A Vietnamese diary of the Vietnam War

Look for the publication of these diaries in English next year. I've long thought that there hasn't been a decent account of the Vietnam War (or, for the Vietnamese, the American War) from the point of view of the Vietnamese. It looks like we'll now have one.

By day, she amputated limbs and comforted the wounded. By night, she sought to heal herself, filling tiny notebooks with thoughts on suffering and love, the petty politics undermining the Communist Party and her hatred of American "pirates who drink the people's blood but don't smell the stench."

Thirty-five years after a U.S. intelligence officer saved them from being burned, the poignant diaries of a North Vietnamese surgeon named Dang Thuy Tram have reconciled once bitter enemies.

Their publication has also become a sensation in Vietnam, opening floodgates of memories in a nation long disciplined to take a sanitized, glorified view of the conflict.

Last month, in Quang Ngai province in central Vietnam where Tram perished in 1970 at age 27 after refusing to surrender to U.S. troops during a skirmish, officials broke ground for a medical clinic, visitors' center and statue in her honor. On Tuesday she will receive a posthumous Hero of the People's Army medal...

The journals capture the psychological and physical strain. In the 36 months covered in the journals, Tram was forced to dismantle and rebuild her operating theater six times, regrouping in increasingly remote, mountainous terrain, often carrying out the wounded on her back.

There are frightening accounts of hiding in foxholes, chest-deep in cold water, or nearly suffocating in underground bunkers.

She rages against the Communist Party for denying her and her mother party membership for years because of their "bourgeois origins." "The saddest part of the hardship is that I still have not found fairness ... still have not won the struggle with the bad traits which dishonor the members of the Party and break the spirit of the people who work at the clinic," says an entry dated June 15, 1968.

A May 5 entry pines almost obsessively for the mysterious M whom she ultimately rejected. Interspersed with words of love are epithets against Richard Nixon and U.S. soldiers — "demons, devils, dogs, pirates and poisonous snakes."