International Women's Day Celebration, Pham Van Dong University in Quang Ngai

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The Women's Association of PDU in Quang Ngai organized a celebration for the women faculty at PDU to celebration International Women's Day. It was a day full of fun, food, sightseeing, the beach, games, and enjoyment to celebrate the women in the community and their contribution to the university, to society and to their families. We began the day's events very early with a buffet at Central Hotel's top floor diningroom with a view of Quang Ngai city. The buffet included eggs and bacon for the Western palate but a spread of Vietnamese traditional breakfast fare of course with pho, rice, dumplings, and all sorts of more traditional dishes. There was coffee and I was able to get some fresh milk to boot. After a delicious meal at Central Hotel, we boarded two buses to visit our first historic landmark, the birthplace and home of Pham Van Dong in Moduc District. We also visited Dang Thuy Tram, a young nurse who killed in the American War, struggling to protect the Vietnamese. She kept a diary every day recording all the daily events during that time. When her village was captured and the Americans were burning everything an American soldier Fred Whitehurst who was ordered to destroy everything that did not represent intelligence found the diary and was urged by his Vietnamese interpreter Nguyen Trung Hieu to keep it. This American saved the diary and took it home. Thirty-five years later this American found the diary and brought it to the attention of authorities.



A daughter returns home — through her diaries

By Aimee Phan, Special for USA TODAY

Retrieved from http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-10-11-vietnam-diaries_x.htm



The diaries are simple notebooks, 5 inches by 6 inches, dull brown with cardboard covers. But when Doan Ngoc Tram, 81, held them to her chest last week in Lubbock, Texas, she imagined her eldest daughter, physician Dang Thuy Tram, who has been dead for almost 35 years.

"Her corpse is in Vietnam, but this is her soul," Doan Tram says through an interpreter in a teleconference interview. "She's right here in front of me. I want to hold her, but I cannot. I can only hold her diary."

Doan Tram and her three surviving daughters traveled from Hanoi to Lubbock last week to hold the diaries in their hands. Tram knew her daughter had kept diaries. But she believed they had been destroyed in the jungles of Duc Pho, South Vietnam, where Thuy, 27, had worked as a North Vietnamese surgeon and had been killed by a U.S. unit during the war.

In April, the Tram family learned that the diaries had been rescued by an American soldier who recently donated them to the Vietnam Archive at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. The soldier, Fred Whitehurst, now an attorney in North Carolina, found the diaries during cleanups of American raids. Though ordered to burn items that lacked intelligence information, he was persuaded by his interpreter to spare the diaries. "He said, 'Fred, don't burn them; it already has fire in it,' " Whitehurst recalls.

"Her corpse is in Vietnam, but this is her soul," Doan Tram says through an interpreter in a teleconference interview. "She's right here in front of me. I want to hold her, but I cannot. I can only hold her diary."

Doan Tram and her three surviving daughters traveled from Hanoi to Lubbock last week to hold the diaries in their hands. Tram knew her daughter had kept diaries. But she believed they had been destroyed in the jungles of Duc Pho, South Vietnam, where Thuy, 27, had worked as a North Vietnamese surgeon and had been killed by a U.S. unit during the war.

In April, the Tram family learned that the diaries had been rescued by an American soldier who recently donated them to the Vietnam Archive at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. The soldier, Fred Whitehurst, now an attorney in North Carolina, found the diaries during cleanups of American raids. Though ordered to burn items that lacked intelligence information, he was persuaded by his interpreter to spare the diaries. "He said, 'Fred, don't burn them; it already has fire in it,' " Whitehurst recalls.

Dang Thuy Tram recorded thoughts on the war, her patients, relationship and friendship woes, criticism of the Communist Party and eulogies for her captured and deceased friends. In her last entry on June 20, 1970, she wrote:

"No, I am not a child: 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 ..."





Two days later, she was killed by an American unit passing through Duc Pho. To view more of the diaries, visit www.texastech.edu/tramdiaries.



NPR did a program on this story http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6492819

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