The US soldiers returning to Vietnam in search of mass graves

As part of the healing process, American veterans work with their former enemies to locate the burial sites of their missing comrades, 50 years after the war. For American soldiers holed up at Firebase Bird – a small helicopter landing zone and staging base – it was a much-needed opportunity for rest amid the “search and destroy” mission that had them slogging through the jungles of Binh Dinh in search of the North Vietnamese Army and guerrilla forces. “We were totally surprised,” reported Spencer Matteson half a century later in Fragments of Memory, a 2023 VTV4-produced documentary about the battle and search for its resulting mass graves. “It was pouring down rain, but most of them don’t even realise that it was raining at all, because they were much more concerned about things other than the weather.” But while “most people involved in a major battle like LZ Bird have pretty vivid memories”, March explained the difficulty of piecing together events from multiple perspectives amidst the chaos of battle. The search continues The excavations at Xuan Son Hill were not the first efforts to locate the country’s long-hidden mass graves, but they were the first to bring together Vietnamese and American veterans.