Vietnam: A Race Against Time to Find Troops' Remains

Is Time Running Out to Find Soldiers' Remains in Vietnam?

Nguyen Dang Thanh, 70, walks among graves of unidentified Vietnam War soldiers at a cemetery in the outskirts of Dong Ha, Vietnam, in 2005. Hoang Dinh Nam / AFP / Getty Images
May 13, 2011 - Grief hangs over the frail face of Bui Thi Me, a communist intellectual contemplating the deaths of three of her sons. For a year in the late 1960s, she had no idea that two of her missing children had perished in central Vietnam while fighting U.S. troops. "It took the government a long time to deliver the news in 1969," says the 83-year-old, a retired propagandist and Social Affairs Minister in Ho Chi Minh City. "I almost gave up on my search for them. The army only found scattered parts of their bodies."

Today, Me stores the ashes of one son in an urn atop a cabinet in her home. Another son went unaccounted for during combat in central Vietnam, and when a U.S. bomb detonated near her third son's grave site, his remains were destroyed. Though she says she's found a sense of peace, the deaths of three of her four sons have left lingering wounds, in no small part because she doesn't have all of their remains in a culture that places importance on them. She and other Vietnamese and American mothers are now elderly, she argues, leaving scant time to find the 300,000 Vietnamese soldiers and the 1,700 American ones still missing from the Vietnam War. "American and Vietnamese mothers have both suffered, and finding them will ease that suffering that has happened for so long," she says. {continued}