Vietnam enlists US researchers to find mass graves from war

Ho Chi Minh City is working with researchers from Texas Tech University to find seven suspected mass graves from the war, using captured documents once taken from the dead.

Major General Nguyen Thanh Trung, political commissar of the Ho Chi Minh City High Command, announced the effort on June 18 at a working session with the research group behind the Vietnam Wartime Accounting Initiative (VWAI), a U.S. government-funded program whose archival work is led by Texas Tech's Vietnam Center and Sam Johnson Vietnam Archive.

It came days after a Texas Tech delegation met Deputy Prime Minister Pham Thi Thanh Tra, who leads the national search effort, in Hanoi.

The seven suspected sites were all battlefields between 1966 and 1970, Trung said, and the exact grave locations are still unknown.

In what is now Chanh Phu Hoa Ward, formerly part of Binh Duong Province, wartime records indicate 154 soldiers were buried in two B-52 bomb craters after the Hon Da Lan campaign of Jan. 21, 1966.

In Bong Trang Commune, once part of Ba Ria-Vung Tau Province, 21 soldiers were laid in two mass graves by Australian troops following the Lang Ca Thi battle on Dec. 30, 1970.

At Tan Son Nhat airport, scene of some of the fiercest fighting of the 1968 Tet Offensive, searchers long ago located two burial trenches. In 1995 they excavated one and recovered 182 sets of remains. The second has never been found.

Other suspected graves lie at Go May, west of the Binh Loi Bridge, and in Xa Bang Commune.

The VWAI research group, led by Dr. Stephen Maxner (fourth from left), and the Ho Chi Minh City High Command survey a site at Le Thi Rieng Park in the city believed to contain three mass burial trenches. Photo by VnExpress/Dinh Van

Much of the team's material comes from the Combined Document Exploitation Center, or CDEC, a vast collection of letters, diaries, identity papers and other items that U.S. and Republic of Vietnam forces gathered from the backpacks and bodies of fallen soldiers and filed away after battles. The Vietnam Center and Archive at Texas Tech now holds more than 261,000 of those records.

Dr. Stephen Maxner, who directs the center and heads the VWAI research group, said the documents are being matched against imagery, maps and combat records to pinpoint where men were buried.

Ta Thu Phong, the research team's leader, said the files fall into three groups: those that map burial sites, often with diagrams attached, those that name the dead without saying where they lie, and personal keepsakes.

The keepsakes are the hardest to set aside. "Some letters still bear bloodstains, letters soldiers wrote to wives and children they had not seen for years. They are deeply moving," Phong said.

The search is part of a national "500-day campaign" running to July 27, 2027, which aims to recover some 7,000 sets of remains and expand DNA identification.

"We very much hope for support in tapping data from the Republic of Vietnam era as well as from U.S. and Australian veterans, to piece together information and pinpoint the mass burial sites," Trung said.

He said the city will set up a dedicated task force and work more closely with the researchers, while Phong proposed a formal mechanism for sharing and cross-checking records with local authorities.