Dr. Dang Thuy Tram
1943–1970
At this moment, how many families are homeless? Where do their gaunt children live?
Oh! Cruel American bandits, your crimes are piling up like a mountain. As long as I live, I vow to fight until my last drop of blood …
Sadly, “as long as I live” turned out to be not long at all. Dang Thuy Tram was twenty-seven years old when she wrote those words seven months before she died—shot in the head with an American bullet.
Thuy was eleven in 1954 when her homeland of Vietnam was divided into two separate countries, North and South, at war with each other. She was twenty-two, and studying to become a doctor, when the United States became involved in the conflict, supporting South Vietnam’s fight against the Communist North, where Thuy lived.
Two years later, now officially Dr. Dang, Thuy set off from the capital city of Hanoi to a remote jungle clinic in Duc Pho, in the province of Quong Ngai, smack in the middle of the war zone. Shortly before her arrival, the hospital building had been bombed and replaced by a primitive temporary facility.
The Vietnamese people have a high regard for poetic expression, and, like many young women embarking on a new venture, Thuy wrote frequently and passionately in her journal. Her entries show how she missed her family, friends, and home, and record her harrowing experience as a military doctor.
Thuy was the eldest of four sisters and a brother. Her father was a surgeon, and her mother was an expert in the use of medicinal plants and a lecturer at the Hanoi School of Pharmacology. Being a healer was clearly in Thuy’s blood. Thuy’s childhood, before the war began, was in a loving home, full of books, music, and fresh flowers. She took violin lessons and studied hard at school.
Thuy often cared for her younger siblings while her parents were absent or working. This included cooking “fun stuff from eggplants and shaddocks,” according to her sister, Hien, who also remembers “singing and making dramas. We used a bed as the boat, and the mat as the river.”
Hard times forced their parents to be away for a year, taking two of the sisters while they looked for work, and leaving Thuy, in her last year of high school, to care for little Hien. A severe lack of money meant that the sisters “usually had to hunt for food on a meal-to-meal basis.… We took some fibers of breadfruit and placed them at the pond’s bank and the morning after there would be snails stuck to them. Indeed we had a new source of nutrition.” Catching crabs was another skill that yielded suppers, sometimes enough to share with neighbors. The resourcefulness that Thuy displayed while caring for her sister during those difficult months was excellent preparation for coping with the hunger and deprivation she would later face.
The young Thuy we meet through her private record is earnest and emotional, deeply attached to her friends. But a frightening and deadly war was a daily threat to her hope and strong spirit. As a new doctor, she repaired grisly injuries and gave comfort to dying boys who, like her, were far away from their homes and families.
By the time Thuy began the second volume of her diary (the first volume was lost) in April of 1968, there were half a million American soldiers in her country. Terrible news had arrived one month earlier from a neighboring village called Son My, where American troops had killed 504 villagers—women, children, and old men, who’d had no way to defend themselves. The North Vietnamese people felt immense sorrow and renewed fury after this event, which became known as the My Lai Massacre, named for the hamlets of the village of Son My. Although Thuy does not refer directly to the horror of My Lai, the intensity of her writing is more understandable set against the background of this tragedy.
The persistent threads in Thuy’s writing are her affection and longing for her family, her belief in the ideals of her Communist country, her regret about a friendship with a man she called “M,” and devotion to her patients.
The diary begins simply:
April 8, 1968: Operated on one case of appendicitis with inadequate anesthesia. I had only a few meager vials of Novocain to give the soldier but never groaned once.… He even smiled, to encourage me.… I was very sorry to find an infection in his abdomen.… I wanted to say, ‘If I cannot even heal people like you, this sorrow will not fade from my medical career.”
A few days later, Thuy heard about the death of a friend named Huong.
22 April 1968
… Huong died? The news stuns me like a nightmare. One comrade falls down today, another tomorrow. Will these pains ever end? Heaps of flesh and bones keep piling up into a mountain of hatred rising ever taller in our hearts. When? When and when comrades? When can we chase the entire bloodthirsty mob from our motherland?
