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A Courageous Communist

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By CATHERINE DOLINSKI

Published: November 4, 2007

"Last Night I Dreamed of Peace: The Diary of Dang Thuy Tram" (Harmony Books, $19.95)
American films have often portrayed Communists as cold automatons, numb to the needs of the individual and intolerant of free thought.

"Last Night I Dreamed of Peace: The Diary of Dang Thuy Tram" blows those perceptions apart. The private, often poetic musings of this young North Vietnamese doctor offer a unique glimpse into "a revolutionist's heart" that is as tender as it is courageous in the face of brutal conflict.

At age 24, Dang Thuy Tram follows her commitment to the Communist Party - and her love for a Viet Cong soldier - into the war zone of South Vietnam in 1968. American soldiers draw nearer as her story unfolds, forcing her clinic to relocate repeatedly. The advancing enemy chases Tram and her colleagues into underground passageways, bushes, even freezing, chest-deep water. Their inadequate supplies, meanwhile, cannot save all of their suffering patients.

"I came to sit by Lam's bedside today," Tram writes. "A mortar had severed the nerves in his spine, the shrapnel killing half of his body. Lam was totally paralyzed ... My heart was breaking for him, but I didn't know what to say ... Oh! War! How I hate it, and I hate the belligerent American devils. Why do they enjoy massacring kind, simple folks like us?"

The English-version release of Tram's diary in September, amid the U.S. presidential primary season, provides for an interesting study in contrasts. Many of Tram's entries brim with political fervor to rival any campaign speech. But unlike today's made-for-prime-time political aspirants, Tram writes only for herself, neither espousing nor holding back anything for the sake of appearances.

"For the first time, I dig a grave to bury a comrade. The shovel hits a rock, and sparks fly like the flame of hatred ... who will survive, who will have been lost when our nation gains its independence? If I die, I have already savored the days of socialism. There are still hundreds of thousands of people growing up who only knew sufferings and hardships ..."

Her devotion to the Communist Party is steadfast but also complicated by the party's prejudice against the middle class to which she belongs. Unabashedly, she relays her sadness, even bitterness, over the party's delay in folding her into its ranks, complaining of the "worms and mites gnawing away" from within it.

"I am very disappointed that the party has not seen fit to let me join the ranks of its members so that I can fight these parasites. Perhaps that's why they still hesitate to accept me."

Tram remains a true soldier of her cause, despite such frustrations. But she dedicates more of her diary to ruminating on the virtues of her many "adopted" brothers and sisters - in reality, patients and colleagues - and her passionate feelings toward them: "We love each other with a miraculous love, a love that makes people forget themselves and think only of their dear ones."

There is an idealistic, almost utopian quality to the intimate bonds between these young comrades, forged in loneliness, common conflict and a communist philosophy of embracing fellow workers as family. Though heartfelt, however, such attachments never replace Tram's feelings for M., the older Viet Cong soldier she has loved since her teens. M.'s appearances bring Tram more pain than happiness, and the couple never reunite romantically before her sudden death by an American bullet in 1970.

"Last Night I Dreamed of Peace" was a sensation in 2005, when it hit the shelves in Vietnam. But its publication - indeed, its very survival - owes entirely to an American veteran of the Vietnam conflict.

As the introduction explains, former soldier Fred Whitehurst came across Tram's diary in 1970 while stationed at an American Army base in Duc Pho. Reading the diary convinced him to save it from a bonfire of enemy documents. After three tours of duty, Whitehurst brought it back to the United States, against regulations.

He would later explain his decision this way: "Human to human, I fell in love with her."

Catherine Dolinski is a reporter in the Tribune's Tallahassee bureau.

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