Casualties of War

The story of how a woman became Vietnam's best-selling author 35 years after her death is almost as compelling as what she wrote. In 1970, as the Vietnam War raged, U.S. intelligence officer Fred Whitehurst was burning a stack of captured enemy documents in Quang Ngai province when his translator begged him to spare a tiny cardboard-wrapped bundle because "it has fire in it already." Intrigued, the American asked his translator to read from the papers, which turned out to be the war diaries of Dr. Dang Thuy Tram, a North Vietnamese field surgeon shot by an American patrol days earlier at the age of 27. Whitehurst was so moved by what he heard that he defied orders and kept the diaries, smuggling them home when his tour of duty ended.

Decades later, Whitehurst managed to track down Tram's family in Hanoi and returned a copy of the diaries to them. What happened next surprised almost everyone. Published in Vietnam in mid-2005, the war diaries became a runaway hit, selling some 430,000 copies in a country where few books have a print run greater than 5,000. Tram herself became a national hero, with hundreds of people visiting her grave site and a hospital named after her. For the younger generation of Vietnamese (nearly 60% of the population was born after the war's end in 1975), Tram's ardent accounts of bloody conflict offer a vivid connection to a time their parents find difficult to speak about. Now translated into English as Last Night I Dreamed of Peace, the diaries provide international readers with a Vietnamese perspective of the "American War," as it was known to Tram and her compatriots — a catastrophe that killed 3 million Vietnamese and traumatized untold others.

Educated and from a well-off northern family, Tram volunteered for battlefield duty on the southern front at the tender age of 24, just after graduating from medical school. She spent three and a half years operating a clandestine field clinic for communist soldiers in the jungles of Quang Ngai, in what was then South Vietnam, and began keeping a diary shortly after arrival. "Operated on one case of appendicitis with inadequate anesthesia," reads her first entry, dated April 8, 1968. "I had only a few meager vials of Novocain to give the soldier, but he never groaned once ... He even smiled to encourage me."

Though she was to become quickly battle-hardened, Tram retained a girlish, almost naive idealism at her core, and her romanticized musings give the diaries a dimension besides the unending carnage of the front line. She pines for a lost love — a communist soldier she names only as "M," but he has vowed to be married only to the cause. She fends off seemingly endless declarations of love from patients. She also records passionate but platonic friendships with at least three younger soldiers, and an older Communist Party cadre, but is dismayed at the gossip these chaste relationships stir up. People "see only materialistic things, only sex!" she writes on April 5, 1970. "Oh, how detestable." (Not that Tram, living under the strain of war, is above amorous emotions. She becomes jealous when one of her platonic "little brothers" finds a girlfriend, insisting that he "place our relationship above everything else.")

Romanticism is in fact Tram's great animator. She romanticizes the Communist Party and upbraids herself for her bourgeois sentimentalism: "Oh, why was I born a dreamy girl, demanding so much of life?" But commitment to the cause notwithstanding, she remains hopelessly enchanted with Western literature, music and poetry, referencing Victor Hugo and Johann Strauss. Indeed, despite her contribution to the war effort, her party overseers conclude that "certain bourgeois characteristics still remain" within her.

Insofar as those characteristics include literary sensibilities, then that's no bad thing. Tram's observations of the war's everyday agonies are powerful and haunting. On July 29, 1969, she describes the flesh falling off a 20-year-old soldier brought to her after being burned by a U.S. phosphorus bomb: "His smiling, joyful black eyes have been reduced to two little holes — the yellowish eyelids are cooked. The reeking burn of phosphorus smoke still rises from his body." Later, she rages against the American enemy that has killed so many of her friends: "Hatred is bruising my liver, blackening my gut."

Translated by Andrew X. Pham and annotated by Tram's younger sister, Dang Kim Tram, Last Night I Dreamed of Peace offers a rare combination of lyricism, grit, passion and humanity. "What am I?" Tram asks at one point. "I am a girl with a heart brimming with emotions, yet with a mind that never falters before a complex and dangerous situation." She might have been speaking for a generation of idealistic young Vietnamese who never returned from the battlefields.