She was 15 when her sister died. Now 50, she remembers her as "very beautiful, very gentle and very fragile. I cannot imagine her working in such difficult conditions."
Nhan, the publisher, recalls that Dang Thuy Tram was popular in high school and believes her interest in literature as a student helped her as a writer.
"She understood other people's feelings," he said. "She could put herself in others' shoes."
After taking the diary home to America at the end of his tour, Whitehurst always hoped to return it to Tram's family. But he soon joined the FBI and believed it would be improper for him to approach the communist government of Vietnam.
When he retired in 1997, he began searching for the family, without success. Last year, he gave the diary to the Vietnam Center at Texas Tech, where it remains. The center located the family within a few months, and Tram's mother and sisters flew to Lubbock in October to see the diary for the first time.
Whitehurst visited Vietnam soon after and was warmly received. Despite Tram's oftexpressed desire for revenge, the Vietnamese have been remarkably forgiving since the end of the war. "We don't want to keep hatred in our heart," said sister Dang Kim Tram. "We want to forget the bad things in the past."
The diary's popularity comes at a time of improving relations between America and Vietnam. U.S. warships stopped here for shore leave over the July 4 holiday, the fourth such visit and the first time two vessels came together. Donald H. Rumsfeld recently made his first visit to Vietnam as Defense secretary, and President Bush is expected to make his first trip here in November for a meeting of AsiaPacific leaders.
Today, diarist Tram might not recognize her country or her beloved Hanoi. Vietnam's population has more than doubled since 1970, to 84 million. Hanoi has become a crowded, frenetic city, where young people talk on cellphones and zoom around on motorbikes -- sometimes at the same time.
Like other North Vietnamese students of her generation, Tram was taught the ideals of communism and Vietnamese nationalism and was prepared to make sacrifices for the war effort.
After graduating from medical school at 24, she volunteered to leave the North and work in the central coastal district of Duc Pho, then part of the U.S.-backed South, where she was assigned to care for Viet Cong guerrillas and local villagers. It was one of the most dangerous combat zones of the war.
