Seeking Closure for Vietnam’s ‘Lost Souls’

HANOI — Pham Kim Ky says the word in a whisper. Mat tich. Missing. She covers her mouth with a small, delicate hand, as though just its mention has brought, even after 25 years, a stab of pain to a mother’s heart. She pauses to regain her composure.

“Look here,” she says at last, opening her photo album to a grainy portrait of Ho Viet Dung, her son, fine-featured and boyishly handsome, then 17 and headed into what is called here the American War, from which he would not return.

“How can I rest until I have found Dung?” asks Ky, 68, a woman of great beauty with gray hair pulled back into a bun and skin as smooth as paper. “He was my eldest. Such a clever, kind boy. To think of him lying unknown, alone, in a distant field of killing is more than I can bear.”

For years, Ky has been among the thousands of mothers, fathers and wives whose lives are devoted to crisscrossing the battlefields of Vietnam, searching out witnesses, military archives and unmarked graves, desperate for clues that will help them locate the remains of loved ones still officially listed as missing in action. Their search for closure is the final legacy of a war most Vietnamese here scarcely even speak of anymore.

Although largely overshadowed here and abroad by the attention paid to the United States’ search for its 1,578 MIAs in Southeast Asia, Vietnam’s unaccounted-for soldiers number 300,000. The fate of these “lost wandering souls,” as the unclaimed dead are known in Vietnamese culture, is becoming an increasingly prominent national issue, with veterans groups asking why so much has been made of America’s missing and so little of Vietnam’s.

“Dear My Beloved Family,” Dung, then a 20-year-old corporal, wrote his parents and younger brother, Thang, from the Central Highlands in January 1972. “I am very well, and you don’t have to be concerned about me. One and a half years on the front has made me strong, and I’ve gotten used to the hardships here. I suffered malaria, but my health is good now, maybe better than any time since I was in Hanoi.”

Dung--his name means “brave” in Vietnamese--had been born, in 1952, into a family steeped in nationalistic struggle.

His grandfather was a member of the resistance against the French in the 1930s and spent six years in France’s notorious prison on Con Dao island. His father was severely wounded fighting at Dien Bien Phu, the battle that ended France’s colonial rule in Vietnam. His uncle served as an army doctor during the American War.

“It seems we were at war forever,” his mother says.

In 1969, the year that Richard Nixon was inaugurated as U.S. president and Ho Chi Minh, the head of state of North Vietnam, died, Dung volunteered for the North Vietnamese army.

He was sent into the mountains for six months’ training with his two best friends, who had joined up the same day.

His mother speaks of her son’s lovely singing voice, his good looks that caught the eye of every girl, his kindness to his little brother and cousins, and her voice drops again to a whisper.

She pushes aside a glass of tea and reaches into her purse.

First she withdraws a pair of baby shoes, wrapped in plastic. Then a tiny silk shirt and a child’s pillow embroidered with the name Viet Dung. She has carried them with her ever since her son joined the mat tich of Dak To.

Twenty-five years, she sighs: Dung has been dead longer than he lived.

The night before Dung was to leave for the southern front, the entire family gathered at their small home in Hanoi. They ate a dinner of rice and spinach and gave Dung small presents that they hoped would be useful: a needle to patch his uniform, cigarettes, candy, a towel and two pairs of warm socks. Later, his father sat with him and for the first time related his wartime experiences at Dien Bien Phu.

“Dear Mother and Father,” Dung wrote from the town of Dak To in March 1972. “I am preparing to go to the battlefield. Please, don’t worry. My friends and comrades, we love each other. We are living together as a family, sharing our happiness and hardships, and that makes me feel better.”

Ky heard no more from her son.

“I had a mother’s feeling something terrible was about to happen,” she said, and when she learned the news of the bloody battle for Dak To, she knew it had.

Then, for three years, there was silence, broken at last, along with her heart, after the capital of South Vietnam, Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), was captured by North Vietnamese troops.

In a ritual repeated perhaps a million times in the Communist North during the war, there was a knock at her door. On her steps stood a group from the local People’s Committee, and the document they handed her began: “The fatherland will never forget your son.”

The sliver of hope she had clung to slipped away like the last rays of a sunset.

Finding Dung’s remains--even finding out where and how he had died, and where he was buried--would, she knew, be a formidable undertaking.

