Posted on Thu, Oct. 06, 2005
JIM WATKINS | AP
Doan Thi Ngoc Tram, center, is overcome with emotion after being presented the diary of her late daughter, Dr. Deng Thuy Tram, who died during the Vietnam War.
War's cruel poetry moves search by 2 N.C. veterans
2 brothers spent decades trying to find the family of a doctor, killed by U.S. troops, who wrote about love, bravery and despair.
DAVID PERLMUTT
Staff Writer
Excerpts From the Diaries of Dr. Dang Thuy Tram
Read the entire diary on online
The diary is two volumes long, bound crudely by cardboard with thin, delicate pages.
Yet the writings of a young North Vietnamese battlefield doctor are so powerful and poetic with despair, bravery and love they have torn down walls between her family and two N.C. brothers, both Vietnam War veterans -- and created a national hero in Vietnam.
Dang Thuy Tram wrote in her war diary, now a bestseller in Vietnam, for three years until she was killed by U.S. troops in June 1970, deep in the jungles of South Vietnam. Months earlier, Army intelligence specialist Fred Whitehurst had been handed the first volume, wrapped in silk, as he burned captured personal documents.
"Don't burn this one, Fred," his translator advised. "It already has fire in it."
Against orders, he didn't. That fire took Whitehurst and his tugboat skipper brother, Robert, on a devoted journey -- Tram's writings prodding them -- to get the diary to her family.
Last spring, with help from a photojournalist, they found the family after 35 years and in August traveled to Hanoi.
Friday, Tram's mother, Doan Ngoc Tram, ("Mother Tram" to the Whitehurst brothers) and three daughters are flying to North Carolina to visit the Whitehursts in the Pitt County town of Bethel, 90 miles east of Raleigh, and to meet their "American mother."
"You can't not be moved by these writings unless you're the kind of person who kicks puppy dogs," said Whitehurst, a lawyer and Bethel commissioner. "They're beautiful. Deep. They're Anne Frank times 100.
"Straight from the heart."
The search begins Whitehurst began his search soon after he began reading the translations.He'd joined the Army his senior year at East Carolina University and arrived in Vietnam with an infantry unit in 1969.
Soon he was assigned to the 635th Military Intelligence Detachment in the central South Vietnam province of Quang Ngai, where he interrogated POWs and supervised document translation.
That's where he was June 23, 1970, dumping more papers into the "burn barrel" when his translator handed him a canvas kit bag with the second volume inside.
"Fred, this is from the same doctor," he recalled the translator saying. "Don't burn it, either."
Later, a soldier told Whitehurst about a nearby skirmish on June 22 between U.S. and North Vietnamese troops. The Americans asked their enemies to "chieu hoi" -- give up.
"They got small arms fire from a single rifleman," Whitehurst said. "They asked the enemy to `chieu hoi' again, and again got small arms fire. After a third time, they returned fire and killed the rifleman. What they discovered wasn't a man at all, but a woman.
"Dr. Tram was laying down fire so her patients and nurses could escape."
At her side, was the kit bag with the second volume.
Her entries, which covered caring for her troops and watching them die, spanned three years. On Aug. 4, 1968, she wrote: "The pages of this small notebook continue to fill with blood. But my dear Thuy, continue to note that not enough blood and bones, sweat and tears of our people has flowed for 20 years. In these last days of the life-or-death fighting, every sacrifice is noteworthy."
Whitehurst returned home with the diary in 1972 -- knowing where it had to go.
"I thought that first, the family should know the last thoughts of its daughter," he said, "then the country should know its hero."
First he had to get well: He was sick with hookworm, and dealing with post-war depression. He finished ECU, then a Ph.D. in chemistry at Duke. In 1982, he went to work for the FBI, first as a field agent, then a forensic scientist in the agency's crime lab -- and earned a law degree at night from Georgetown University.
His FBI work hindered him from asking a Communist country for help.
But in the 1990s, Whitehurst began exposing FBI lab scientists for fudging reports and manipulating evidence.
As that scandal unfolded, he told reporters and Hollywood producers about the diary: "Nothing happened. They just wanted to talk about the FBI."
A Washington Post reporter from Hanoi told him the family was probably dead and he should give up.
"I wasn't about to give up."
Dogged search rewarded Neither was Rob Whitehurst.
After Fred left the FBI in 1998, Rob told him they had to find the family.
"He went at it doggedly," Fred said.
Rob, a tugboat captain in New Orleans, made contacts on the Internet, and talked to anyone with ties to Vietnam. During his research, he found the Vietnam Center at Texas Tech University and discussed the diary with archivists.
Short of finding the family, he persuaded Fred to give the center the diary for safe-keeping.
Last March, the brothers took it to Texas Tech and delivered a paper on the diary at the center's Vietnam symposium. In the audience was a photojournalist named Ted Engelmann, who was headed to shoot a project in Hanoi.
Engelmann offered to take digital copies and try to find the family.
In Hanoi, he met Lady Borton, an American Quaker and writer. Through her connections at a hospital, she found "Mother Tram" and her family.
In August, the Whitehurst brothers flew to Hanoi and were treated as family -- and as celebrities by a nation they'd fought against nearly four decades ago.
The story was told in newspapers. Vietnam's prime minister welcomed the brothers in news reports.
Mother Tram told reporters: "I have been unhappy for 35 years ... However now, I have found my daughter's soul. I have her soul and her grave so that I am happier and luckier than many other mothers."
More than 200,000 copies of "The Diary of Dang Thuy Tram" have been sold -- undoctored.
"The Vietnamese have embraced this diary as if they were coming out of the desert and needed a glass of water," said Fred Whitehurst, who is not profiting from the diary's sale in Vietnam.
During their visit, they all drove to Duc Pho, where Dang Thuy Tram ran her clinic and wrote in her diary -- and Fred saved them from the burn barrel.
A poignant party Wednesday, Mother Tram and her daughters spent hours at the Texas archive, holding and reading the original diary for the first time, often overcome with emotion. They'll continue reading it today.
They fly into North Carolina Friday, and Saturday the Whitehurst brothers' mother, Kay, is hosting a party for them in Bethel.
"Mother Tram asked to meet our American mother," Fred Whitehurst said. "She said she wanted to `look into the eyes of the mother who raised such sons.' "
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