Enormously sad, a chronicle of absolute waste, this is the diary of a 24 year old Vietnamese doctor who was a field medic for two years during the Vietnam War, until she was killed when trying to move patients from a clinic destroyed by enemy attacks. Killed, I say, as if it wasn't murder: a bullet through the forehead isn't accidental, nor is attacking hospitals and medical staff allowed by the Geneva Conventions, but the Americans did not seem to care. They do not come across well here, and certainly not in comparison with the diarist. Poor girl, all she wanted was to go home to her parents, but she wouldn't because her countrymen needed doctors.

I think was stood out for me most here was the sheer level of hatred she had for the people invading her country. And fair enough too, I wouldn't love anyone invading mine, but there's often a popular conception of doctors being slightly better than the rest of us, I suppose - solidly humanitarian in their beliefs. And historically, of course, this isn't always true, but for someone who had nothing but an overwhelming love, it seems, for the people around her, for friends and family and patients... it's really confronting to see it co-exist with such loathing. We'd like to think that doctors, if confronted by an injured enemy, would act as doctors, but here I suspect the loathing would overcome the duty. Yet I can't for one minute blame her; she's having to operate, sometimes without the benefit of anaesthetic, on patients who are suffering unbearably. Of course she'd hate the people that did this to her own, and that hatred, if not spilled onto every page, is close enough to being on every second one. It's completely understandable, as I said... but it's also horribly compelling.