Vietnam War Diary

Here is a really special piece by Michael Sullivan, A Wartime Diary Touches Vietnamese, All Things Considered (10/11/2006- 10:11), on a recently discovered diary of the Vietnam War, kept by young doctor Dang Thuy Tram, who served with the North Vietnam fighters, that is, with our enemy at the time, although the same side that now runs Vietnam and hence the same government that hosted President Bush this past weekend.

Musings

• There are two touching stories here--that of the American veteran Frederick Whitehurst, who saved the diary, and that of the short, poetic life of Dang Thuy Tram herself, and possibly a third story as well, the reunion of Dang Thuy Tram's mother with her daughter's words, and the fact that her daughter's diary contained an honesty that she had never shared with her family. Perhaps there is even a fourth story here, as Whitehurst struggles with his own easy acceptance of war as the proper solution to political disagreements.
  
  
• While is Vietnam last week, President Bush said that the lesson of the Vietnam War for Iraq today is, “We’ll succeed unless we quit.” Yet one thing that seems never to have sunk into the American consciousness is that we did quit in Vietnam, basically walked away (or, perhaps more accurately, "cut and ran"), after years of struggle and after some 57,000 American military fatalities (and over a million Vietnamese). SO what is the lesson of Vietnam for today?