Word: soldier
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...Educated and from a well-off northern family, Tram volunteered for battlefield duty on the southern front at the tender age of 24, just after graduating from medical school. She spent three and a half years operating a clandestine field clinic for communist soldiers in the jungles of Quang Ngai, in what was then South Vietnam, and began keeping a diary shortly after arrival. "Operated on one case of appendicitis with inadequate anesthesia," reads her first entry, dated April 8, 1968. "I had only a few meager vials of Novocain to give the soldier, but he never groaned once...
...Though she was to become quickly battle-hardened, Tram retained a girlish, almost naive idealism at her core, and her romanticized musings give the diaries a dimension besides the unending carnage of the front line. She pines for a lost love - a communist soldier she names only as "M," but he has vowed to be married only to the cause. She fends off seemingly endless declarations of love from patients. She also records passionate but platonic friendships with at least three younger soldiers, and an older Communist Party cadre, but is dismayed at the gossip these chaste relationships stir...
...Insofar as those characteristics include literary sensibilities, then that's no bad thing. Tram's observations of the war's everyday agonies are powerful and haunting. On July 29, 1969, she describes the flesh falling off a 20-year-old soldier brought to her after being burned by a U.S. phosphorus bomb: "His smiling, joyful black eyes have been reduced to two little holes - the yellowish eyelids are cooked. The reeking burn of phosphorus smoke still rises from his body." Later, she rages against the American enemy that has killed so many of her friends: "Hatred is bruising my liver...
...movie has turned Neville into a soldier-scientist (and former TIME cover boy), seeking a cure for the virus in the basement of the lavish Washington Square townhouse he has turned into a fortress (and where, don't ask me why, he sleeps in the bathtub, with his dog). So now he's Jonas Salk, and Jesus too, ready to give his life so that others may live again. It's in the last half-hour that I Am Legend imports new elements that both propel the story to its explosive climax and just aren't as compelling...
...we’re in a village where Action-Movie Asians are screaming and dying. But then we see those big, stubby fingers, fondling a tiny crucifix. And then come words that every voiceover-man would kill to say: “He is a legend of war. A soldier without a country. You know his name. And you know...” Pause. “...what he’s capable of.” So, it turns out that Rambo, like Rocky, ain’t dead yet. He’s living somewhere humid and foreign...