Much of the forest in the region of the clinic was like a dense hedge as high as a house, with trails like tunnels cut through it. Soldiers, as well as the medical facility itself, were camouflaged, and not visible from the helicopters droning overheard. Thuy often mentioned the jungle or the weather to set the mood or reflect her feelings, as in these excerpts:
July comes again to our jungle, with its southern wind bothering the trees …
The cold wind whistling through the roadside trees, I remembered shivering slightly as I passed a tree whose trunk was forked cleanly into two branches.
Thuy observed and vividly described her small patch of the war. She wrote about the troops who passed through the clinic, her surgical patients, and her fellow medical teammates. She occasionally had to walk many miles to treat soldiers on the “battlefield” in odd corners of the oppressive surrounding jungle, all the while evading the enemy. That often meant sleeping in underground shelters. She passed one night standing up to her chest in water.
17 May 1968
The war goes on, death falls among us daily, like the flip of a hand. Just last night, Thin and Son were chatting with us. Thin asked Le to buy fabric for a shirt. Tonight they are two lifeless bodies within the earth of Duc Pho—this place where they had just set foot for the first time. Death takes us so easily; there is no way to prevent the losses. What sadness!
4 June 1968
Rain falls without respite. Rain deepens my sadness, its chill making me yearn for the warmth of a family reunion. If only I had wings to fly back to our beautiful house on Lo Duc Street, to eat with Dad, Mom, and my siblings, one simple meal with watercress and one night’s sleep under the old cotton blanket.
By July 1968, Thuy had been assigned chief physician of her little hospital. “I alone am responsible for managing the clinic, treating the injured, teaching the class. More than ever I feel I am giving all my strength and skills to the revolution …”
Month drags after month, with each day bringing danger or heartbreaking news. Thuy recorded the troubles and deaths of many friends, usually addressing them as “Brother” or “Sister” in the Communist tradition of an extended family.
28 July
Brother Kha is captured! … Your handwriting is still imprinted clearly on the patient record. Where are you today, in chains or in a torture chamber? … Will I ever see you again? Your rucksack is still here; I feel a stab of pain in my heart whenever I see it.
4 August
… Sister Hai has brought sad news: Brother Dung died, captured and killed on site. What agony! Must I keep filling my small diary with pages of blood?
Throughout her trials as a doctor and friend, Thuy also worked hard toward becoming a member of what she called “the Party,” an abbreviation for the Communist Party. This was not an automatic privilege, but one that involved high standards of behavior and displays of loyalty.
Finally:
27 September, 1968
I’ve been admitted to the Party.
My clearest feeling today is that I must struggle to deserve the title of “communist.”
Months of routine turned into years of relentless worry and peril. Thuy’s experience in emergency surgeries gave her more confidence but was never a guarantee against the alarming variety of injuries that she dealt with.
25 August 1969
Sister Thu Huong, who is the village nurse, and her son were wounded in the raid this morning. Her chubby baby, as cute as a European toddler, has two pieces of shrapnel in his lung near the heart. I don’t know if he will survive.
(Happily, a footnote in the published diary tells us that this baby was saved.)
26 November 1969 [Thuy’s 28th birthday]
Another year of living, another year of fire and smoke on this
dangerous battlefield …
As American attacks got closer and more deadly, Thuy and her colleagues were forced to move around, sometimes carrying their patients on their backs, hiding whenever possible and always afraid.
On June 2, 1970, a bomb hit the clinic directly. Five people were killed. A second strike came on June 12, seeming to confirm that there must be an inside informant. The next day everyone left except Thuy, three female medics, and five men too seriously wounded to be moved.
By June 20, their supplies were utterly depleted. Thuy was in agony over whether or not to abandon the injured patients if the Americans arrived before help from her own countrymen.
