At home and abroad

Coexistence, via the Times.

Diary of North Vietnam Doctor Killed in U.S. Attack Makes War Real

lost wartime diary by a doctor in which she tells of love, loneliness and death on the Ho Chi Minh Trail has become a best seller in Vietnam, bringing the war alive for a new generation of readers.

The journey of the diary itself has given it a special postwar symbolism for people here. It was returned to the doctor's family just last year by a former American soldier who recovered it after she died on the battlefield in 1970.

The writer, Dang Thuy Tram, was killed at the age of 27 in an American assault after she had served in a war-zone clinic for more than three years. Among the intertwining passions she expressed were her longing for a lost lover and her longing to join the Communist Party. ...

"Just yesterday," she wrote at one point, "a badly wounded soldier 21 years old called out my name, hoping I could help him, but I could not, and my tears fell as I watched him die in my useless hands."

When the diary was serialized in newspapers last year, people cut out and saved the articles, passed them among their friends and read them aloud to one another. When it was published as a book, its print run was a sensational 300,000 or more in a country where books are generally published in small numbers, well under one-tenth that number. ...

The visits to Hanoi of the American soldier who saved her diary, Fred Whitehurst, have drawn wide attention and he has been welcomed almost as a member of the family by Dr. Tram's mother, Doan Ngoc Tram, 81, and three sisters.

In a telephone interview from North Carolina, Mr. Whitehurst, who is now a lawyer, said he had been a military interrogator whose job included sifting through captured documents and destroying those that were of no tactical value.

He said he had come to feel that his discovery of the diary linked him and Dr. Tram in a shared destiny, and he now calls her "my sister and my teacher."

"We were out there at the 55-gallon drum and burning documents," he said, describing that moment, "when over my left shoulder Nguyen Trung Hieu said, 'Don't burn this one, Fred, it already has fire in it.' "

The Times tags Fred the American soldier who saved her diary? He was going to burn it, until his Vietnamese translator stopped him!

It's astonishing how gracious Vietnam has been toward America in recent years. Somewhere around 3 million Vietnamese died in our 'stop the dominoes' war, yet they've now normalized relations with us and Secretary Rumsfeld on a recent trip even hailed them for their economic development and cooperation with the U.S.

And I doubt Senator John McCain during his years in a bamboo cage and later prison cell ever thought he'd live to see this:

The Vietnamese greeted their guest with a resplendent military honor guard, which played "The Star-Spangled Banner" before the talks began at the Defense Ministry.

We're lucky that, driven by economic need and a keen desire to keep up with the Chinas of the world, Vietnam has for the most part just tried to forgive and forget when it comes to the war.

Not sure we'd do the same in their place.

Under Oz, a Land of Weird Wonders

William Grimes: Tasmania is a funny place. Under the land down under, nearly off the map, it has been a synonym for isolation ever since the days when it was known as Van Diemen's Land. As Nicholas Shakespeare puts it in "In Tasmania," his rambling, whimsical portrait of the island, "it is like outer space on earth and invoked by those at the 'center' to stand for all that is far-flung, strange and unverifiable. ...

Who could blame Mr. Shakespeare, a British novelist, for taking up residence on the island? It offers breathtaking natural beauty, a pristine rain forest and clean air. "The air of Hobart Town is perfect air," wrote Anthony Trollope, whose ecstatic descriptions of Tasmania in 1873 inspired a mini-migration from Britain. He didn't know the half of it.

Tasmania's far northwest, cleansed by southerly winds, boasts the purest air ever recorded on the planet. All this, and fabulous Tasmanians like Errol Flynn and Merle Oberon. ...

Here and there Tasmanians come to the rescue. Some are contemporary, like the wondrous cricketer David Boon, also known as the Keg on Legs, who upheld a proud Tasmanian tradition when he managed to consume a record-breaking 52 cans of beer on a flight to London in 1989. Some, like Anthony Fenn Kemp, are long dead, and, intriguingly, related to the author.

Kemp, called by some Tasmanians the father of his country and by others "a great Ass," offers Mr. Shakespeare an irresistible point of entry into the history of Tasmania and, it turns out, of his own family. Kemp, a thoroughgoing rascal, was the business partner and brother-in-law of Mr. Shakespeare's great-great-great-grandfather, whom Kemp defrauded of about a million dollars in modern money, promising to send back precious cargoes from Tasmania. Instead, Kemp gained a stranglehold on the liquor trade and set up as a local lord, naming his estate Mount Vernon in honor of George Washington, whom he had visited during his radical youth.

Kemp was volatile, underhanded and universally despised. He was also incredibly lucky, always in hot water, but never burned. As Mr. Shakespeare riffles through the archives, he develops a sneaking fondness for this man, who, for completely selfish reasons, established the first white settlement on Tasmania.

"A monster and a rogue he may have been, and yet there was something satisfying about the repeated pattern of his life — one minute facing catastrophe, the next getting off scot free," Mr. Shakespeare writes.

Wonder what it'd have been like to be Boon's seatmate, or anywhere near Kemp. I think you'd have needed all that clean air to clear your head.

In the Body of an Accounting Professor, a Little Bit of the Mongol Hordes

The first American to be able to claim descent from Genghis Khan has been discovered. He is Thomas R. Robinson, an associate professor of accounting at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Fla.

Dr. Robinson's descent from Genghis Khan emerged in a roundabout way. The Y chromosome of that Mongol emperor was identified in 2003 by geneticists at the University of Oxford in England. Surveying the chromosomes of Asian men, they noticed a distinctive genetic signature in populations from Mongolia to Central Asia. Their common feature was that all but one lay within the borders of the former Mongol empire.

