Primary Source from the Vietnam War: The Diary of Dr. Tram

Seth Mydans of the New York Times has a fascinating story about a diary written by a young Vietnamese doctor during the Vietnam War, which was recovered by an American soldier named Fred Whitehurst after the doctor's death and eventually published in a Vietnam. The NYT article, "Diary of North Vietnam Doctor Killed in U.S. Attack Makes War Real", notes that the tale of the doctor, Dang Thuy Tram, has made a lot of younger Vietnamese aware of the struggles of that era:

When the diary was serialized in newspapers last year, people cut out and saved the articles, passed them among their friends and read them aloud to one another. When it was published as a book, its print run was a sensational 300,000 or more in a country where books are generally published in small numbers, well under one-tenth that number.

"I really admire her," said Vu Thi Lan, who works in a camera shop and said she was 38, "the same age as her daughter if she had had one."

Ms. Lan said she had read everything she could find about Dr. Tram in newspapers and on Web sites, and wondered whether, in the doctor's place, she could have found the strength to endure.

"In my generation we haven't had a chance to live in that kind of situation," Ms. Lan said. "And it's a diary. It's real. That's what makes it interesting. She didn't mean for people to read it. It was just to release her feelings."

My own research is based on computer-assisted analysis of media content, but the diary of the young doctor is something that apparently isn't meant for computerized parsing and analysis. It's one of those primary sources that has the power to touch people on an emotional level, as it illustrates a personal view of the war between North Vietnam and South Vietnam and the United States.

The Vietnam Center at Texas Tech has scans of the original diaries, as well as photos, but has removed the English translations -- the family has apparently contracted a company in the U.S. to publish it in print.