book I

1968-1969

The inflamed days

Joy, sadness condensing in my heart

A person's most valuable possession is life. We only live once; we must live so as not to sorely regret the months and years lived wastefully, not to be ashamed of the months and years lived wastefully, so that when we die we can say, "All my life and all my strength have been dedicated to the most noble goal in life, the struggle to liberate the human race."

n. a. ostrovsky1

To live is to face the storms and not to cower before them.

8 April 1968

Operated on one case of appendicitis with inadequate anesthesia. I had only a few meager vials of Novocain to give the soldier, but he never groaned once during the entire procedure. He even smiled to encourage me. Seeing that forced smile on lips withered by exhaustion, I empathized with him immensely.

Even though his appendix had not ruptured, I was very sorry to find an infection in his abdomen. After a fruitless hour of searching for the cause, I could only treat him with antibiotics, insert a catheter, and close the wound. A whirl of emotions unsettled me: a physician's concerns and a comrade's compassion and admiration for this soldier.

Brushing the stray hair back from his forehead, I wanted to say, "If I cannot even heal people like you, this sorrow will not fade from my medical career."

10 April 1968

It is finished. You have all gone this afternoon, leaving us in an empty jungle with only our intense yearning, this loss of you.2 You have gone, but this place holds your shadows: the pathways, the pretty benches, the echoes of your impassioned poems.

"Everybody put on your pack. Let's go."

At Brother Tuan's3 order, you shouldered your crude rucksacks made from salvaged American bags. All was ready, but each of you still lingered, waiting your turn to shake my hand for the last time. Suddenly a strange longing for the North surged through me like a stormy river and . . . I cried so hard I could not face all your farewells.

No, be on your way brothers! I'll see you again one day in our beloved North.

For a night and a day, I worried about Sang's4 operation. I was so happy to see him sit up this afternoon. His face bore deep lines of pain and fatigue, but a smile slowly bloomed on his fragile lips when he saw me. His hands cupped over mine, a touch filled with warmth and trust.

Oh, you young, brave wounded soldier, my love for you is as vast as it is deep: it's a physician's compassion for her patient; it's a sister's love for her sick brother (we're the same age, you and I); and in admiration, it is a love special beyond others.

Did you see it in my anxious glance? Did you feel the tenderness in my hand on your wound, on your pale, thin arms? I wish you a quick recovery, San, so you can return to your comrades, return to your lonely old mother, who waits for you every hour, every minute.

12 April 1968

Afternoon in the forest, the rain has left the leaves wet and fragile, pale and lucid in the sunbeams, these emerald hands of a maiden imprisoned within a forbidden fortress. The air has gone somberly sad. In the patient ward, silence broods. Murmurs of Huong's5 conversation drift from the staff's room.

An immense longing envelops me.

Whom do I miss?

Dad, Mom, people who left . . . and a patient waiting for me to come to him.

Within this longing roosts a secret and profound sorrow, silent as this air, heavy as this earth. I feel the wound in my heart still bleeds, an excruciating pain that neither work nor memories can numb.

Oh, let's forget it, Thuy!6

Forget it for a new hope,...

 

In 1968 the young Dang Thuy Tram bravely left her family to serve the Vietnamese National Liberation Front as a medical doctor in battlefield hospitals. She was killed in 1970 by American Forces. Kim Mai Guest invigorates Tram's diary, her tender voice revealing the young doctor's desperate loneliness and her passionate loyalty to her country. Sadly, Tram was miserably baffled by her relationships with men, and Guest's sensitive reading requires the listener to endure the many diary entries that are beleaguered by the disappointment of lost love. Guest enhances the portrayal of the author with a delicate hint of an accent and fluid pronunciation of the Vietnamese names. Above all, this memoir allows the listener to contemplate the high personal price of war. N.M.C. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

 

"Now available for the first time in English -- faithfully translated by Pulitzer Prize-winning Vietnamese American journalist Pham -- [LAST NIGHT I DREAMED OF PEACE] is witness to the unjust horrors and countless tragedies of war, a reminder made more pertinent every day."

 

"Last Night I Dreamed of Peace is a book to be read by all and included in any course on the literature of war."

 

"Remarkable. . . . A gift from a heroine who was killed at twenty-seven but whose voice has survived to remind us of the humanity and decency that endure amid--and despite--the horror and chaos of war."

 

"As much a drama of feelings as a drama of war."

 

"An illuminating picture of what life was like among the enemy guerrillas, especially in the medical community."

 

"Idealistic young North Vietnamese doctor describes her labors in makeshift clinics and hidden hospitals during the escalation of the Vietnam War.
Tram did not survive the war. On June 22, 1970, an American soldier shot her in the head while she was walking down a jungle pathway dressed in the conventional black pajamas of her compatriots. Judging by her diary, rescued from the flames by another American soldier and first published in Vietnam in 2005, she died with a firm commitment to the Communist Party, the reunion of Vietnam, her profession and her patients, many of whom she saved in surgeries conducted under the most primitive and dangerous conditions imaginable. In one of her first entries, on April 12, 1968, she characterizes herself as having 'the heart of a lonely girl filled with unanswered hopes and dreams.' This longing and yearning--especially for the lover she rarely sees, a man she names only as 'M' -- fills these pages and gives them a poignancy that is at times almost unbearable. Early on, Tram records her concerns about being accepted into the Party. She eventually--and gleefully--is, but one of her last entries reveals the results of an evaluation by her political mentors, who say she must battle her 'bourgeois' tendencies. It's a laughable adjective to apply to a young woman dedicating her life to the communists' political and military cause. Tram blasts the despised Americans over and over, calling them 'imperialist,' 'invaders,' 'bloodthirsty.' She notes with outrage the devastation wrought by bombs, artillery and defoliation. Describing her efforts to treat a young man burned by a phosphorous bomb, she writes, 'He looks as if he has been roasted in an oven.'
Urgent, simple prose that pierces the heart."

 

Last Night I Dreamed of Peace by Dang Thuy Tram
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