Last Night I Dreamed of Peace by Dang Thuy Tram

Title: Last Night I Dreamed Of Peace
Author: Dang Thuy Tram
Publisher: Rider 2008 (paperback), London
ISBN - 9781846040764



Summary:
On 22 June 1970, a platoon from the Americal Divison was out on patrol in the boonies of the Duc Pho District. A radio playing Vietnamese music and the sound of voices alerted them to VC in the vicinity and later that day, 4 VC with a radio appeared, walking down the trail towards them. Upon being ambushed, 2 of the VC ran off, while the remaining 2, a woman wearing Ho Chi Minh sandals and a black pyjama outfit and a young NVA soldier, stood their ground, opening fire. One eyewitness account I came across on the Internet stated that the woman, Dang Thuy Tram, went into a crouched shooting position and began returning accurate fire with her rifle before being killed by US fire. Along with her medical kit, a dairy was found on the dead woman’s body, which was passed on to divisional intelligence. It was deemed of no military worth and was about to be incinerated by Fred Whitehurst, an intelligence officer, when he was told by his interpreter “Don’t burn this one, Fred. It has fire in it already.” Whitehurst took the diary back Stateside after completing his tour of duty and went on to become an FBI officer dealing with counter-terrorism investigations. He thought of returning the diary to Vietnam but as a serving Federal agent he was not able to contact Hanoi. After eventually leaving the FBI, he and his brother presented the diary at a conference on the Vietnam War at Texas Tech University in 2005. An Air Force veteran there said he was going to Hanoi in a couple of weeks, and took a copy of the diary with him, and managed to find Dang Thuy Tram’s family. When they finally got to travel to Hanoi, Fred Whitehurst and his brother were surprised to find a crowd of people greeting them upon their arrival, as the diary had recently been published in Vietnam and was already a best-seller.

Thoughts:
Dang Thuy Tram, a North Vietnamese doctor working in Southern Liberation Front field hospitals, was still only in her twenties when she wrote her diary. She was part of the first generation of Vietnamese to grow up entirely under Communism, and the effects of that are evident. The opening page of her diary begins with a quote from Nikolai Ostrovsky’s Soviet revolutionary novel “How Steel Was Tempered”, the tale of a young factory worker who is transformed by Communism into a Red soldier (I have the Soviet edition, and even read it, many years ago). A lot of the same sort of mindset and phrasing prevails in Dang Thuy Tram’s diary. In between telling about the horrendous working conditions she has to operate in (performing operations during bombing raids, moving from place to place to avoid capture), she spends a lot of time worrying whether she is strong enough to fulfil the Party’s lofty goals at the same time as being aware of the fact that her bourgeois Hanoian origins set her apart from the local Party hierarchy.

And there is a lot of flowery romantic language, as she pines for an NVA officer who, apparently, just wasn’t really into her. She also wrote a collection of poems to him, mercifully not included here, but nonetheless the diary does have a lot of hearts and flowers content that makes for tedious reading, although it would explain why this book is so popular with the ladies.

I read the English edition of this diary alongside the Vietnamese edition and struggled with the flowery language and the revolutionary terminology in the original text. This book would have been a challenge to translate, but I don’t think this is going to become the definitive translation. The translator conflates various sentences, boiling things down where it is too tricky to catch the intricacies of Dang Thuy Tram’s flowery Communist writing. A particularly annoying feature of the translation is that the original paragraphing has been ignored, and the translator plays free and easy with the sentences, breaking them up and rearranging them. There are also errors in the translation; most notably the dates are wrong on various of the diary entries.

As someone who studied Soviet literature at university, this work had a certain curiosity value for me, and as a symbol of the war era, I can see why it is so popular in Vietnam, but I don’t think it would be of much interest to Fields of Fire members.

Rating: ***

That's a pretty amazing story on it becoming published. I wonder if the translation issues were somewhat because the individual didn't want to put forth the full Communist propaganda view or as a matter of personal taste instead of being purely interested in preserving the writing in an objective way, or somesuch?

To be honest, I think it was because they didn't have the translation skills. My Vietnamese is not that good, but I have been in the biz since the 1990s and can spot fudges and simplifications when I see them. Having read a lot of Soviet stuff in Russian, I can say that Communist writing is difficult to put into English without sounding wooden in the first place. The translator was also a Viet Kieu who did not grow up in the North, although he did have help from his dad, who is from that generation.