Nguyễn Văn Tuấn
The war between nationalist and communist forces in Vietnam ended more than half a century ago, but its echoes still linger in the memory of Vietnamese people everywhere.
On 13 April 1972, North Vietnamese forces launched an assault on An Lộc, the provincial capital of Bình Long, barely 100 kilometres north of Saigon. Highway 13 was cut. An Lộc was encircled. Shelling was almost continuous. The battle dragged on for nearly three months, and by the end of it much of An Lộc had been reduced to rubble.
The following figures give some sense of the ferocity of the battle. According to a US study, around 78,000 artillery rounds fell on An Lộc over three months. The Republic of Vietnam forces defending the town suffered about 5,400 casualties, including roughly 2,300 killed or missing. North Vietnamese losses are harder to establish because no official figures were released, but US estimates put them at more than 10,000 killed and 15,000 wounded. Civilian deaths and injuries cannot be determined with any precision, but tens of thousands of people in Bình Long province were forced to flee their homes.
What those data cannot tell us are the human stories behind them. Inside that besieged town stood a small hospital. And in that hospital was a young surgeon named Nguyễn Văn Quý.
An Lộc Diary is his account of those brutal months.
There are many ways to tell the story of a war. A commander sees it through maps, defensive lines and the balance of forces. A soldier remembers patrols and operations, comrades who were killed, and the moments when he himself narrowly escaped death. A historian approaches it through documents and the decisions that shaped battles. For a military doctor, war appears differently: in shattered bodies, soldiers bleeding before him, and operations that sometimes have to be undertaken within minutes.
Nguyễn Văn Quý’s An Lộc Diary tells the story of war from that perspective.
The book was first published in California in 2002 and was reissued in 2026 by Việt Ecology Press and the Vietnam – Canada Medical Magazine. Across more than 400 pages, Nguyễn Văn Quý recounts his time as a surgeon at Bình Long Provincial Hospital, particularly the period in 1972 when An Lộc became one of the war’s fiercest battlefields. It is a wartime diary, a record of military medicine, and the story of a young doctor trying to preserve life in circumstances where danger was present at every moment.
The author himself makes clear what he hoped the book would preserve. At the beginning of the new edition, he dedicates it to “a generation of young people who lived through the war, many of whom never returned”. He describes the pages that follow as memories of “a fratricidal war”, left for generations to come.
It is this perspective that makes An Lộc Diary worth reading more than half a century after the events it records.
From medical school to the battlefield
Nguyễn Văn Quý graduated from the University of Saigon’s Faculty of Medicine in 1967. As the only son of a widowed mother, he was eligible for exemption from military service. He chose instead to serve. In 1968 he joined the 10th intake of conscripted medical officers. He later served with the 43rd Regiment of the 18th Infantry Division. There he saw battlefield casualties at first hand and came to feel that a doctor attached to a combat unit could do only so much. Much of the work consisted of first aid followed by evacuation. He therefore sought further training in surgery and was subsequently posted to Bình Long Provincial Hospital.
He arrived in Bình Long on 13 April 1971. Almost exactly a year later, the war reached the hospital itself. After Lộc Ninh fell in early April 1972, North Vietnamese forces continued their advance towards An Lộc, while Highway 13 south of the town was cut to prevent reinforcements from arriving by road. The fighting at An Lộc became one of the major battles of the 1972 offensive.
That military background is important for understanding the book, but Nguyễn Văn Quý rarely views the battle from a strategic height. His field of vision is more immediate. When an assault begins, what he sees is the wounded being carried in. When the shelling intensifies, his questions are practical and urgent: can the operation continue, how much medicine is left, how much water remains, and who must be treated first? In that sense, the hospital becomes another battlefield.
A hospital in a besieged town
What gives An Lộc Diary a distinctive place among accounts of the Vietnam War is the detail with which it records the practice of medicine under battlefield conditions.