The geneticists concluded that the far-flung Y chromosome must have belonged to Genghis Khan and had become so widespread because of the vigor with which he and his sons labored in their harems, a fact noted by contemporary historians.

While the geneticists were collecting blood samples from the Oxus to Xanadu, Dr. Robinson was researching his family tree and had established that his great-great-grandfather, John Robinson, had emigrated from Cumbria in England to Illinois. Reaching a dead end, in 2003 he submitted a scraping of cells from the inside of his cheek to Oxford Ancestors. The company traces people's ancestry to specific regions of the world based on their Y chromosomes, which track paternal descent, or on their mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited through the female line.

"They told me my mother's side of the family came from France and Spain and my father's side probably originated in Central Europe," Dr. Robinson said in an interview yesterday.

Recently, Bryan Sykes, the geneticist who founded Oxford Ancestors, decided to look through his database of some 50,000 people to see if there were any anomalous matches with Genghis Khan's Y chromosome. "We get people wanting to know if they are related to Genghis Khan and they never are unless they come from China or Mongolia," he said yesterday in an interview from England.

Among his non-Asian customers was one hit: Dr. Robinson. "Someone rang him up and I think it came as a nice surprise," Dr. Sykes said. ...

Although Genghis Khan was the most spectacular progenitor, several other prolific patriarchs have since come to light, including Giocangga, the founder of the Manchu dynasty in China, and Niall of the Nine Hostages, an Irish king considered by some historians as more of a legend than real.

So much for the stereotype of Asian men as shy and retiring.

[6/22 update: The Times, in the perfectly-headlined article Falling From Genghis's Family Tree, says:

DNA tests have furnished a double surprise for Thomas R. Robinson, an associate professor of accounting at the University of Miami. The first was being told he was descended from Genghis Khan. The second was learning last week that the first test was wrong.

Mr. Robinson's own caution was one cause of this vicissitude. His temporary induction into the Mongol royal house began in April, when he received a call from Oxford Ancestors, an English DNA testing company he had asked in 2003 to test his Y chromosome. The company said that on a recent scan of its database Mr. Robinson's chromosome had emerged as having a genetic signature very close to Genghis Khan's.

Mr. Robinson's male ancestors were British. Perhaps because of that apparent incongruity — and the contrast between his profession and Genghis Khan's — the finding was reported in several newspapers, including The New York Times.

Then a movie company offered to fly Mr. Robinson out to Mongolia. But instead of sitting back and basking in the posthumous fame of his new ancestor as many people might have done, Mr. Robinson decided to get a second opinion before matters went any further.

He sought the view of Family Tree DNA of Houston, only to learn last week from its president, Bennett Greenspan, that he belonged to a different branch of the Y chromosome family tree from that of the Mongol emperor, and could not be descended from him.

I don't think an Asian American who thought he was descended from Attila the Hun would've gotten either media attention or the offer of a free flight to Hungary.]

She and Her Graduation Robe Had to Come a Long Way

It was not the usual gown seen at a college commencement ceremony.

Sarah L. Smith graduated from Hunter College yesterday wearing a handmade cloak of feathers and shells that had traveled more than 8,800 miles but almost couldn't get past inspection at Kennedy International Airport.

Ms. Smith, 32, is a Maori, a New Zealander whose Ngati Kuri tribe made the cloak to celebrate her achievements. She is, she said, the first Maori to graduate from a college in the City University system.

"You have to show you are a worthy recipient," she said, after explaining that her family had submitted a request to tribal officials to have the cloak made.

That was months ago, before 50 people had collected the materials to make it and before her parents had brought it from New Zealand to New York. ...

She lifted it out of its carrying case and pulled it over the robe, explaining that the tribe had sought permission from the New Zealand government to obtain the feathers of three species. Each figures in the story she said the cloak tells.

There are feathers from the kiwi to symbolize stability, she said — their feet are planted firmly on the ground because they do not fly.

There are the feathers from the kuaka, also known as the bar-tailed godwit, a migratory bird that goes from the Southern Hemisphere to the Northern, as she has already done. Then the kuaka returns to the Southern, as she intends to do.

And there are feathers from the native New Zealand pigeon.

Next season on Broadway: Sarah and Her Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat?

Soldier of Fashion

Whether you are a hawk or a dove or just a peacock, the trappings of war remain resiliently stylish and often go way beyond standard-issue camouflage. To anyone not fluent in the proud tongue of war arcana, the references embedded in our wardrobes are all but invisible, but that's where Bob Melet comes in. One of the world's most exclusive and knowledgeable vintage-clothing dealers, Melet always goes to the source. Which in this case is located in South Wing A of the Kentucky Exposition Center, across the parking lot from the Six Flags amusement park, in Louisville, Ky. Here, at the 14th annual Show of Shows, a three-day event as large as its name, hundreds of military enthusiasts buy and sell collectibles from every era, nation and war. And Melet is shopping. ...

Similarly captivating to him are the "thousand-stitch belts" for sale by a vendor wearing a shirt that reads "I buy Japanese militaria." The five-inch-wide strips of silk or cotton were worn by Japanese soldiers as symbols of protection; the women who made them were required to solicit 1,000 people to add one stitch each. "A thousand people's hands touched each one," Melet marvels. "You can call it whatever you want. I call it folk art." More likely, one of Melet's less sentimental clients will call it next season's wide belt.

If I came across one of those belts, I'd frame it and put it on the wall. How anybody could knowingly use it to prop up their pants is beyond me.

Photo of Dang Thuy Tram from her family via the Times.

Photo of the summit of Tasmania's Cradle Mountain by Hugh Watts for Lonely Planet Images via the Times.

Photo of Sarah L. Smith by Chang W. Lee in the Times.

Photo of senninbari found online.