Dang Thuy Tram

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is a Vietnamese name; the family name is Đặng, but is often simplified as Dang in English-language text. According to Vietnamese custom, this person properly should be referred to by the given name Trâm.

Cover of Vietnamese-language edition of Dang Thuy Tram's Diary

Đặng Thùy Trâm (b. Hanoi, Vietnam, November 26, 1943; d. Đức Phổ, Quang Ngai Province, Vietnam, June 22, 1970) was a Vietnamese military doctor who worked as a battlefield surgeon for North Vietnam during the Vietnam War. She was killed, at the age of 27, by United States forces while defending her hospital in the Quang Ngai Province of south-central Vietnam. Her wartime diaries, which chronicle the last three years of her life, attracted international attention following their publication in 2005.

One of Tram's handwritten diaries was captured by U.S. forces in December 1969. Following her death in a gun battle on June 22, 1970, a second diary was taken by Frederic (Fred) Whitehurst, then a 22-year-old U.S. military intelligence officer. Whitehurst defied an order to burn the diaries, instead following the advice of a South Vietnamese translator who advised him not to destroy them. He kept them for 35 years, with the intention of eventually returning them to Dang's family, if possible.

Whitehurst's search for Tram's family initially proved unsuccessful. In March 2005, he and his brother Robert (also a Vietnam War veteran) brought the diaries to a conference on the Vietnam War at Texas Tech University. There they met the photographer Ted Engelmann (also a Vietnam veteran), who offered to look for the family during his trip to Vietnam the next month. With the assistance of Do Xuan Anh, a staff member in the Hanoi Quaker office, Engelmann was able to locate Tram's mother, Doan Ngoc Tram, and family.[1]

In July 2005 Tram's diaries were published in Vietnamese under the title Nhật ký Đặng Thùy Trâm (Dang Thuy Tram's Diary), quickly becoming a bestseller. In less than a year the volume sold more than 300,000 copies and comparisons were drawn between Dang's writing and that of Anne Frank.[2][3]

In August 2005 Fred and Robert Whitehurst traveled to Hanoi, Vietnam to meet Tram's family. In early October of the same year the family traveled to Lubbock, Texas to view the diaries, which are archived at Texas Tech University's Vietnam Archive, then visited Fred Whitehurst and his family in his home state of North Carolina.

The diaries have been translated into English and the English version was published in September 2007. Published translations into other languages (including Korean) are forthcoming.