The American War in Vietnam: The Remembrance of 300,000 Lost Souls

Embedded within the soil of Vietnam’s Quảng Trị province lies the shrapnel of deployed bombs, the poisons of chemical herbicides, and the fragments of human bone and flesh from a war that ended almost half a century ago. Resting silently beneath the earth, these are the remains of thousands of soldiers who though left on the battlefield, have not yet been forgotten by the Vietnamese people. 

It was during the Vietnam War–known in Vietnam as the American War–that this land was demarcated the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), an unofficial border between the warring states of North and South Vietnam. Among the bloodiest fronts in the conflict, the land in and around the DMZ was eviscerated by artillery barrages and bombing runs by U.S. forces in support of the Southern government. One U.S. soldier remarked upon the devastation that the land was comparable to the surface of the moon.

Crater-ridden Land West of Saigon

Photo Credit: Henri Huet

In years since, battlefields such as those in Quảng Trị have been dramatically reshaped. From the ruins of bomb craters and ash, residents have cultivated forests, farmlands, and rice paddies. Tourists–many of them American–are led on so-called “DMZ tours.” They’re shown to the sites of former U.S. military bases, now rusted and overgrown, while guides recount the battles of a war that’s become increasingly invisible in a recovered landscape. Where tanks used to track on dirt paths, freight trucks now travel on highways, Quảng Trị has become a commercial center integral to Vietnam’s postwar economic development. 

The state has played a formidable role in this restoration, not least in its construction of memorials, museums, and cemeteries. In virtually every locality–from cityscape to village–martyrs’ cemeteries lay rest to tens of thousands of Northern revolutionary soldiers. Their graves are adorned with burning incense, and offerings to the spirits of the dead, while obelisks stand near the center of these grounds inscribed with the refrain Tổ Quốc Ghi Công–The Fatherland Remembers Your Sacrifice. Their memory further lives on in statues that run along highways or occupy public spaces, in which the steely-eyed soldiers, rifles in hand, stare triumphantly into the distance. Perhaps gazing at an oncoming battle, they appear ready to die for a cause greater than themselves.

These monuments tell the story of a nation forged by the martyrdom of its revolutionary soldiers, and of a people who find solace in those soldiers’ noble sacrifice. This narrative, however, is incomplete, neglecting the victims of war who have been lost or forgotten in contemporary Vietnamese society. Furthermore, it overshadows the traumas of a war that run deep and continues to scar the Vietnamese identity. 

In those same killing fields upon which monuments now stand lie the unrecovered bodily remains of an estimated 300,000 Vietnamese soldiers. Many were thrown in mass graves where their bones lie to this day, while others, eviscerated by the horrors of napalm and artillery, have been absorbed into the earth. It is a tragedy ever more painful considering the Vietnamese tradition of funeral rites, in which the burial of the dead consummates the release of their soul to the “other world.” If this does not occur, the soul of the deceased remains on the earth as a “ghost” (bóng ma), wandering in a purgatory-like state until they receive their proper rites.

Burial of a South Vietnamese Soldier, Biên Hòa (now Bình An) Cemetery, 1975

Credit: Françoise Demulder

Thus, the families of these lost soldiers remain haunted by the thought of their loved ones spending eternity in torment. Their souls ceaselessly demand of the living to be found, buried, and made at peace. So it is fifty years later that these families work with social workers, veterans organizations, and governments in the dim hope that the remains of their brothers and fathers may be retrieved. 

As the enemy of victorious North Vietnam, South Vietnamese soldiers’ sacrifice remains unrecognized in a society that sees their former country as a “puppet administration”. They are referred to using the onerous moniker “the terrible ones.” Marginalized and forgotten, their cemeteries are in much the same state as they were at the war’s end. No incense burns at their graves. 

South Vietnamese émigrés–many of whom immigrated to the United States upon the fall of the Southern government–are now the memory-bearers for these forgotten souls. The Vietnamese American Foundation (VAF) currently leads efforts to renovate the Bình An Cemetery in Vietnam, in which resides the remains of an estimated 12,000 South Vietnamese soldiers. The VAF is also engaged in efforts to recover the remains of Southern soldiers who, like their revolutionary brethren, have not yet been properly accounted for. 

In a nation scarred by the deaths of potentially three million of its people, storytelling emerged as a powerful medium for representation and reconciliation. War stories carry themes of loss, intergenerational trauma, and disillusionment which are often hushed in more public settings. They allow the Vietnamese people to be the writers of their history in determining how we are to remember the American War in Vietnam. 

Speaking to many of these sorrows, Ta Duy Anh’s “The Most Beautiful Girl in the Village,” a popular short story among the Vietnamese people, follows the homefront life and descending tragedy of a North Vietnamese woman, Tuc. Beautiful and young, Tuc receives the letters of hundreds the soldiers enamored with her–yet only the letters of a commander named Kieu, who writes of the war with realistic horror and the expectation of his death, captures her heart. Hopelessly attached to him, she waits at post offices in the hopes that he might write, before going to wartime hospitals in a desperate attempt to find him there, lying with the wounded. As she does this, years pass and she grows ever older, until she’s no longer young and beautiful. Now, no man writes to her. The fate of Kieu is unknown and the promise of his love is broken, and for Tuc, the trauma of that loss is life-long.

Stories such as Tuc’s can speak to the varied traumas of war endured by the Vietnamese. By offering remembrance and representation, they inspire hope, telling the victims of war that their stories will not be forgotten. Fifty years later, the wounds of war in Vietnam are being healed as a space for loss has been created and nourished. 

Statue of a South Vietnamese Soldier in Biên Hòa (now Bình An) Cemetery, 1969

Photo Credit: George Lane