Nguyễn Văn Quý writes about triage, anaesthesia, abdominal and chest wounds, fractures and infection. He also writes about the most basic things that a hospital in peacetime simply assumes will be there: electricity, water, sterile instruments, sutures, medicines, staff, and the ability to transfer patients to a higher level of care.
At An Lộc, none of these could be taken for granted. One detail that has stayed with me concerns sutures. When he ran out of the material needed to close abdominal wounds, Nguyễn Văn Quý took nylon cord from sandbags, sterilised it and used it on his patients. He describes the case of Captain Nghi, whose wound was closed with this nylon and subsequently healed without the infection Quý had feared. He used the same improvised material in three more cases before proper sutures arrived.
It is a small detail, perhaps, but it says a great deal about battlefield medicine. In a modern operating theatre, surgeons work within a system designed to control risk. At An Lộc, the doctor had to recreate that system from whatever was available, because there was often no alternative.
By the end of the battle, Nguyễn Văn Quý recorded that he had operated on 254 patients in what he described as “major surgery”. Six died at the scene; he had no way of following the outcomes of those who were evacuated elsewhere. He also acknowledged that proper clinical records became almost impossible to maintain once the shelling grew intense. On some days, the immediate aim was simply to finish the operation and then find shelter.
The 2026 edition adds an important qualification for anyone reading the book as a record of battlefield medicine. In the interview at the end of the volume, Nguyễn Văn Quý explains that the figure of 254 in fact referred to the total number of operations recorded, including both major and minor procedures. That clarification is worth retaining. It reminds us of the distance between an event and the memory of it more than half a century later, and of the need to distinguish between figures recorded under battlefield conditions and later interpretations of them.
Whatever terminology we use, however, the number still points to a reality that is difficult to imagine for anyone accustomed to peacetime medicine. Every operation involved a particular human being and a decision that had to be made with too little information, too little time and too few resources.
When the enemy becomes a patient
For me, the chapter entitled “The Prisoners of War” is one of the most important in the book. If I had to choose a single episode that best reveals Nguyễn Văn Quý as a person, this would be it.
Two wounded prisoners were brought to the hospital: a woman of about 23 with an abdominal wound, and a young man of about 21 with a fractured femur. Nguyễn Văn Quý operated on them both. He writes simply:
“I operated on both of them and cared for them just as I did for the civilian patients, making no distinction between friend and foe.”
After surgery, the two prisoners were handcuffed to their beds and guarded by security personnel. What is striking is how much space Nguyễn Văn Quý devotes to imagining the pain and numbness caused by the restraints. He recalls a patient from his student days whose arm had once been immobilised during an intravenous infusion, and from that memory tries to imagine the prisoners’ discomfort. Over the following days, he notices their guarded manner gradually soften as they realise that the doctors and nurses are treating them no differently from anyone else. Elsewhere he writes: “I will do everything within my ability to save them and to preserve their bodies intact.”
Both recovered and thanked him and his team for saving their lives. Of the young woman, he writes: “This was the first time I had heard her say ‘thank you’ since she had been admitted to the hospital. It was completely different from the suspicion and defensiveness she had shown at first.”
The episode leads him to a deeply humane observation. The other patients on the surgical ward knew that the woman was an enemy prisoner, yet he saw no particular hostility towards her. On the battlefield, he writes, the two sides might fire at one another; once a wounded person entered the hospital, however, “everyone was simply a patient”. They were Vietnamese, spoke the same language and shared the same customs. Most of those who were actually enduring the war, he believed, wanted only a peaceful life. For that reason, the doctors and nurses tried to heal whoever came before them, “making no distinction between our side and the enemy in medical care”. To me, this is where Nguyễn Văn Quý’s humanity is most clearly revealed. It is not presented as a lecture on medical ethics, but through the simple facts of what he did.
