The journals capture the psychological and physical strain. In the 36 months covered in the journals, Tram was forced to dismantle and rebuild her operating theater six times, regrouping in increasingly remote, mountainous terrain, often carrying out the wounded on her back.
There are frightening accounts of hiding in foxholes, chest-deep in cold water, or nearly suffocating in underground bunkers.
She rages against the Communist Party for denying her and her mother party membership for years because of their "bourgeois origins."
"The saddest part of the hardship is that I still have not found fairness ... still have not won the struggle with the bad traits which dishonor the members of the Party and break the spirit of the people who work at the clinic," says an entry dated June 15, 1968.
A May 5 entry pines almost obsessively for the mysterious M whom she ultimately rejected.
"My dear M ... I still love you very much but love is mixed with hate and blame. ... You are not mine, but I would like to bring my love to rub your wounds. My wound never heals. I will carry this broken heart with me all my life," she wrote.
Interspersed with such words of love are epithets against then US president Richard Nixon and US soldiers -- "demons, devils, dogs, pirates and poisonous snakes."
Robert Whitehurst, 60, a tug boat captain from New Orleans, has done a rough translation of the diaries into English using skills learned during 18 months of language training in Vietnam, where he skippered a patrol boat in the Mekong Delta. They will be professionally translated and published next year in the US.
According to Tram's mother, a soldier who survived Tram's last battle said she laid down fire to cover the retreat of wounded soldiers, and US troops combing the hospital found the diaries.
Whitehurst says his research shows that Tram was well-known to the Americans.
"According to US intelligence reports, she was known as a skilled surgeon and protected by local resistance groups," he said on a visit to Hanoi. "The documents indicate that she was targeted for capture or elimination to strike a blow at enemy morale. She already was a hero back then."
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