What Viet Cong Wrote In Their Diaries After Facing US Soldiers 

What Viet Cong Wrote In Their Diaries After Facing US Soldiers 

On a blood-soaked hillside in central Vietnam, Corporal Ira Frazier bent down over a fallen enemy soldier. What he found in the dead man’s chest pocket would sit in a box for 46 years. A combat diary written in Vietnamese filled with poetry promises and final prayers. The words inside revealed something American commanders never expected.

 Not fear not hatred, something far more human. His name was Vu Ginh Xuan. He was 23 years old from a small village called Ke in Hai Duong province, North Vietnam. An artilleryman in the 14th company of what would become the People’s Army 21st Regiment. In late 1965, Xuan marched south down the Ho Chi Minh Trail carrying 50 pounds of equipment and one small notebook.

 The notebook wasn’t contraband. It wasn’t forbidden. This is where most Americans get the story wrong. The idea that North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers were ordered not to write diaries that’s a myth that won’t die. There’s no documentary evidence directive from 1966 or 1967 in the translated military records.

The truth is simpler. Vietnam had a deep literary tradition almost every soldier could recite ca dao folk poetry. The Communist Party actually encouraged what they called battlefield diaries as a form of ideological self-cultivation. Writing wasn’t rebellion. It was cultural practice.

 But what Xuan wrote in his diary, what thousands of others wrote in theirs it wasn’t propaganda. It was something far more revealing. February 1st, 1966 Xuan’s unit gathered for what the party called a resolve and oath-taking meeting. 97 soldiers stood in formation. Among them Xuan and his artillery crew.

 Listen to what he wrote that day. Unit 17 held a resolve and oath-taking meeting. The unit consisting of 97 comrades including me volunteered to destroy enemy tanks. We read the 10 Army oaths. The atmosphere in the meeting was boiling with enthusiasm like a great storm ready to shake the earth and royal the sea.

We swore that we would destroy eight enemy aircraft and five M113 tanks. That enthusiasm, that revolutionary fervor, it was real. The party had manufactured it through years of indoctrination. But enthusiasm doesn’t stop bullets. Nine days later, Xuan wrote again. This time the tone was different.

 12 helicopters arrived and landed troops on Hill 62, 200 m from my sector. Then my unit fought all day. At 10:00 a.m. Uncle An was killed on Hill 62. Son Tinh District. The fighting was incredibly ferocious. They fired rockets and machine guns. That word ferocious not fierce not intense ferocious like an animal attack.

 This was almost certainly his first encounter with US Marine helicopter assaults during Operation Double Eagle II. The Marines had a tactical advantage Xuan had never seen before. They didn’t march through the jungle for weeks like he did. They flew in fresh rested supported by artillery and air power that made the ground shake.

 But Xuan kept writing. On the back of a photograph he carried, a picture of a friend Xuan wrote something that breaks your heart when you know how the story ends. Dear Nhat and Yen you gave me this photograph as a memento of Quang on the 9th of August, 1965. Now I am living with the people of South Vietnam and I am fighting and I am still alive.

On March 9th, 1966, Quang sacrificed his life in Quang Ngai for the fatherland and for the liberation of South Vietnam. If I am still alive when the country is unified, we will all be together again and we will truly be happy when our country is unified. He signed it Vu Ginh Xuan.

 If I am still alive he wouldn’t be. What do you remember about the day that you found the diary? I got the diary towards the end of March of uh 1966, Operation Indiana. While in pursuit of the enemy, Charlie Company of the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines had been ambushed in a rural area in a hot zone known as I Corps. 11 Marines died and around 55 were wounded.

 Bob Frazier’s Bravo Company arrived the next morning and witnessed the aftermath. I was very first person there. That diary was out of his shirt. It was laying in plain sight. I just wanted something to bring back. It was a spur of the moment deal. Bob says he found the diary’s owner inside a pit where it appeared he’d been part of a team firing a heavy machine gun.

There was two or three drag trails where they had dragged other soldiers away from there. And the only reason they didn’t drag him away from there was because it just got too hot for them. But you think that he that he died laying down covering fire? Oh, I know he did. I absolutely know he did. Yeah, he was he had killed a lot of our boys.

 He was shooting right through a rice paddy dike and he just mowed them down. So he was left behind as the rear end guard. So when they left him there he wasn’t going to leave there. Corporal Ira Frazier later said Vu Dinh Don and his three comrades had bravely sacrificed themselves for the safety of their unit.

 Trying to block US troops’ pursuit. Vu Dinh Don might have been the most valiant man he had ever met in his life. For 46 years that diary sat in a box in Oregon. Corporal Frazier kept it. Not as a trophy. He said it felt wrong to destroy it. In 2012 Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta returned the diary to Vietnam.