Courage in the presence of fear
Another feature of the book that struck me is that Nguyễn Văn Quý makes no attempt to fashion himself into a wartime hero. On the contrary, he describes running for a bunker when shells were falling, surviving by chance, and feeling fear when an explosion came too close. When asked whether he was afraid, his answer was brief: “Of course I was.”
Perhaps it is precisely this admission of fear that makes his courage easier to understand. Courage here does not mean being fearless. It means carrying on with one’s work while knowing that death may come at any moment.
He also has a sense of humour and an ability to laugh at himself. Early in his time with a combat unit, he recalls being naïve enough to spot a beautiful orchid in the forest and think that he would collect it on the way back. The soldier with him had to point out that they would almost certainly return by a different route. The diary is therefore not made up solely of wounds and casualties. There are meals, conversations with friends, jokes, thoughts of family, and brief moments of ordinary life that the war has not yet taken away. These details appear between scenes of injury and shelling and give the narrative a distinctly human rhythm.
Unselfconsciousness prose
Nguyễn Văn Quý himself describes the writing as somewhat “disorganised”. Events in the present, he explains, often draw him back into earlier memories, from which he then returns to what is happening around him. He may describe an operation and then move to the problem of finding food; the sound of shellfire may remind him of someone he once knew; a wounded soldier may bring back a memory from his student days. Past and present constantly interweave in what he calls a “natural, unforced” flow of thought.
His prose is largely unpolished, rather like a soldier writing home with a notebook balanced on his pack. Some passages are long; conversations are sometimes reproduced almost in full; details that might seem unnecessary are allowed to remain. Yet the overall impression is of a man trying to record what he saw, rather than of a writer trying to impress his reader.
The circumstances in which the manuscript was written are also important. Nguyễn Văn Quý says that he began writing at An Lộc in 1972 because he did not know whether he would survive. He wanted his family to know what had happened to him if he were killed. As the fighting intensified, there were periods of two or three weeks when he could not write at all because he was too busy caring for the wounded. Only later did he type up the manuscript that his family had preserved.
Anyone using the diary as a historical source therefore needs to recognise its different layers of time. Some observations were written during the events of 1972; another layer was added when the book was prepared for publication in 2002; and the 2026 edition includes a new preface, introductory material and an interview looking back from a distance of more than half a century. Each layer has its own value, but they should be distinguished when the book is used as historical evidence.
Three ways of seeing war
Reading An Lộc Diary brought to mind two other wartime books: Phan Nhật Nam’s Mùa Hè Đỏ Lửa and Đặng Thùy Trâm’s diary.
Mùa Hè Đỏ Lửa is one of the best-known South Vietnamese works of battlefield reportage on the 1972 offensive. Phan Nhật Nam was both a soldier and a military writer. He wrote the book while the battlefields were still fresh, covering several major fronts of 1972, including An Lộc. In time, the title itself came almost to stand for that entire season of war.
Phan Nhật Nam’s prose is fierce and vivid, carrying the rhythm of battle: military units, engagements, death and the devastation of whole landscapes. His An Lộc is a battlefield in which life and death unfold on a scale that seems almost beyond comprehension. Nguyễn Văn Quý views the same An Lộc from much closer range. He does not look through operational maps or troop formations, but through the wounded bodies being carried into his hospital. If Mùa Hè Đỏ Lửa shows us An Lộc from the battlefield, An Lộc Diary shows us the battlefield from the operating table. The two books therefore complement one another naturally.
Đặng Thùy Trâm and Nguyễn Văn Quý were of roughly the same generation and both were doctors, but they served on opposite sides of the war. Trâm graduated from Hanoi Medical University in 1966, went to Quảng Ngãi and ran the Đức Phổ clinic until her death in 1970. Her diary records emergency care, shortages and the deaths of comrades, but it also dwells on emotion, ideals, loneliness and the reflections of a young woman. Nguyễn Văn Quý is less lyrical. He writes more about wounds, operations, sutures, medicines, casualty evacuation and the very practical problems of a hospital under siege.
