Beyond Borders: Reaching out to Vietnam

Steve Maxner shakes hands with Tran Hoang. The Vietnam Center is the first U.S. institution to sign such an agreement, which will improve understanding and awareness between two countries formerly divided by war.

Representatives from the Texas Tech Vietnam Center formalized Friday (Aug. 17) a commitment to exchange information with the State Records and Archives Department of Vietnam (SRADV), Vietnam’s national archive, creating the first such agreement between the socialist government’s official archive and a U.S. institution.

Tran Hoang, director general of the SRADV, signed the memorandum, which outlines a professional exchange of information between the SRADV and the Vietnam Center. This will include not only the sharing of documents, but more direct interaction to improve archiving efforts and the creation of collaborative document exhibitions. 

“We see this as a monumental milestone for our project,” said Steve Maxner, director of the Vietnam Center. “ The Vietnam Center has been working with the State Records and Archives Department of Vietnam since 2004 to create this memorandum, which will improve understanding and awareness between these two countries and help us reconcile our past so that we can build a brighter future.”

Eventually the agreement could result in the SRADV, the official archive of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, making documents and materials related to the Vietnam War available in digital form to researchers outside the country. These documents include first-hand accounts and books written by residents inside Vietnam that have not been accessible until now. 

The Vietnam Center is the first U.S. institution to sign such an agreement with the SRADV, Maxner said.

The signing helps cap a three-day visit by a delegation of representatives who visited Lubbock to learn about the Vietnam Center’s digital archiving. 

To help begin the exchange of information, Hoang provided Maxner with service records of North Vietnamese physician Dang Thuy Tram, whose diaries chronicling the 27-year-old physician’s experiences treating North Vietnamese soldiers have become an international phenomenon.

The Vietnam Center already houses the diaries, but Maxner said this provides a richer level of information as to the details of her service. Vietnam Center representatives, in turn, gave delegation members a disk with photographs of the diaries’ pages as well as a preview copy of “Last Night I Dreamed of Peace: The Diary of Dang Thuy Tram,” the English-language translation of the diaries.

Founded in 1989, the Texas Tech Vietnam Center houses one of the largest collections of Vietnam-era related documents in the world. Only the National Archives has more material on the Vietnam War.