And in September of that year, it reached Xuan’s family. His son was in his late 40s. He’d never known his father just stories. Now he had his father’s words. But Xuan’s diary isn’t the only one. January 21st, 1968 26th Marine Regiment, 6,000 men surrounded by 20,000 North Vietnamese army troops in the hills around Khe San Combat Base.

What happened next was the most concentrated bombing campaign in the history of warfare up to that point. Operation Niagara 75,000 tons of bombs dropped in 77 days. The Americans called it a waterfall of bombs. An unnamed NVA soldier from the 304th Division wrote this. From the beginning until the 60th day B-52 bombers continually dropped their bombs in this area with ever-growing intensity and at any moment of the day.

The entry cuts off there. Museum archivists believe the soldier was killed before finishing. But here’s what American intelligence missed at the time. NVA units at Khe San were receiving advanced warning of B-52 strikes. Usually 2 hours notice. They had help. Soviet signals intelligence ships were intercepting American communications.

So they survived by hiding enduring. A different NVA soldier wrote something that captures the psychological warfare at play. We travel hundreds of kilometers of forest with only meager rations while US troops use the helicopter for bathing and washing. Seeing this scene I am sure that if we have perseverance, we will win this war.

Read that again. The helicopter for bathing. They watched American helicopters bring hot food, clean water, and baths to the hilltop outposts. Meanwhile, they ate rice mixed with rainwater in tunnels. And their takeaway wasn’t we can’t win this. It was if we have perseverance, we will win. Here’s what most people don’t know about these diaries.

In October 1966, the US military established the Combined Document Exploitation Center at Tan Son Nhut Air Base in Saigon. Every captured document, every diary, every letter seized from dead or captured enemy soldiers went through CDEC. They screened them for intelligence value.

 Only about 10% were fully translated. The rest brief English synopsis then microfilmed and often destroyed. Today, those microfilm reels sit at Texas Tech University, the Sam Johnson Vietnam Archive, 3 million pages of Vietnamese voices, most never fully translated. Scholars are still going through them, finding poems, love letters, tactical reports.

 In 1994, two scholars published a collection of poems pulled from these captured documents. One poem reads, my mother is old. She waits for me in our village. Every night she waits to see me return so she can finally close her eyes.” That’s not propaganda. That’s not political indoctrination.

 That’s a 19-year-old kid 1,000 mi from home wondering if he’ll ever see his mother again. So, what do these diaries actually tell us about facing the Marines? Here’s the uncomfortable truth. Vietnamese soldiers wrote “Lính Mỹ”, American soldiers, or “Giặc Mỹ”, American bandits. They didn’t know which branch was hunting them. They didn’t care.

 To them, it was all the same war, the same helicopters, the same artillery, the same B-52s turning the jungle into moonscape. But, what they did write about reveals something more important than tactical observations. They were terrified of the bombing, genuinely awed by American material superiority, desperately homesick, and they wrote poetry.

 Even on the night before battles they knew they might not survive. They turned their fear into verse. The Communist Party wanted revolutionary romanticism, socialist realism fused with battlefield diary keeping. They got that. Joan’s February 1st entry proves it. All that talk about storms ready to shake the earth.

But, they also got something they couldn’t control, the private homesickness, the love notes to girls they’d never see again, the poems about mothers waiting that ended up, thanks to Marines like Corporal Frazier and translators like Merle Pribbenow, in American archives, preserved, translated, returned.

 There’s one more thing you need to know. The most famous Vietnamese War Diary in English is probably Dr. Đặng Thùy Trâm’s Last Night I Dreamed of Peace. She was a young doctor running a field clinic in Quảng Ngãi province. Her diary is often cited in articles about what the Viet Cong wrote about facing Marines, but she wasn’t killed by Marines.

 She was killed on June 22nd, 1970 by a patrol from the 4th Battalion, 21st Infantry of the Americal Division, the Army, not the Marines. By 1970, the Marines had withdrawn from most of First Corps. The area was transferred to Task Force Oregon, which became the 23rd Infantry the Americal in September 1967.

This matters. If we’re going to tell these stories, we need to get the basic facts right. So, what did the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese soldiers write in their diaries after facing US Marines? They wrote about fear, about awe, about missing home. They wrote poetry in the face of death.

They wrote revolutionary slogans they’d been taught to believe, and they wrote goodbye letters they hoped someone would find. What makes these documents so powerful isn’t that they reveal some tactical secret about how the Viet Cong viewed the Marines. It’s that they reveal the same thing every war diary reveals, that war, no matter which side you’re on, is a fundamentally human experience, and sometimes the enemy you kill in combat is a 23-year-old artilleryman who wrote poetry about reuniting with his friends when the war ended. He never got that reunion. But, 46 years later, his son got to read his final words.