How US veterans are helping locate Vietnam's mass graves

Decades after the Vietnam War, US soldiers are returning to the country but on a very different mission – to help their former adversaries find the burial sites of their missing comrades.

Where veterans from US and Vietnam once "exchanged gunfire", now they "exchange handshakes and smiles", said Al Jazeera, but time is running out for more discoveries.

Firebase Bird

In 2022, Major Dang Ha Thuy, who fought for North Vietnam, greeted four American veterans at the airport and they travelled to the Kim Son Valley and the site of the 1966 battle at Firebase Bird.

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The notorious fighting erupted straight after a Christmas truce, when North Vietnamese forces launched a "ferocious assault", said Firstpost. The fighting claimed the lives of 27 Americans and 267 Vietnamese soldiers.

For Spencer Matteson, the memories of a battlefield "covered with dead bodies" are still painful. But with his help, Vietnamese excavation teams found the remains of approximately 60 soldiers, who were buried properly at the Tang Bạt Ho Town Martyrs’ Cemetery, in a "solemn ceremony" attended by state leaders and thousands of veterans.

Since then, teams have located the remains of around 600 people across eight mass graves, but they have also begun to face difficulties. Matteson and three other US veterans have returned to Vietnam but they "ran into the stumbling block that is the human memory", said Al Jazeera, because "half a century is plenty of time for memories to fade".

So time is "running out" as the number of living Vietnam War veterans "dwindles", said First Post. There's an "upper limit", said Bob March, a 77-year-old US veteran, and in 10 years time, it's "going to be very difficult to find many Vietnam veterans". The teams in the US and Vietnam are asking for more help from their respective governments.

Grief and relief

For the families of those whose remains have been discovered there has been "a great outpouring of grief and relief", said Al Jazeera. There can also be an opportunity for healing for US soldiers, said Matteson, particularly "the ones that are still suffering from PTSD".

But one of his colleagues has his own description for the emotions of the process. "I wouldn't call it closure", said Steve Hassett. "My daughter called it 'closing the circle.' That's a good description."

John Bryant, a former Australian soldier who has also returned to Vietnam to find the bodies of Vietnamese soldiers he helped kill and bury, told ABC News he was "happy" that he had "found them" and has been "able to give them back to Vietnam and their relatives".

Meanwhile, the work continues. When Bob Connor, who helped pioneer the search for mass graves of North Vietnamese soldiers, saw "the red, tearful eyes" of a woman who was reunited with her loved one after 49 years, he "knew his work was not finished", said the United States Institute of Peace.