20 June, 1970
Today there is only enough rice left for an evening meal. We cannot sit and watch the wounded soldiers go hungry. But if one of us goes out, there is no guarantee that she will be safe or that she can come back. There are too many dangers on the road.… No, I am no longer a child. I have grown up. I have passed trials of peril, but somehow, at this moment, I yearn deeply for Mom’s caring hand. Even the hand of a dear one or that of an acquaintance would be enough.
Come to me, squeeze my hand, know my loneliness, and give me the love, the strength to prevail on the perilous road before me.
Thuy died two days later, on June 22, 1970, as the result of a bullet shot through her forehead. Her body was discovered on a forest path, next to a member of the North Vietnamese Army and two other people. Although the diary does not tell us, the clinic had been resupplied just before her death, and the injured men Thuy had stayed to protect had been safely evacuated.
How did Thuy’s private journal become a public document that anyone can read?
There are two existing volumes of Thuy’s diary: one was found by the U.S. Army in a backpack lost during one of Thuy’s treks into hiding. It was later matched with the other volume, discovered after her death when the hospital was cleaned out by the American soldiers who occupied the region at that stage in the war. A young man named Fred Whitehurst had the job of sorting through papers to decide what was important from a military viewpoint. Assisting Fred, as he tossed things into a fire, was his interpreter, Sergeant Nguyen Trung Hieu, a man who spoke both English and Vietnamese. Hieu began to read the pages in a small notebook. Fred still remembers that Hieu was standing behind his left shoulder when he said, “Don’t burn this one, Fred. There is fire in it already.”
Against a rule of the United States Army that forbade scavenging for souvenirs, Fred held onto his prize, “a collection of pages sewn together with a cardboard cover, no bigger than a pack of cigarettes.” During the next few evenings, Hieu read the poetic words aloud to Fred, who found himself enchanted by the young woman who had written them.
Fred mailed the diaries home to his father in the United States, knowing that “what I was doing could send me to jail.” When he returned himself—just twenty-four years old, after three grueling years in Vietnam—he placed the precious books in the hands of a lawyer friend. Fred could not read the words himself, but he certainly wondered about the author and what might have happened to her family during the war. With sadness and remorse, he suspected that they had likely been killed by American bombs.
Nearly thirty-five years later, Fred shared the diary with his brother, Rob, who had married a Vietnamese woman and could speak and read Thuy’s language. Rob was quickly hooked. He translated and copied the pages, while the brothers dreamed of returning them to the author’s family.
Eventually, the Whitehursts entrusted a copy of the diary to Ted Engelman, a photographer who often traveled to Vietnam. Thuy’s father and brother had died, but Ted was successful in finding her three sisters and her mother, then eighty-one years old. Seeing Thuy’s handwriting, Dang Ngoc Tram said, “I felt as if my daughter was here, standing right in front of me.”
In the summer of 2005, Fred and Rob Whitehurst traveled to Hanoi, shortly after the diary’s publication in Vietnam. They were eager, but nervous, to meet Thuy’s family. News of their mission attracted journalists and government officials, adding to the excitement over the book.
Thuy’s mother and sisters gratefully welcomed Fred Whitehurst into their family, and he is now addressed by them as Brother Fred. Although Thuy cursed the American enemies, it was one of them who salvaged her diary, and made her feelings known to the world. Thuy’s diary has now sold nearly half a million copies in Vietnam. It is also available in an English translation, which is the version this profile is based on.
Perhaps more importantly, Thuy’s mother was able to revive her long-lost child, thanks to the gift of written words.
Absence is often the reason that words are written or exchanged, to make a connection.
Dang Thuy Tram wrote letters from the war zone, sharing details of daily life, trying to color in the unknown for the family she would never see again. Her diary—and the spirit within it—brought her mother comfort after a lapse of more than thirty years, connecting through time.
Doris Pilkington Garimara was lucky to be reunited with her mother after a separation of decades, though her words were written later, when she finally learned her own history. And Doris’s story is inextricably connected to that of Margaret Catchpole from centuries earlier, when rabbits were also immigrants to the land called New South Wales.