24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
humanization of the "enemy", November 12, 2007
This review is from: Last Night I Dreamed of Peace: The Diary of Dang Thuy Tram (Hardcover)
"Last night I dreamed that Peace was established," Dang Thuy Tram confided to her diary. "Oh, the dream of Peace and Independence has burned in the hearts of thirty million people for so long. For Peace and Independence, we have sacrificed everything. So many people have volunteered to sacrifice their whole lives for these two words: Independence and Liberty. I, too, have sacrificed my life for that grandiose fulfillment." Thuy never saw the fulfillment of her dream. She was only twenty-seven when on June 22, 1970 American soldiers put a bullet through her forehead.
Dang Thuy Tram (b. November 26, 1942) was a surgeon fresh out of medical school who headed a field hospital in the remote, mountain jungles of Vietnam. She operated without anesthesia, rebuilt her clinic every time it was bombed, tended to the peasants whose villages had been burned and bull-dozed, hid in her underground shelter, and suffered the atrocities of war -- kids stepping on land mines, helicopter gunships in the middle of the night, forests stained yellow by toxic defoliants, napalm bombs, amputees, and patients like Khanh, a twenty-year old victim of a phosphorous bomb whose charred body, burned to a crisp, still smoldered with smoke an hour after it was admitted to her clinic.
The sparse possessions found with Thuy's body included some medicines, a rice ledger, a Sony radio, and this diary. When the American soldier Fred Whitehurst found the diary during the mop-up, he violated military regulations, kept the diary, and took it home with him in 1972 after three tours of duty in Vietnam. In April 2005 he was able to deliver the diary to Thuy's eighty-one-year old mother and three sisters, who published it in Hanoi on July 18, 2005. In the following eighteen months Thuy's diary sold 430,000 copies -- in a country where two-thirds of the citizens were born after the war ended and where books rarely sell more than 5,000 copies.
Much like Clint Eastwood's film Letters from Iwo Jima, Thuy's diary tells the story of Vietnam from the perspective of our "enemy." She's a fervent patriot devoted to Vietnam's revolutionary resistance. She longs for acceptance with the Communist Party which suspects her admitted bourgeois background and attitudes (her father was a surgeon and her mother a university lecturer). She rages with hatred against the American invaders, those "imperialist killers, vicious dogs, bloodthirsty devils, and terrible, cruel people who want to use our blood to water their tree of gold." More importantly, Thuy's diary reveals the longings of a fellow human being who misses her mom and dad and aches with loneliness for her boyfriend. FitzGerald's introduction, numerous footnotes that explain historical details, and two dozen family photographs complement Thuy's deeply human dream of peace.
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Mesmerizing, March 21, 2009
From the moment I saw the cover on this book, I was mesmerized by the rice patties in the foreground, the mountains in the background and the smiling young woman in the cone-shaped hat. The lush green landscape looked eerily familiar. So did the young woman.
"Last Night I dreamed of Peace" is the diary of Dang Thuy Tram, a 25-year-old North Vietnamese doctor who goes to South Vietnam during the war to serve in jungle clinics near Duc Pho. Her diary chronicles her life from 1968 to 1970, which was one of the bloodiest periods in the Vietnam War.
Thuy writes of her heart-wrenching days in the clinics where she is sometimes forced to operate on patients without anesthesia. To add to her despair, her clinics were often bombed and strafed by American aircraft and sometimes attacked and destroyed by ground forces. If American troops were seen approaching the clinic, Thuy, her staff and patients fled into the jungle or climbed up into the mountains. Sometimes, when there was no time to flee, they crawled into hidden underground tunnels where they anxiously waited as American soldiers searched the jungle above them.
I was captivated by Thuy's diary because I also saw the horrors of this war, but from the "other side." I was a U.S. Army supply sergeant for a light infantry company, also stationed in Duc Pho, at the same time as Thuy. It's quite possible that some of her patients were wounded by soldiers from my company.
As I read Thuy's diary, I was also struck by her sentiments, which were so similar my own. Enemies in war often share a common likeness, and this becomes evident in Thuy's diary. She longs for the comforts and safety of her home in North Vietnam. She misses her Mom and Dad, her siblings and her friends.
Despite these familiar emotions, Thuy's diary is not always easy reading. Her friendships with others on the medical staff, the soldiers and villagers are often referred to as Big Brother or Little Brother, or Big Sister and so forth, ranked according to the intimacy of their friendship and their position in Vietnamese society. Her boyfriend, whom she grew to love as a teenager in Hanoi and still longs for, is simply referred to as Mr. M.
In her daily writings, Thuy often struggles with her bourgeois past. She came from a family of educated intellectuals. Thuy's father was a surgeon and her mother a university lecturer. Thuy followed in her father's footsteps, becoming a doctor, and she volunteered to go to the South as soon as she finished medical school. Some thought she was too fragile for such arduous and dangerous work, but Thuy was determined to succeed.
This determination constantly emerges in her daily writings, but she continues to questions her bourgeois past and what influence it might have on her relationships with others. Many of Thuy's patients, and the villagers who sheltered her, were probably uneducated peasants.
Frances Fitzgerald, who covered the Vietnam War for the New Yorker, wrote an introduction to Thuy's diary. She describes Quang Nghai Province, where Duc Pho is located, as a guerrilla stronghold. The Saigon government had long since given up control of the province to the rebels when the Americans arrived in the 1960s. The American's began a campaign to pacify the area, but they had little success. As the fighting dragged on and casualties mounted, the tactics of war became much more brutal.
