Posted on 10/07/2005 10:03:15 PM PDT by Army Air Corps
A personal diary can be powerful reading and Wednesday at Texas Tech, the Tram family was moved to tears. A U.S. soldier saved Doctor Dang Thuy Tram's diaries after she was killed in the Vietnam War and, after all these years, her family read them for the first time Wednesday. Thuy's Sister Kim describes her sister saying, "My sister was a very gentle girl and liked music and painting."
Thuy was a Vietnamese physician in her late twenties when she left for her country's war-torn jungles in winter of 1966. Her sister Phuong recalls it was a very cold winter in the war. "My family was very worried about my sister."
Thuy wrote of her haunting experiences in two diaries. In may of 1968 she wrote "Death still happens everyday, every minute, every second as easily as turning over your hand." And in August she wrote "The pages of this small notebook continue to fill with blood." In 1970 Thuy's own blood would spill. Phuong says, "The day my sister died, my mother had a bad dream. She saw my sister with a tear and her hair flying in the wind."
The U.S. soldier that found Thuy's diaries spent 30 years trying to find her family. He finally gave the diaries to Texas Tech's Vietnam Center. Tech found the Tram family. They flew to the U.S. and Thuy's mother held her daughter's words to her chest for the first time in Lubbock, Texas. Kim says, "I can tell you my mother never cried and this is the first time she's cried. I've never seen her cry."
Beneath the tears is a thread of happiness to feel close to a loved one again... and to feel that an old enemy is now a friend. Kim says, "I feel something very holy."
Thuy's family will now travel to North Carolina to meet with Fred Whitehurst, the soldier that saved her diaries all these years. They have officially adopted him as a son into their family.
Thuy's journal entries will be translated soon and placed on the Vietnam Center's Website: ( vietnam.ttu.edu).
They are not staying in the US; they are here just to read the diaries and meet the US soldier who preserved them.
For many people in the NLF/VC they discovered far too late that they were NVA/DRVN pawns. Most did not realise this until it was too late for them to do anything about it.
What unit were you assigned in Vietnam AAC ?
"What unit were you assigned in Vietnam AAC ?"
I was born jsut as the war was, for the US, winding down.
You know he/she wasn't...
Have to ask; was she with the North or the South??
.......I know the answers. Sad ain't it.
You hit the nail on the head.
In fact, look at the level of war protest in the States and compare it with actions that the US and it allies executed in the fight against the communists. You will find that anti-war hysteria peaked each time that we were successful in grinding-down the Communists and their allies.
Think of how the 1968 Tet offensive was a crushing NVA defeat and how OUR media portrayed it as a US and RVN loss.
Think of how the anti-war crowd screamed during ROLLING THUNDER and LINEBACKER I & II. Let us not forget that anti-war groups in the US were funded largely by direct cash payments from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Was in the South, but she was a doctor in the NLF (VC).
The diaries do provide some insight into the effectiveness of the RVN and the Allied forces to strike at an enemy that OUR press often portrayed as "unbeatable". Our media has had an anti-US bias that is far older than the current war in Iraq.
General Giap admitted after the war that the North Vietnamese "Politburo" was on the verge of throwing in the towel but chose not to do so because they felt that,in the end,their "friends" in the West (read:Kennedy,Kerry,Clinton,Rodham,etc) would carry the day.And these Politburo members never even pretended to be bothered by the spilling of anyone's blood (North....South...soldier....civilian),as long as it wasn't their own.
"Politburo members never even pretended to be bothered by the spilling of anyone's blood (North....South...soldier....civilian),as long as it wasn't their own."
You said it. They had been doing so since the 1950s when ChiCom advisers told the DRVN to follow their example in "agricultural reform". The result was hundreds of thousands of deaths in the North.
Giap's own memoirs thank the US media for helping the DRVN to win. He said that without the aid of our media and anti-war groups, the communists would have lost.
I will chat later; I have to spend the next few hours in the archive doing some reading.
"Beneath the tears is a thread of happiness to feel close to a loved one again... and to feel that an old enemy is now a friend. Kim says, "I feel something very holy."
Interesting to hear a godless Communist feeling "holy"....
"Civilian soldiers can annihilate the Americans anywhere. Every piece of land is soaked with the enemy’s blood. Every family wears the heavy mourning hat, but still continues to fight with strength and a strange happiness."
I guess she didn't know, the Communists most effective forces were already at work on the Mall in Washington -- with Fonda and Kerry leading the forces....
She was a Communist -- attending to the enemy....
Patching them up, to make it possible to kill more Americans who came to her stink hole of a country to bring freedom from Communism....
Semper Fi
What a bunch of garbage! She minces through poetic phrases all nice and cute and at the same time patches up the NVA. I can just see john kerry and whats-her-name fonda and maybe even hitlery getting all teary eyed reading this crap.
I don't let hate burden me yet I do not forgive those who kill US troops. ......I'm gonna have to drive down to Lubbock and see this Vietnam Center for myself......wasn't even aware such was there.
I'll report back....
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