It is August 2022, and four Americans – all men in their 70s – disembark at a small airport outside Quy Nhon, a city of about half a million located on the south-central coast of Vietnam and the capital of the Binh Dinh province. With its lush landscapes and stunning tropical beaches, it is hard to accept that the region was the setting of fierce fighting during the Vietnam War, which ended 50 years ago this coming April.
The Americans exit the airport and are met by Major Dang Ha Thuy – a uniformed Vietnamese man, also elderly – who greets them warmly. Half a century ago, they would have exchanged gunfire; today, they exchange handshakes and smiles.
They have been drawn together by a shared mission. Thuy has spent 20 years searching for the missing remains of his North Vietnamese comrades lost in battle, and the Americans have come to help. Not only might these veterans know where some of the bodies can be found, but they are the ones who buried them.
The five board a shuttle along with a film crew from VTV4 – a Vietnamese television network facilitating and documenting the trip – which carries them all to Xuan Son Hill, a remote point in the Kim Son Valley. Fifty years ago, it was the site of a brutal battle at the United States Army’s Firebase Bird – and until recently, it was the location of a mass grave containing the remains of 60 people.
The battle at Firebase Bird
By 1966, Vietnam’s civil war had been raging for more than a decade, and US involvement had grown from a smattering of military advisers and special forces to a sprawling army of 400,000. While the violence would not peak for another two years, the casualty rate was already rising fast. Hundreds of US personnel were killed every month, and the Vietnamese losses were much worse. Before ending in 1975, about 58,000 Americans, 350,000 Laotians and Cambodians, and between 1-3 million Vietnamese were killed in the war.
On Christmas of 1966, a declared truce would suspend the carnage for 30 hours. 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 (NVA) and guerrilla forces. But when the truce expired in the early morning hours of December 27, the NVA attacked.
“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. Matteson only survived the initial onslaught due to a last-minute bunker switch – the soldier who took his place was killed instantly by a direct mortar strike. As the rounds rained down, he said, “It was the loudest thing I’ve ever heard in my life. I’ve never been able to hear right since.”
It did not take long for the attacking forces to overwhelm the hill and base, and soon, the American defenders only had their last remaining heavy gun. From this, they fired a last-ditch weapon called a “beehive”, which scattered a barrage of small projectiles in every direction and finally broke the attack.
After the firing died down, the smoke cleared and the sun rose, 27 Americans had been killed and 67 had been wounded. Exact figures for Vietnamese casualties are less certain, but official records number the dead at 267.
“The battlefield was covered with dead bodies,” said a tearful Matteson in the documentary. “It’s just horrible beyond belief.”
When I later spoke with Matteson, he went into greater detail about the hours following the battle.
“They dug a big pit with a small bulldozer”, he explained, “and then we were put on details to drag the enemy dead over there. I was on one of those details too. The aftermath of the thing was almost even worse than the battle itself. When the sun came up it was like a nightmare. It was like waking up inside a Hieronymus Bosch painting. It was really grim. I remember very clearly. The whole thing was etched in my mind”.
“Soldiers had dragged a lot of the dead NVA to a central point in the LZ [landing zone],” recalls survivor Steve Hassett. “And at that point, I began taking photographs.” These photos would come into play some 50 years later.
“It was like your worst nightmare,” said Matteson. “It didn’t look real, but it was. And for an 18-year-old kid to see stuff like that, it’s not good psychologically. It’s never left me.”
Though Matteson and Hassett soon returned home, the war raged for another six years. After it ended, life moved on. The jungle reclaimed the site cleared for Firebase Bird. And the Vietnamese families of those killed attacking it were left to wonder about the remains of their lost loved ones.
Decades passed.
A stolen statue comes full-circle
For Matteson, like so many veterans and civilians touched by the war, life in its wake was not easy. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) resulted in alcohol and drug abuse, which in turn ruined his marriage. Then, in 1991, Matteson got sober and began attending reunions with other veterans. Around that time, he found among his things a long-forgotten memento picked up during the war: a small Buddhist statue stolen from a pagoda.
“That statue was the start of everything,” Le Hoang Linh, the filmmaker behind Fragments of Memory, told Al Jazeera. It set in motion a chain of events that would eventually reveal a mass grave and bring together American and Vietnamese collaboration in the search for more.
According to Matteson, he had pilfered the statue not long before the battle at Bird.
