A search team carries a liberation soldier's remains from a mass grave at Lê Thị Riêng Park, HCM City, on July 15. — VNA/VNS Photo

Compiled by Lê Việt Dũng

For 13 days, excavation teams worked through a single trench beneath Lê Thị Riêng Park in HCM City, carefully uncovering the remains of soldiers killed nearly six decades ago.

By July 18, they had recovered 100 sets of human remains – many believed to belong to South Việt Nam Liberation soldiers killed during the 1968 Tết Offensive and buried en masse in what was then the City Cemetery.

The excavation has become the most visible symbol of an ambitious 500-day national campaign to recover and identify the country's missing war dead. In its first four months, the campaign had already recovered 1,421 sets of remains nationwide.

The effort was launched on April 2 at Quảng Trị Citadel, one of the bloodiest battlegrounds, though its clock formally runs from March 15 to the end of July 2027 – a deadline chosen to coincide with the 80th anniversary of War Invalids and Martyrs' Day, the national commemoration of wounded veterans and the fallen.

Its targets are specific: recover roughly 7,000 sets of remains; take bone samples from about 230,000 unidentified graves in war cemeteries; complete DNA analysis on some 18,000 of those samples; build a national genetic database of the dead soldiers' relatives; and accelerate clearing unexploded ordnance from priority zones along the northern border.

The ledger so far

The arithmetic behind the campaign explains its urgency. More than 1.2 million soldiers were killed in the wars of the last century and are recognised by the State as war martyrs, but just over 1 million sets of remains have been gathered into cemeteries over the decades.

Roughly 175,000 have never been found, and, separately, nearly 300,000 graves hold remains recovered long ago but never named.

Graves of unidentified fallen soldiers at a war cemetery in the southern province of Đồng Tháp. — VNA/VNS Photo

Against that ledger, the campaign's running totals, as reported by the national steering committee overseeing the campaign on July 18, amounted to 1,421 sets of remains recovered since mid-March; 397 were found inside Việt Nam, 174 in Laos and 850 in Cambodia, where dedicated military recovery units known as K teams have searched former battlefields for decades.

Two such teams from the southern province of An Giang have brought back 6,871 sets since 2001, including 170 in last year's dry season.

Sampling teams had taken samples from over 63,400 unidentified graves, almost 70 per cent of which yielded material viable for testing. They have collected 93,464 DNA samples from relatives, 53,036 of which had already been analysed and entered into the database.

A team exhumes an unidentified soldier's grave in the central province of Quảng Trị to collect a DNA sample for identification, on June 14. — VNA/VNS Photo

Demining units had cleared 8,462 of a planned 22,725 hectares, including four-fifths of the priority zone at Vị Xuyên – historically in Hà Giang Province, now part of Tuyên Quang following the 2025 administrative merger – the scene of ferocious border war in the 1980s.

The domestic tally is being assembled site by site, in terrain that ranges from limestone karst to urban parkland.

In Đà Nẵng on July 14, the remains of five liberation soldiers, recovered from a collapsed mountain cave 57 years after an air strike by US-Sài Gòn forces, were reburied with honours.

In the neighbouring Quảng Ngãi Province, where 13,656 of the province's 37,689 war graves hold unidentified remains, a verified street-side site has yielded three sets so far, with excavation planned through the end of 2026.

The manpower is on a commensurate scale: 32 recovery teams totalling more than 1,500 soldiers, 360 demining units with some 5,000 personnel and 1,300 devices, and more than 300 DNA sampling teams of roughly 3,500 staff members.

A wartime landmine, unearthed in Vị Xuyên, Tuyên Quang, is defused by demining crews on June 17. — VNA/VNS Photo

Every bone sample they take is logged in a tracking system built by Viettel, designed to keep millions of specimens traceable from graveside to laboratory without mix-ups.

Archives and genetic markers

Modern methods are where the campaign departs most sharply from past practice. Where earlier searches leaned on veterans' memories, teams now cross-reference wartime coordinates against the terrain, sweep sites with ground-penetrating radar and convene formal verification panels before breaking ground.

