and believed it would be improper for him to approach  
the communist government of Vietnam.

When he retired in 1997, he began searching for the family, without  
success. Last year, he gave the diary to the Vietnam Center at Texas  
Tech, where it remains. The center located the family within a few  
months, and Tram's mother and sisters flew to Lubbock in October to  
see the diary for the first time.

Whitehurst visited Vietnam soon after and was warmly received.  
Despite Tram's oftexpressed desire for revenge, the Vietnamese have  
been remarkably forgiving since the end of the war. "We don't want to  
keep hatred in our heart," said sister Dang Kim Tram. "We want to  
forget the bad things in the past."

The diary's popularity comes at a time of improving relations between  
America and Vietnam. U.S. warships stopped here for shore leave over  
the July 4 holiday, the fourth such visit and the first time two  
vessels came together. Donald H. Rumsfeld recently made his first  
visit to Vietnam as Defense secretary, and President Bush is expected  
to make his first trip here in November for a meeting of AsiaPacific  
leaders.

Today, diarist Tram might not recognize her country or her beloved  
Hanoi. Vietnam's population has more than doubled since 1970, to 84  
million. Hanoi has become a crowded, frenetic city, where young  
people talk on cellphones and zoom around on motorbikes — sometimes  
at the same time.

Like other North Vietnamese students of her generation, Tram was  
taught the ideals of communism and Vietnamese nationalism and was  
prepared to make sacrifices for the war effort.

After graduating from medical school at 24, she volunteered to leave  
the North and work in the central coastal district of Duc Pho, then  
part of the U.S.-backed South, where she was assigned to care for  
Viet Cong guerrillas and local villagers. It was one of the most  
dangerous combat zones of the war.

Her early days in Duc Pho remain a mystery because at least one of  
her early notebooks was taken by U.S. troops in a raid. It  
disappeared and was probably destroyed.

The published diary begins in April 1968 with her description of  
performing an emergency appendectomy on a guerrilla with only a few  
tubes of Novocain for anesthesia. His appendix doesn't burst, but she  
fears he will die of an infection because she doesn't have adequate  
antibiotics.

"Patients like you who I cannot cure cause me the most sorrow," she  
writes.

But as her diary hints, Tram went to the South not just out of  
patriotism and idealism. She also was in love.

The object of her affections is the shadowy M, who apparently spurned  
her before the book begins. She first mentions M in the fourth entry,  
saying: "I have strength to bury nine years of hope deep in the  
ground…. Day by day, love for M fades away."

Nevertheless, her passion for M is a recurring theme as she seeks to  
prove herself as a doctor and revolutionary.

Although his identity is never revealed in the book, publisher Nhan  
said M was a cousin on her mother's side and a Communist Party member  
who had gone to the region to take a post as political officer. Tram  
volunteered to serve there so she could be near him, the publisher  
said. M survived the war and died shortly before the diary was  
returned to the family.

The diary has resonated with many readers because Tram is bluntly  
honest, even when writing about the Communist Party. Denied  
membership for years, she complains of petty jealousies, attempts by  
party members to control her behavior and discrimination against her  
because of her middle-class background. Her mother was a university  
lecturer, her father a surgeon.

"Because she wrote for herself, she wrote the truth about the war,"  
said her mother, Doan Ngoc Tram, 81.

Introspective and often self-critical, Tram wonders why her life  
seems so much more difficult than others'.

"The way I travel is so very hard, the way of a girl student becoming  
a leader," she writes. "Something causes me to be different from  
others. Is it my way of life, a life of love, a life of too much  
thinking with my heart?"

At other times, she seems consumed with the desire for revenge.

"With those pirates robbing our country, every time I think about you  
[dying] my heart is so filled with hate I cannot breathe," she writes  
after losing a friend in combat. "We must force them to pay for their  
crimes."

She spends much of her three years in Duc Pho fleeing and hiding from  
the Americans. At times the troops attack and destroy her field  
hospitals, which she and her comrades work to rebuild. More than  
once, she says goodbye to friends only to have them brought back to  
the clinic soon after, badly injured or dying.

"Death still continues to make the hearts of the living bleed," she  
writes after trying in vain to save the life of one guerrilla who had  
led her to safety only a few days earlier. Two weeks later, American  
planes bomb a village where she knows many of the residents. "From a  
place not too far away I quietly watched, my heart filled with hate  
for those burning fires," she writes. "Who is burning? In the  
explosions, who is burning in the bomb craters?"

One night, she joins a Viet Cong unit on a night rescue operation and  
is momentarily caught in American searchlights, which reminds her of  
performing in school musicals.

"Now I am also an actor on the stage of life: I am playing a girl of  
the Liberation with a black dress, every night following the  
guerrillas in their activities in our area close to the enemy," she  
writes. "Maybe I will meet the enemy, and maybe I will fall with my  
hand carrying the red-crossed box, and then people will also feel  
sorry for the girl sacrificed to the Revolution during her dream- 
filled youth."

By late 1969, the tide of war in Duc Pho favors the Americans. Her  
entries are less frequent, dwelling more on the war and less on her  
dreams for the future.

"Is the conflict gradually taking away the thoughts of one who knows  
how to think about life?" she asks. "No, I don't want it to be that  
way, but the job weighs heavily on me and every day the sorrow of  
dead comrades makes me forget personal matters." She never expresses  
regret over her decision to volunteer but is saddened by the toll the  
war has taken on her and her country.

"My youth is over: Fire, smoke and war have robbed my youth of the  
happiness of love," she writes "The 20-year-olds of this generation  
have given away the dreams and happiness which they should have had.  
My youth is soaked with sweat, tears, blood and the bones of those  
living and those already dead."

In June 1970, the situation becomes desperate. U.S. troops are  
closing in and able-bodied guerrillas evacuate. With her clinic  
destroyed, she is left behind with five wounded fighters who can't be  
moved. Two young women stay behind to help her.

"The situation with the enemy is tense and if they come here how can  
I leave the wounded soldiers?" she writes on June 14.

Food supplies, never plentiful, run short. In her final entry, June  
20, she reports that there is only enough rice left for one meal. She  
thought help would have arrived by now. Her two assistants leave, and  
she wants to cry as she watches them wade across the river.

The Americans attack on June 22. One GI reported later to Whitehurst  
that the doctor tried to fight off the heavily armed soldiers with a  
single-shot rifle.

There were no Vietnamese survivors to tell her story; the five  
wounded guerrillas were killed with her. But her remains, buried by  
villagers and turned over to the family in 1976, also indicate that  
she stood her ground.

"When I went to pick up her bones, I saw a bullet hole in her  
forehead," Dang Kim Tram said. "I imagine that she would pick up a  
gun. I know for sure that she faced the enemy."

Four days before her death, Dang Thuy Tram seems to recognize that  
the end is near.

"When you live like this, then you understand the value of life," she  
writes. "Oh, life changed by blood and bones, by the youth of so many  
people, how many lives have ended in order to allow other lives to be  
fresh and green?"

<http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg- 
diary4aug04,0,2581540.story?coll=la-home-headlines>
OR http://makeashorterlink.com/?Z1D12238D



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