Last Night I Dreamed Of Peace- Dang Thuy Tram and Andrew X. Pham (2007)

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In 1970 in Duc Pho, central Vietnam, American lawyer Fred Whitehurst came across an unusual article while sorting through captured documents for a US military intelligence detachment based in the area. He had discovered the diary of Dang Thuy Tram, a young doctor who was killed by open-fire from an American patrol on 22^nd June 1970. Thuy Tram was twenty-seven years old when she died and had arrived in Quang Nhai province from Hanoi three years earlier to offer her medical skills to the liberation effort. In clinics in the cold, rainy jungle of the central highlands, Thuy treated injured civilians and National Liberation Front (NLF) soldiers. She also trained medical students and spent days chopping wood and carting sacks of rice as her part of the manual tasks necessary for the daily running of the clinics. At this time, the US military was operating Task Force Oregon across South and Central Vietnam, a strategy of open and indiscriminate attack on villages and hamlets thought to be harbouring NLF (Viet Cong) guerrillas. Under this policy, the clinics Thuy worked in would receive no protective immunity. Indeed, on several occasions from 1968 to 1970, Thuy reports in her diary of patients and staff having to be relocated when American patrols came close to their clinic.

In this impermanent and dangerous environment, life was lived as though the end was around the corner. This led Thuy to form deep emotional bonds with her patients and comrades, usually men, as a result of shared experience and shared ideals. Throughout her diaries, Thuy ponders the significance of these friendships. Where deep mutual respect, attachment and trust were present between herself and another, Thuy would allow the titles of brother and sister to be adopted. She often wondered whether her relationships with her ‘adopted brothers’ would be misinterpreted; in fact she was romantically and sexually innocent. As a college student in Hanoi, Thuy Tram had given her heart to a man referred to in her diaries as ‘M.’ The two had courted for three years but M., six years older than Thuy, had left to join the resistance in the South in 1962 and later became an officer. Thuy had the opportunity to see him again when she herself went to serve in the South. As Thuy’s earlier diaries had been lost, it is not known what happened when the two were reunited, but from April 1968, when this diary begins, it is evident that Thuy did not believe he loved her in the way she loved him. This, along with being away from her family and suffering the loss of comrades on the battlefields, caused Thuy much misery.

Despite her anguish, Thuy Tram was committed to her work and to her ideals. With each friend lost, her hatred for the American ‘devils’ and ‘bandits’ grew stronger; her pain and fury transcends the pages. For a long while she was also burdened with disappointment at not yet being accepted into the Communist Party of Vietnam; she believed that this was because of her bourgeois origins. Thuy was ever-ready to self-criticise in her diaries, particularly the ‘bourgeois sentiments’ that she believed held her back, referring to her tendency towards nostalgia and self-pity. But to any reader, Thuy is an admirable woman, sacrificing a comfortable life to endure the hardship of the jungle in the midst of war. Throughout her ordeals, which included nights in water-filled shelters or spent at the clinic operating on wounded patients without electricity, she found time to confide in her diary, which today can be heralded as a valuable historical source.

The diaries were first published in Vietnam in 2005, the same year that Whitehurst returned the original pages to Thuy’s mother after eventually having the opportunity to track down the family. The book has caused a sensation in Vietnam, with 430,000 copies sold a year and a half after its first publication. As Frances FitzGerald points out in his excellent introduction to the English copy (first published in 2007 and translated by Andrew X. Pham), few books in Vietnam sell more than 5,000 copies, an indication of the massive popularity of Thuy’s diaries in her native country.

It is problematic to objectively review a book that was never intended to be published. The primary function of Thuy’s diary was for her to record her daily sentiments; her daydreams and miseries are repetitive and much of the book is slow-moving and boring. On top of this, the writing style is grating. Although a doctor by profession, Thuy was absorbed by literature and poetry and often vividly portrayed scenes of the hideous destruction she witnessed or of the natural beauty of the lowlands she occasionally visited. But her bold and flowery language and use of the second- and third-person to directly address herself and her friends make the writing ostentatious. The blood-and-soil nationalistic sentiments and the contemplations of love only contribute to this. Another difficulty for the reader is distinguishing between the many ‘younger brothers’ she refers to and often addresses in her diary.

Such setbacks are challenging for the reader who attempts to continue into the lengthy prose, but cannot be held as valid reasons to criticise what is, first and foremost, a personal diary, and a courageous one at that. The story, so often dry, becomes very moving in the final months of Thuy’s life. From April 1970, the staff of the clinic were constantly on the move to escape approaching American troops and search for a new site to relocate the clinic to. When a temporary clinic is bombed and all others flee, Thuy and three medics remain with the most critical patients, despite rice supplies running dry. Thuy wonders if she would be able to abandon her patients to save her own life were the enemy to arrive. The sadness of this episode is heightened by the knowledge that these were Thuy’s last days, and that her dreams to return to the North and see her family again would never be realised.

The simple ending of the diary leaves a space for reflection on all that Thuy had sacrificed and suffered, on the tragedy that she would never see her family again, nor witness the reunification of the South and an eventual return to peace. The diary is lengthy and hard to follow, but despite the wearisome language style it is hard not to be touched by the words of this courageous and kind-hearted woman. The fact that the diaries were ever discovered and the world can now hear Thuy’s story, an experience of war seen from the ground, heroic yet human, is amazing in itself.

*In my previous book review posts I attached a link to an Amazon page so readers had the option of purchasing the book in question. In light of their recently-discovered massive UK tax evasion, I will no longer post links to Amazon pages. Now I will use www.bookdepository.com instead.