'WAR CHILD Diary"; Vietnamese Anne Frank (3-box Kleenex warning!)

[LynnTheDem]

A MUST-READ.

And the man who held onto the diaries for all those years wonders how much the world has changed since. "I know that an Iraqi mother will one day be in the same position as Mother Dang. Why are we in Iraq? I don't know. You can't know the vulgarity of war until you've been there, until you've been splattered with your friend's blood."
-October 4, 2005 By David McNeill, Japan Focus

Over 35 years since returning home from the Vietnam War, a former US soldier has returned a poignant diary he recovered from a young Vietcong military doctor. The diary has sparked a patriotic revival in Vietnam, turning the two former enemies into national heroes.

"I had to do an appendix operation without enough medicine. Only a few tubes of Novocain, but the wounded young soldier never cried out or yelled. He continued to smile to encourage me. Looking at the forced smile on his dry lips, knowing his fatigue, I felt so sorry for him...I lightly stroked his hair. I would like to say to him: Patients like you who I cannot cure cause me the most sorrow, and their memory will not fade.'"

So begins the diary of Dang Thuy Tram, an army doctor who fought Americans in the Vietnam War and died defending her hospital from a US attack.



#3C78 at http://www.militaryproject.org

[FreedomAngel82]

1. How sad

:( What a brave person.

[LynnTheDem]

2. Very sad, very brave.

The last entry in the diary, written days before Dang was shot (at age 27), is unbearably poignant:

"I am grown up and already strong in the face of hardships, but at this minute why do I want so much a mother's hand to care for me, or really the hand of a close friend, or just that of a person I know who is all right? Please come to me and hold my hand when I am so lonely, love me and give me strength to travel all the hard sections of the road ahead."

:cry:

[Selatius]

3. That war rips me up on the inside

My family is Vietnamese. My parents fled when Saigon fell to the North. They know what war is about. For the average person living in South Vietnam, there was no real difference between who was winning and who was killing. If that person wasn't being terrorized by the NVA and the VC into serving with them, he was being bombed from the air by B-52 carpet bombing raids trying to weed out the NVA/VC, or he was uprooted and made to live in fortified hammocks, while his town or village was torched to try and deprive the enemy cover.

There was not one iota of an improvement for the plight of the average Vietnamese in that fucking war. All US involvement did was prolong the bleeding. Nevermind the legacy of French imperial colonialism that set the stage for the bloodshed.

[TahitiNut]

4. "I was treated better there than I was by my own country."

How's that for pithy? :grr:

[ConsAreLiars]

5. Too true -- the full essay is at this link:

http://japanfocus.org/article.asp?id=412

The http://www.militaryproject.org/ is an extraordinary resource. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

(edit typo)