Communist Field Surgeon: Dang Thuy Tram

On Jan. 1, 1969, Dr. Dang Thuy Tram recorded in her diary a message Ho Chi Minh had sent to those fighting for the Communist cause: "This year greater victories are assured at the battlefront. For independence - for freedom. Fight until the Americans leave, fight until the puppets fall. Advance soldiers, compatriots. North and South reunified, no other spring more joyous."

Committed to her cause Dr. Dang Thuy Tram wrote in her diary that if she were ever hit during combat, she would "hold my medical bag firmly, regardless." (Frederic Whitehurst Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University)

Tram had thought of little else since Dec. 23, 1966, when she left her family in Hanoi and began the arduous, dangerous trek down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Three months later, Tram reached Duc Pho, a district in the south-central Quang Ngai province. The people there had heavily resisted the French during the First Indochina War and were now fighting the Americans and South Vietnamese forces. Tram was assigned the job of Chief Surgeon in a Duc Pho clinic, working to save Viet Cong and NVA soldiers.

While Tram derived great satisfaction from her work, she was troubled by her thwarted attempts to be accepted into the Communist Party. Tram believed that being a party member would allow her to more effectively serve the Communist cause. To her great frustration and sorrow, Tram's educated background branded her as bourgeois - that is, middle class and materialistic - and therefore unworthy of membership in the Communist Party.

Tram's dedicated medical work and obvious devotion to the cause, however, eventually gained the respect of local Communist Party leaders. On Sept 28, 1968, she was finally accepted, writing in her diary, "My clearest feeling today is that I must struggle to deserve the title of  'communist.'"

During her service, Tram found it difficult to not befriend the young men fighting for Vietnam's unity. "I have a physician's responsibilities and should maintain some degree of objectivity," she wrote, "but I cannot keep my professional compassion for my patients from becoming affection. Something ties them to me and makes them feel very close to me."

In late March 1969, she transferred to a clinic that treated civilian and military cases. Americans considered the area a "free-fire zone," an area with supposedly no friendly civilians, so anyone remaining was considered the enemy and could be fired upon. Whenever American units approached, clinic personnel had to flee. They were never safe, and throughout the summer, the medics and their wounded were constantly on the move as the intense fighting grew closer.

On July 16 Tram witnessed a nearby airstrike: "Where each bomb strikes, fire, and smoke flare up; the napalm bomb flashes, then explodes in a red ball of fire, leaving dark, thick smoke that climbs into the sky."

During such raids, Tram worried about the people she knew and loved. "From a position nearby, I sit with silent fury in my heart," she wrote. "Who is burned in that fire and smoke? In those heaven-shaking explosions, whose bodies are annihilated in the bomb craters? Oh, my heroic people, perhaps no one on earth has suffered more than you."

From underground shelters and bunkers, Tram had heard American troops but never encountered them face-to-face. Sent on a nighttime emergency mission, she once walked through hostile territory with an armed guard. "Perhaps I will meet the enemy, and perhaps I will fall, but I hold my medical bag firmly regardless," she wrote in her diary.

On June 2, 1970, Tram's clinic took a direct hit, which killed five patients. Ten days later, American troops attacked the medics at a different location. No one was injured, but the medics had to move again.

A few days later, Tram and two Vietnamese civilians were walking on a trail with a soldier when she came face-to-face with a group of Americans. Local villagers later found her body; she had been shot in the head.

Tram's diaries fell into the hands of Fred Whitehurst, an American working with a military intelligence unit. Assigned to destroy enemy documents, Whitehurst was about to throw the diaries in a fire when his South Vietnamese interpreter, Sgt. Nguyen Trung Hieu stopped him. "Don't burn this one, Fred," he said. "It has fire in it already." Hieu read aloud the entries to Whitehurst, who was moved and kept the diaries when he left Vietnam in 1972.

In 2005, Whitehurst located Tram's family and gave them the diaries. Later that year, they were published in Hanoi as one volume, which became a best-seller. Young Vietnamese readers, who had learned about the war only from textbooks or overly formal diaries, were taken by Tram's unpretentious voice, describing a warm, intelligent and occasionally self-doubting young person caught up in the horror of war. In 2007, Tram's diary was translated into English and published under the title, "Last Night I Dreamed of Peace."