Drawing Under Fire : War Diary of a Young Vietnamese Artist

A poignant and rare—perhaps the only—contemporaneous Viet Minh diary of the siege of Dien Bien Phu that marked the end of French colonial rule in Indochina and the start of direct US military intervention in Vietnam that led to the Vietnam War (1946–1954).

Written from an anti-colonial perspective, the diary of Phạm Thanh Tâm is a humane and moving account by a young war reporter and artist coming of age during “a sanguinary battle that has since turned out to have immense historic importance.” On May 7, 1954, the Vietnamese forces fighting for independence, the communist Viet Minh, won an unexpected victory at the battle of Dien Bien Phu against the French colonial forces who were receiving massive US military financial aid and air support to fight the expansion of communism in the region.

Drawing Under Fire, discovered by journalist Sherry Buchanan and first published in hardback in 2005 in the United Kingdom and in 2011 in France, fills a gap in history as the first English translation and critical edition of one Viet Minh’s diary of life and death at Dien Bien Phu. Both sides suffered such huge casualties that US journalist Bernard G. Fall described the siege as “hell in a very small place.”

During the First Indochina War or French War (1946–1954), the twenty-two-year-old Phạm Thanh Tâm, armed only with his Waterman pen, pencils, and a Chinese ink bottle, joined the Viet Minh heavy artillery division besieging the French military camp in the remote mountain valley of Dien Bien Phu. He wrote his diary at night, under relentless French aerial bombings, napalm strikes, and tank shelling. He describes in vivid detail how his fellow soldiers lacked food, clothes, and ammunition; how they managed to move one-ton guns to hilltops to surround the French; how they built fortified gun emplacements twenty feet deep into the hills and slept underground next to their cannons; how they camouflaged the guns that remained undetected by French surveillance planes; and how sappers scooped the earth out with their bare hands to dig miles of tunnels to protect the infantry’s advance.

Through his words and sketches, Phạm Thanh Tâm gives a voice and a face to his fellow soldiers, their youthful bravado, and their determination to win, but also to their tears and their suffering. He confides in his diary his patriotic enthusiasm to free his country from the French who bombed his home; his admiration for the bravery of the fighters; his trauma witnessing his fighter-friends blown to pieces; his love of beauty and nature when he discovers a tranquil stream untouched by bombs; his unrequited love for an actress in a frontline theatre group; and his hopes for an end to the war.

On May 7, 1954, the night of the French surrender, an emotional Tâm penned a poetic note in his diary, “grateful to be alive” when so many had perished: “Tonight, as I lie under the stars, I feel both calm and excited. I try to forget all the nights when the bombings shook my entire body. I’m sure I’ll fall asleep right away. I’m worn out and grateful to be alive.”

As the prominent French journalist Jean Guisnel commented, “This is a must read for the strength of the account told without hatred.”

Phạm Thanh Tâm (1932–2019) was a prominent war correspondent and artist. Born in Haiphong, at the age of fifteen he joined the League for the Independence of Vietnam or Viet Minh. During the First Indochina War (1946–1954), he was a war reporter and artist at the historic battle of Dien Bien Phu that ended French colonial rule in Indochina. After the war, he joined Nhân Dân (The People), the communist party newspaper, and continued his art studies at the Hanoi Institute of Fine Arts, graduating in 1962. He was a war correspondent and artist during the Vietnam War (1964–1975) and the Sino-Vietnamese War (1979). He retired from the People’s Army with the rank of colonel. His drawings are in several museum collections including the British Museum and the Ho Chi Minh City Fine Arts Museum.

Sherry Buchanan is a journalist and the publisher and editor of Asia Ink. She is the author of On The Ho Chi Minh Trail: The Blood Road, The Women Who Defended It, The Legacy, Vietnam Posters, the best-selling Vietnam Zippos: American Soldiers’ Engravings & Stories, Mekong Diaries: Viet Cong Drawings and Stories, and Tran Trung Tin: Paintings and Poems from Vietnam. Before creating Asia Ink, she served as an editor and columnist with The Wall Street Journal and the International Herald Tribune in New York, Brussels, Paris, London, and Hong Kong. She has a BA from Smith College and an MA from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. She lives between London and Southwest Scotland.