The HCM City site was located in this way: architect Nguyễn Xuân Thắng spent eight years triangulating three wartime press photographs against old water towers and satellite imagery, while Robert Connor, an American veteran who once guarded Biên Hòa Air Base – and whose chance discovery on Google Earth in 2016 led to a mass grave of some 150 liberation fighters there – supplied corroborating detail.

The archival strand runs deeper still: a Texas Tech University project that manages 2.7 million pages of documents captured on wartime battlefields, with an estimated 30 million more pages of US records still being mined, handed the city burial maps, a decoded dossier and three soldiers' personal effects on July 9.

Identification rests on genetics. A next-generation sequencing method known as NGS-SNP – developed by the national science academy with support from the International Commission on Missing Persons and US development assistance – reads more than 5,000 genetic markers and can match DNA fragments as short as 50 to 70 base pairs to relatives four generations removed, on both parental lines.

In a pilot at a war cemetery in the northern province of Cao Bằng, it lifted the share of bones yielding usable DNA from roughly a fifth under the old methods to more than 80 per cent, produced viable profiles from 54 of 58 sets of remains, and delivered two confirmed identifications in its first round.

The matching side is being built at speed. A national Gene Bank for relatives – established in 2024 under the public security ministry – collected more than 51,000 samples by the end of its first year of operation in mid-2025.

A month-long national drive launched at the end of June aims to gather 250,000 more samples, rising to 300,000 by year's end.

Thanh Hóa Province was the first to report full completion; Hà Tĩnh collected more than 16,300 samples in five days; Huế processed 2,866 across nine sites in three days; and Cần Thơ launched a three-site push on July 18 to gather 2,700 more, with shuttle vans laid on for elderly relatives.

As of June 24, DNA had formally restored names to 25 of the fallen.

A relative of a fallen soldier in the central province of Hà Tĩnh gives a DNA sample to help identify his remains, on July 3. — VNA/VNS Photo

A pending name

That last figure illustrates the gap between the two stages of the process. Of the thousands of bone samples collected, the Military Forensic Institute had completed testing on 210 of the 10,129 it had received by July 18.

Recovery has outpaced identification so far, a pattern officials attribute to the scale and complexity of DNA analysis rather than to any single bottleneck.

Deputy Prime Minister Phạm Thị Thanh Trà, who chairs the steering committee overseeing the campaign, has likened the work to something "harder than finding a needle at the bottom of the sea", and warned that living memory of burial sites is fading and will be far scarcer within five to seven years.

A prime ministerial dispatch on July 8 conceded that results, though accelerating, remained far short of the campaign's end goals and ordered provinces and cities to quicken the pace.

Lê Thị Riêng Park in HCM City distils the entire campaign – its scale, methods and human cost – into a single trench.

The trench, cut on July 6, now runs some 30 metres long and three metres deep, worked by five teams from the surrounding military region, one of them raised specially for the task. Officials estimate the site may hold some 900 fallen soldiers across three burial trenches, and only the first had been opened by July 18.

Party General Secretary and State President Tô Lâm drapes the national flag over a casket holding a liberation soldier's remains, recovered at Lê Thị Riêng Park, on July 17. — VNA/VNS Photo

Prime Minister Lê Minh Hưng opened the dig with a pledge to bring the martyrs home "at any cost" in early July.

Less than two weeks later, Party General Secretary and State President Tô Lâm inspected the site, urging teams to combine DNA analysis with artificial intelligence and geophysical technology, and calling for the model to be replicated nationwide.

The site had produced one tentative name by mid-July – Huỳnh Văn Quên, a liberation fighter identified from a unit transfer order still legible after 58 years in a plastic sleeve.

His fiancée, Nguyễn Thị Lệ, now 79, never married after he failed to return from the 1968 Offensive. On July 18, authorities in the southern province of Tây Ninh formally recognised her as his widow, with a monthly survivor's allowance payable from August 1.

DNA confirmation, matched against samples from his two younger brothers, is expected by early August.

The campaign's target is 7,000 sets of remains. The harder number lies behind it: how many of those still waiting for a name will live long enough to hear one.— VNS