The North Vietnamese army, in which untold millions in this country fought, had no computerized records. Tens of thousands of its soldiers were buried in graves that bore only the word liet sy (martyr) or in mass graves. Battlefields had been napalmed; terrain had been transformed by Agent Orange; bodies had been stripped of wallets, identification and family pictures by GIs seeking souvenirs. Commanders and colleagues who might have remembered Ky’s boy were dead.

In Vietnamese tradition, the dead are exhumed three years after burial. Their bones are washed, then reinterred, so that the soul may forever live in peace. Relatives tend to the grave on each anniversary of their loved one’s death. The 15th day of the seventh lunar month is reserved for those whose death day or graves are unknown.

Since these souls cannot be taken care of properly, they are said to be destined to wander aimlessly, forever lost. “Pity . . . the souls of those lost thousands,” the poet Nguyen Du wrote. “They are the ones for whom no incense burns.”

With Dung’s soul wandering somewhere in the Truong Son mountains of Kon Tum province, Ky began her quest in Hanoi and the outlying areas.

For months, sitting behind her surviving son on his motor scooter, she rolled down crowded alleys and country roads, seeking out veterans of Dak To. She and Thang would get home at dusk each day, and her husband, Trinh, his right leg disabled by war injuries, would hobble to the door and ask: “Any news? Anything at all?”

From her inquiries, Ky learned that Dung’s unit, the Baza Brigade, had been the lead element in an attack on the Dak To airfield. Dung had been killed on April 21, 1972. She learned of no heroic deeds, no stirring last words--just vague details of one ordinary soldier’s death.

“It was a beginning,” she said. “I knew I had to be patient.”

The veterans she talked to described the terrain and drew her maps, and with her husband she set off one rainy February morning in 1976 for Dak To, nearly 1,000 miles south, on the first of four long trips to the southern battlefields.

She wept, knowing she was retracing the very steps her son had taken.

During those four treks that covered many months and spanned 21 years and often depleted the family’s $100 a month in pensions, Ky and her husband questioned army commanders and villagers. They scoured battlefields, climbed mountains, struggled through jungle so thick that the soldiers escorting them had to hack a pathway with machetes.

Along the way, they dug up 45 unmarked graves, hoping one would yield the clues to Dung’s fate.

When Ky would declare, “We must dig here!” the soldiers would ask: “But mother! How could you recognize your son even if we find something? Bones are only bones.”

Ky would reply: “I will recognize Dung by his teeth. He had such beautiful teeth.”

Her search goes on.

Despite limited resources, the government, the army and local people’s committees provide considerable support for grieving families like Ky’s.

Neighborhood groups and veterans organizations raise money to finance parents’ trips to battlefields. Army commanders provide transportation, escorts and access to records to facilitate site inspections. Local newspapers and television stations regularly show pictures of MIAs and ask anyone with knowledge of the soldiers’ deaths to contact the families involved.

In private conversations, Vietnamese officials express the belief that the U.S. government has a moral obligation to become involved in the search for Vietnamese MIAs--by providing forensics experts, for example--but that seems unlikely to happen.

But over the past few years, a bond of kinship has taken root between veterans groups in Vietnam and the United States. As a result, GIs have turned over to the Vietnamese Embassy in Washington and to their organizations thousands of souvenirs taken from Vietnamese bodies. They have passed on maps of mass burial sites. In hundreds of cases, the information has provided the link that families have needed to end the wandering of their lost loved ones.

“Yes, I have been discouraged to search so long and still not have the answer,” Ky said. “There were times I thought I could not climb another mountain or dig up another grave. But I found the strength. Just as any mother would find the strength.”

At each battlefield she visited, Ky scooped a handful of dirt and pebbles into a plastic bag.

“It made me feel close to Dung, knowing maybe he had stepped across that very ground,” she said. Not long ago, Ky mixed all the dirt together and placed it in a ceramic vase.

She buried the vase in a handsome grave in the family plot in Hanoi. She placed fruit and incense and a picture of Dung on the granite headstone.

She prays there often, and when she returns to her home, neighbors say, passersby can hear the lullaby she sings:

I see you in the shadow of Truong Son mountain,

In the blooming of flowers and the singing of birds.

This is my lullaby with all my love for you.

I’m always with you until the end of my life.