I was looking around in the Virtual Vietnam Archive at Texas Tech University today when I started to come across “infiltrator diaries.” That is how the diaries of North Vietnamese soldiers who journeyed down the Hồ Chí Minh Trail to fight in the South were labeled by a US Army center that collected such materials, the Combined Document Exploitation Center (CDEC).
I found one that had the lyrics to various songs in it. It had lyrics, for instance, for the “Liberation March” (Hành khúc giải phóng).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPYjIyASpBY
“Stars in the Night” (Những ánh sao đêm).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3rJ2GMT3k8
And the “Song of the Forest Worker” (Bài ca người thợ rừng).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrxcdzr256o
And then I found a page in this diary with Chinese text – the lyrics of the “Ode to the Motherland” (歌唱祖國) [I prefer “fatherland,” but there is a Wikipedia entry already for “Ode to the Motherland,” so. . .].
The “Ode to the Motherland” was a patriotic song that was composed in the early 1950s, not long after the People’s Republic of China had been established. It was also featured in the 1965 film, The East is Red, a musical that depicts the history of the Chinese Communist Party’s rise to power.
I also found out from a document in the Virtual Vietnam Archive that The East is Red was shown in Hanoi theaters in the fall of 1966. The diary that has the lyrics to “Ode to the Motherland,” meanwhile, was captured in 1967.
While it’s not clear if the person who wrote that diary learned about that song from watching The East is Red or through some other means, what all of this points to is a shared cultural world at that time.
Subsequent historical events have made that shared moment difficult/painful for some people to remember, to the extent that it is now rarely acknowledged, but I was reminded of that time and that world when I came across this diary.
In the 1960s, the East was Red, North Vietnam was in the East, and at least one Vietnamese was singing “Ode to the Motherland” on the Hồ Chí Minh Trail.
(Item Number: F034600741985. Title: Captured Documents (CDEC): Vietcong Infultrator’s [sic] Diary (100 pages) [29 March 1967])
One of the more delightful phenomena of 20th century Vietnamese culture are the keepsake notebooks. I think most teenagers kept them North and South. They would mostly include poems and songs that were usually copied from somebody else’s notebook. In addition to the songs in this book there are a number of poems, including a pair of lengthy ones by Tố Hữu, and a few that look kind of romantic – the writing is really difficult to read so I can’t say for sure.
In Hanoi I met a woman who had kept a notebook full of nhạc vàng songs (what people today call nhạc tiền chiến) that she had compiled before 1954 even though her mother ordered her to burn it (fearing political and criminal repercussions for possessing it). It’s importance to the woman was demonstrated by the fact that she’s held on to it for almost 60 years.
It’s interesting that there’s a shared orthography used when writing titles for songs that I’ve seen in the north and south. You also see this orthography on public sheet music.
These are fascinating documents because they do give small hints of the private lives and individuality of people in a society that has been imagined to have lived in a lock-step fashion.
Yea, I was wondering about the orthography of the song titles. Thanks for pointing that out.
It is not really such great a surprise that the movie was popular among people in other Asian countries too, considering the fact that their contribution to world revolution is mentioned immediately before this famous “Ode to the motherland”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rffLLliKz9I
There are some girls dancing in striped skirts (Burmese, Lao or Tai people?), another group of girls in blue dresses and straw hats (Vietnam?), a third group of red skirted girls with drums in Korean dresses (North Korea) and finally a band of men with pipes (representing hill tribes?)…
It’s a really fascinating document. The beginning consists of familiar song lyrics. In the middle there are a few Tố Hữu poems. But most of the book looks like original poetry. Unfortunately, the low quality of the reproduction makes it really difficult to understand as much as I would like. Some of the poetry expresses feelings of sadness and longing that was otherwise forbidden from society at the time.
It will be a great day for scholarship when Vietnamese scholars get ahold of the originals to these documents (assuming they are extant somewhere) to give them detail cultural and historical analysis. I think the power of Đặng Thùy Trâm’s diary was that it gave an account of normal, mundane worries of a person under great stress, in an environment where many commit selfless acts (and others were as selfish as ever). But in any case, these diaries and journals give space to everyday feelings and it’s really welcome to have access to this.
Thanks for sharing this clip, JRD. And I agree. There is so much power in the imagery there. The building alone is impressive!!
And Tây Bụi, I think the extracts I just posted fit exactly with what you say here. As for originals being extant somewhere see the information below, but it looks like the CDEC probably destroyed materials after they filmed them.
And if the people at Texas Tech used an automated scanner to digitize from microfilm, then it’s possible that it did a bad job. I find that digitizing materials from microfilm often requires that you manually adjust each image to get good quality scans. So at the very least, it might be possible to get better images of the diaries that the CDEC filmed. As for the “several hundred” diaries that the Diary of an Infiltrator claims to be based on, my guess would be that those must be gone.
http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/resources/cdec/index.php
The Combined Document Exploitation Center was created by the US Army in 1966 to handle the increase in materials captured from North Vietnamese and Vietcong forces. A wide variety of types of documents were captured and kept, including diaries, letters, reports and photographs. CDEC summarized and translated documents that contained valuable intelligence. Many thousands of pages of non-useful materials were destroyed. Each kept document was assigned a log number consisting of the the two digit month, followed by the number in sequence of the document, and finally the two digit year. CDEC then filmed the files captured each day, in the order in which they were captured, on movie stock with a 8-bit coding on the soundtrack. This coding is the only real “index” to the CDEC collection. CDEC used a Filesearch machine to access the filmed items. In theory the Filesearch machine could be used to search the entire collection of filmed documents for requested subjects.
Since the end of the war, all the Filesearch machines have become either lost or unusable, making the 8-bit coding useless for researchers. Following the war, over 100 reels of the Filesearch film were transferred to the National Archives. The National Archives has since copied the materials onto 954 reels of 35mm microfilm. Reels 2-914 (there is no reel 1) contain the captured documents and summaries. Reels 915-955 include monthly CDEC bulletins. The collection was declassified in 1979, and copies of the entire microfilm collection are available to researchers at numerous libraries and archives around the country, including the Vietnam Center and Archive.
Digitization
In 2004 the Vietnam Center and Archive received a grant to purchase a high-speed microfilm scanner from the Houston Endowment. In September of that year work began on digitizing the 954 reel collection. This process took approximately 4 months and resulted in over 2.5 million Tiff images.