October 21, 1969
Thuy writes, "The situation is extremely tense. At Mo Duc, military vehicles plowed through the hamlets, The villagers fled. Many cadres perished, crushed in their shelters by the enemy vehicles."
Thuy often expresses her intense hatred toward the Americans. She asks, "What joy is there when the American bandits are trampling our nation and killing our countrymen?" As the war drags on, Thuy's despair also seems to grow in her diary. Still, she never gives up her dream of peace.
Meanwhile, the daily horrors of war for this young doctor. Many of her patients are sent back into battle shortly after she heals their wounds. She tells of one encounter with such a solder named Bon whom she treated for a shoulder wound. Thuy spots Bon marching with an AK-47 on his shoulder and he shouts, "Greetings doctor! My arm is as good as new!" Thuy is overjoyed to see Bon's recovery, but days later he is brought back to her clinic, this time his leg mauled by a mine. "He lies motionless and silent, without a single moan," she writes. Thuy amputates the leg in an attempt to save Bon, but he later dies.
Despite the often horrific scenes in her clinic, Thuy's writing lacks much description. She writes mostly in a matter-of-fact style. But then this is Thuy's diary and she probably did not intend for it be a novel.
Still, the reader cannot help but visualize the blood and the pain on the faces of her patients -- and the despair on Thuy's face as she tries to save them. Thuy's writing, at times, becomes graphic. She tells of a young man, severely burned by a phosphorous bomb, who is brought to her clinic. His charred body is still smoldering as she begins to examine him.
"Last Night I Dreamed of Peace" is a diary not only full of hope, but also filled with horrific realism. In her writings, Thuy also questions whether she will survive the war, and there is a sense of coming dread in her daily chronicles. Thuy writes her last entry in her diary on June 20, 1970.
Days later, Thuy was shot in the head by an American solder as she and a group of communist troops walked down a jungle path. Thuy abruptly became another statistic, a wasted life in a long and brutal war. She laid dead in the jungle, her conscious dream of peace vanquished, but her written dream of peace, her diary, survived.
It should be noted that had the two groups of enemy combatants been transposed that day, Thuy might have survived. Had Thuy and her troops been the ones hiding in the jungle, with the American soldiers approaching on the trail, the Americans would have died that day.
War is always a sadistic game of life or death, with a brutality that can never be fully understood by those who don't experience it.
Thuy's diary, however, moves the reader beyond the horrors of war. Thuy dares to dream of peace. In her diary, she sometimes paused at the end of a long day at the clinic and gazed across the lush, green Vietnam countryside. "Sunset on the rice fields always holds a certain poetic sway, regardless of the day's horrors," she wrote.
This is why I was mesmerized by Thuy's diary. As a young American soldier, I too would pause at the end of a long day and gaze across the rice fields toward the distant mountains. And like Thuy and so many others, I also dreamed of peace.
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The other side of the river...., February 22, 2008
This review is from: Last Night I Dreamed of Peace: The Diary of Dang Thuy Tram (Hardcover)
...to use Blasé Pascal's phrase, relating to his rhetorical question concerning his right to kill another man, just because he lived on that opposite bank. Dang Thuy Tram's diaries are an important addition to that small group of Vietnamese books concerning the American War which have appeared in English, and include Bao Ninh's "The Sorrow of War," and Duong Thu Huong's "Novel Without a Name."
Alain-Fournier was another great writer whose life was cut far too short by war during the very early months of World War I. Both he and Thuy died at the same age, 27. Alain-Fournier's literary reputation was established prior to his death, Thuy's has finally come, posthumously. The strength of her diary is the immediacy and authenticity of the comments. She was quite optimistic at the beginning, but with the mounting casualties in her unit, and the relentless bombardment from the Americans, she turns more pessimistic, and foreshadows her own death. For those portions I would have given her a 5-star rating, but the frequent interjection of that leaden communist rhetoric, and the vague treatment of the personnel struggles within her unit, and the party, I decided to give only a 4-star rating, preferring both of the books above. Also, there were the issues that were only briefly discussed, and were of essential interest - her medical work. There was never an adequate description of her clinic, and the availability of medical supplies. Malaria, and what the GI's called "jungle rot," (fungal infections) were unmentioned yet must have been a significant portion of her work. She mentions in passing the poison that was Agent Orange, but again gives no real description of the effect it had on her unit.
Tim O'Brien, probably the greatest American novelist to come out of this tragic war, was in the infamous Americal Division, in Quang Ngai province, the unit that Thuy repeatedly called "the American bandits." He might have actually have been on one of the patrols that she had to face. The Americal's bases were on the lowlands, near the coast, and the mountains loomed to the West, where Thuy lived, and were a constant source of fascination and beauty - the light was never quite the same on those mountains. One of O'Brien's novels, "Going After Cacciato" explored the fantasy of one soldier finally having had enough, and deciding to walk away from the war, through those mountains, all the way to Europe. I shared that fascination with those mountains, during the same time Thuy was in them, and even had the same fantasy about walking away from the war. I was in a tank unit that spent four months, in late '68, in the next province south, Binh Dinh. One of our jobs was the road "security" of Highway 1, and on several days, we would sit, overlooking the South China Sea, at the boundary between Quang Ngai and Binh Dinh province, only 2 to 5 miles from Thuy's clinic in the hills.
Thuy spoke many times of her desire for revenge against the invaders of her country. An honest and understandable emotion from those who suffered years of misery, and the loss of so many friends. This emotion was shared by her compatriots, and has now been dissipated as they welcome American tourists to their country. I would have loved to have discussed this transformation with her in a tea house in her beloved Hanoi.
Finally, how many more diaries like this are currently being produced in Iraq?
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