Yet the two doctors meet at one essential point: when someone is wounded, the doctor’s duty is to save a life. For Nguyễn Văn Quý, that principle was tested most sharply when the patient was an enemy soldier. He operated on and cared for such patients “without distinction between friend and foe”, later observing that once they entered the hospital, “everyone was simply a patient”. The two doctors stood on opposite sides of the war, but medicine brought them to the same place: the protection of life while all around them war was destroying it.
At this point I cannot help thinking of a painful irony that occurred only three years later. Some memoirs and historical studies report that, after Cộng Hòa General Hospital in Saigon was taken over on 30 April 1975, wounded Republic of Vietnam servicemen who were forced out, including some who were seriously injured. Official accounts published in Vietnam describe the takeover differently, emphasising the provision and organisation of medicines and food for the wounded and sick. The divergence between these accounts points to a larger problem in the memory of war: people on opposite sides can carry profoundly different memories of the same event.
That is why Nguyễn Văn Quý’s phrase, “everyone was simply a patient”, deserves particular reflection. In war, people may call one another the enemy. In a hospital, however, the person suffering in front of a doctor should have only one name: patient.
More than half a century on
The Battle of An Lộc receded into history more than half a century ago, and the war itself has long since ended. Yet war has a life beyond the sound of gunfire. It survives in the memories of those who lived through it, in families who lost people they loved, in the stories that are told, and in those that were never allowed to be told.
For more than half a century, the history of the war in Vietnam has largely been told from the perspective of the site that prevailed. That may be understandable politically, but it has left a historical gap. Millions of Vietnamese lived in the Republic of Vietnam. They went to school, worked, fell in love, married, served in the armed forces, were wounded, died and suffered loss during the war. They, too, are part of Vietnam’s history. If their voices are absent, the picture passed on to later generations cannot be complete.
In that sense, An Lộc Diary is an important testimony. It is not the “final truth” about the Battle of An Lộc; no personal diary could ever be that. Nguyễn Văn Quý wrote as a military doctor of the Republic of Vietnam, with the beliefs, limitations and emotions of someone who was there. That is precisely why the book matters as a witness account. To come closer to the truth, we need to place many different pieces of the past alongside one another.
Reading an account from the other side does not mean that we must agree with everything its author believed or wrote. It asks only that we acknowledge something that ought to be simple: those on the other side also lived, suffered, loved, lost people dear to them, and had the right to tell their own story.
That is why I believe An Lộc Diary deserves a place on the bookshelf of every Vietnamese family. On that shelf there may also be Đặng Thùy Trâm’s diary, Mùa Hè Đỏ Lửa, and books written from other sides of the war. They should be there not so that our children continue the conflicts of their forebears, but so that they understand that Vietnam’s history is larger than any single official narrative.
Nguyễn Văn Quý opens the book by dedicating it to “a generation of young people who lived through the war, many of whom never returned”, and by leaving behind memories of “a fratricidal war” for generations to come. More than half a century later, I think that is also the best way to read this book.
The guns of An Lộc fell silent long ago. Those who once bore arms on both sides are themselves gradually passing from the scene. What remains is memory. But memory can become history only when different voices are allowed to be heard. An Lộc Diary is one such voice, and that is why this book deserves to be read, preserved and passed from one generation to the next.
Nguyễn Văn Tuấn (*)
Sydney, September 2026
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(*) The author, Nguyễn Văn Tuấn, is Distinguished Professor of Predictive Medicine at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and Professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of New South Wales, Australia. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences, of the Royal Society of New South Wales, and of the American Society for Bone and Mineral Research. A former ‘boat people’, he reached Thailand in early 1981 and was resettled in Australia in early 1982. He has made important contributions to osteoporosis prevention and medical research globally. In 2022, he was conferred the Order of Australia by Queen Elizabeth II. He is the author of the memoir Kangaroo Dreams(Quill Hawk, 2025), which recounts his 45-year journey of resettlement and life abroad.
