Doctor’s Odyssey Mirrors Face of Change in Communist Vietnam

Disgraced and defeated, deemed ideologically impure, South Vietnamese Army Col. Tran Thanh Trai was shunted off to a Communist labor camp in 1975.

It was the price paid for lining up on the wrong side of Vietnam’s bitter war.

Today, a respected and honored surgeon, Trai is an elected lawmaker in Communist Vietnam’s 450-seat National Assembly--one of only three independent legislators in a nation of one-party politics.

How this former adversary of Hanoi was rehabilitated and won trust within Communist Party circles is more than just a story about Trai. It’s a story about Vietnam, and how a nation isolated and xenophobic for so many years is coming to grips with its past and is changing politically, albeit by slow, carefully measured degrees.

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A young and promising student, Trai graduated from Saigon Medical School in the spring of 1965, just months before the first American combat troops waded into the Vietnam War at the coastal city of Danang.

The war against Communist North Vietnam was escalating and getting worse by the day. The Army of the Republic of Vietnam, or ARVN as South Vietnam’s military was called, sought to shore up its meager medical corps.

“The army badly needed doctors,” Trai said. “I was drafted, and trained in combat. I was given an officer’s rank and by 1966 was sent to Danang.”

Until the final weeks of the war, he stayed in Danang, patching up the wounded, a witness to a generation of young Vietnamese men decimated by a terrible jungle war.

A junior officer, in time he would climb through the ranks, eventually becoming a colonel--an honor that later would cost him at the hands of the victorious Communists who reserved severe punishment for senior enemy officers.

During the 1968 Tet Offensive, he remembers standing for hours, maybe it was days, in a puddle of blood that pooled under his operating table. He saved countless lives; many others died on his table.

“I sacrificed my whole life in Danang,” he said. “And I watched my world falling apart.”

In March 1975, with North Vietnamese troops surrounding the city, he and his medical unit fled Danang. By boat and on foot, he made his way to Saigon.

“We were taught that if the North Vietnamese won, blood would flow like a river and bones would pile up like a mountain,” Trai said. “I thought, ‘Who would protect me from the Communists?’ ”

On April 30, they came. Rolling into Saigon in tanks and marching on foot, Communist troops promptly renamed the city after North Vietnam’s revolutionary patriarch, Ho Chi Minh.

Days and weeks passed and no massacre transpired, but years of forced labor, torture and ideological re-education did.

A Peasant’s Life by Day

Under a scorching sun often for 14 hours a day, Trai hacked and toiled in the countryside with other former South Vietnamese soldiers.

Trading his officer’s uniform for baggy black pajamas, his surgeon’s scalpel for a hoe, he was sent into the muddy fields to cut down trees and plant corn.

“Purge your past and be of the people” was the slogan of his labor camp guards.

For almost three years he lived a peasant’s life by day, and following orders he wrote self-criticisms and confessions to the Communist Party by night.

Life was harsh in postwar Vietnam, but the country’s miserable fate ultimately would win Trai his freedom.

By late 1977, newly unified Vietnam faced a crisis. There were fewer and fewer doctors in the cities of the former South Vietnam. Recognizing Trai’s medical credentials, his captors cautiously arranged for his early return to Ho Chi Minh City.

“I came back and was assigned to the Health Services Department of Ho Chi Minh City as a surgeon,” he said. Within weeks, he was sent to the city’s main pediatric hospital, where he has served ever since.

Trai immediately began to prove his worth.

In 1978, southern Vietnam was crippled by a mass exodus. By boat, thousands upon thousands of people began to flee their increasingly isolated Communist country. Many of the boat people were the educated, the wealthy and the once-influential elite of South Vietnam.

Of the 11 doctors who staffed the Ho Chi Minh City Children’s Hospital in early 1978, only one--Trai--remained by 1979.

“I could have left the country; I had a place on a boat, but I declined,” he said. “I quietly worked and worked for my people.”

In time, Trai gained the full trust of the Communist Party.

On his own initiative, he returned again and again to the corn and rice fields where he once toiled in labor camp units. Now, however, he was back to offer free health care and teach basic first aid to isolated farming communities. He still goes back when he has the time.

“Through my experience with the people, I could see the lack of access to health care,” he said.

Trai, by the late 1980s, was named chief surgeon at Children’s Hospital. He was also becoming Vietnam’s leading advocate for rural health care reform, pleading for money for medical facilities, better training and greater access.

His old wartime ties were even exploited in the early 1990s when he was allowed to arrange for doctor training and exchange programs in the United States. He was also permitted to study new medical procedures at Stanford University in California.

Not a Communist, Trai nevertheless was fast becoming “of the people,” in the eyes of the country’s Marxist leaders.

Mellowing Communists

Last year, while chatting over tea with his staff, one of the hospital’s nurses suggested Trai run for election to the National Assembly in the capital, Hanoi.

Thinking it impossible, he tried to dismiss the notion, but it had already taken root in his mind.

“I kept thinking, if I was elected I could have access to the country’s leaders and discuss health care reform with them,” he said.

His first dilemma: How does a former enemy soldier and labor camp inmate stand for election in a system devoted to Communist doctrine and one-party politics?

“The law allows all citizens to run for elections,” Trai notes. All citizens, that is, that the Communist Party deems fit.

Interviewed and vetted by the country’s ideological watchdog, the Fatherland Front, Trai’s strength came from the support of Ho Chi Minh City’s population.

He organized polls at his hospital to illustrate the backing he enjoyed in the medical community. He submitted personal profiles to the Interior Ministry and the elections board.

His public service and his apolitical devotion to medicine had, it seems, cleansed his past. Or maybe the Communist Party has become more willing to accept the country’s past.

Shaken by the collapse of its ideological mentor, the Soviet Union, the Communist Party of Vietnam has mellowed in recent years, at least in small ways.

Rhetoric warning of a thousand anti-Communist conspiracies still fill the official newspapers and state-run radio broadcasts, but talk of democracy and a tempered view of political pluralism are the reality.

“We are trying to create a more democratic and lively environment,” National Assembly spokesman Vu Mao told reporters before last year’s elections. “We are of the view that even nonparty members can be good.”

Three independent candidates won seats in the Legislature--a first in postwar Vietnam.

An additional 66 National Assembly delegates are not Communists--although, unlike Trai, they do have the party’s sponsorship as handpicked ethnic minority representatives.

The government has said up to 20% of the National Assembly may eventually be filled with nonparty lawmakers.

“The young generation needs democracy. They can advance if there is democracy,” former President Le Duc Anh said recently.

Democracy Vietnamese-style is an equation of unwavering Communist Party leadership, with a growing tolerance for diversity.

A measure of that democracy can be found with Trai, whose ultimate success as a neophyte politician came down to popularity with the voters--80% of whom in Ho Chi Minh City cast their ballots for the soft-spoken doctor.

With his agenda in hand, Trai is now a quietly persistent member of the National Assembly, sitting side-by-side with such revolutionary stalwarts as former Prime Minister Pham Van Dong.

“When I met the country’s leaders, they never brought up the past,” Trai said. “They came over, we shook hands, and they thanked me for my work in the medical field.”

Reluctant to discuss party politics, he knows well where to draw the line.

“It’s a mistake to think with more independent delegates you could form some kind of opposition bloc in the National Assembly. That’s not how Vietnam works.”