“We were on what they call a ‘search-and-destroy’ mission in what they called a ‘pacified’ area,’” he told Al Jazeera, “which meant anything in there was the enemy, so it was a free-fire zone and you could shoot at anything that moved”.
Over the course of the mission, his unit came across a vacant Buddhist pagoda, which they proceeded to ransack. Matteson took the statue and carried it in his backpack through the remainder of his tour, even though it was made of heavy metal and only added to his burden. At the time, he thought it was a little Buddha, but he later learned it was in fact a Bodhisattva – an enlightened being who rejects paradise in favour of helping those suffering here on Earth.
When Matteson rediscovered the statue more than 20 years later, it brought forth contradictory feelings of guilt and calm. To sit before it gave him a sense of peace, though he harangued himself for its theft.
“I was always interested in Buddhism, even when I was young and in the army. It was all kind of mysterious to me back then,” he told Al Jazeera. “But then I got back and I got out of the army and I had a bad case of PTSD, and the longer I kept that thing, the more I thought what I did was really not right. I basically stole it, and if I ever got a chance, I swore that I would go back and try to return it.”
So in 2014, that is what he did — or at least tried. When Matteson arrived at the pagoda and explained his situation to one of its monks, he received an unexpected response.
“The monk kind of sat there looking at it and mulling it over in his mind for a minute or two,” said Matteson. “Then he said that because the pagoda had been destroyed twice since I was there, he thought it was my karma to keep the thing, because if I hadn’t taken it, it would have been destroyed along with the building when it was bombed out. So I carried this thing halfway around the world, and I ended up carrying it all the way back too. I still have it.”
Connecting the dots
Matteson had blogged online about his experiences in Vietnam for several years leading up to the visit, but what had been an occasional post now grew to a steady stream. Then, in 2016, he finally opened up about “the battle that changed me forever” in a blog post titled “Bad Night at LZ Bird”, which goes into gory detail.
“It was kind of part of the healing process,” he told Al Jazeera.
Unbeknown to Matteson, he was not the only one preoccupied with the ghosts of Xuan Son Hill. On the other side of the world, excavation teams in Vietnam had been searching for the remains of Vietnamese soldiers for years, to no avail.
“Right now, there are about 200,000 Vietnamese soldiers missing in action whose remains have not been found,” Linh explained. “The pain in Vietnamese families lingers on. Since the war ended less than 50 years ago, the pain is always there.”
In 2018, engineer and excavator Nguyen Xuan Thang chanced upon Matteson’s post describing the battle, which contained photos of the massacre taken by Steve Hassett.
“It was a Kodak Instamatic and I barely knew how to use it,” Hassett told Al Jazeera. Even so, the photos he captured with it proved instrumental to locating long-hidden graves.
Thang forwarded the post to Major Thuy, who had not participated in the battle but served nearby during the war and was now looking for the remains of comrades lost at Xuan Son. Thuy leveraged clues from the story and photos to narrow the focus of the search. By comparing the photos against the now-overgrown landscape of Xuan Son Hill, he was able to get a more general sense of where to look, but successive excavations proved fruitless as the search area was still impossibly vast. Thuy needed more information.
That is when they connected with Bob March, 77, an American veteran who produced YouTube videos about the Vietnam War. While he had not participated in the battle at Firebase Bird, he agreed to gather testimonies from soldiers who had.
“He was the one who weaved everything together,” said Linh.
Through these combined efforts, it was concluded that there must have been two mass graves associated with the battle, and the search was further focused. Then in March 2022, after three days of digging, local excavation teams unearthed a rubber sandal of the type used by NVA troops. The more they dug the more they found. A purse. A comb. A belt. A pen. And bones. Here was the first of the graves.
The second dig
In August 2022, when Matteson and Hassett, along with fellow Firebase Bird survivors Ivory Whitaker and Kin Lo, returned to Vietnam to help search for the second grave, the meeting with Major Thuy was a happy one, with handshakes and smiles all around.
“I want to help the families bring closure to their lives,” Whitaker explained in Fragments of Memory. “And that, in turn, will help me in some way – knowing that we did something good after all of this bad.”
Major Thuy brought them directly from the airport to Xuan Son Hill, which, according to Matteson, was unrecognisable.
“When I was there during the war, it was just a denuded hilltop. There were a few bushes and such, but there were almost no trees at all on the actual firebase,” Matteson told Al Jazeera. “And then when I went back, the whole thing was a forest of acacia trees. They grow them for building materials and fuel.”
Hassett had never considered returning to Vietnam until the opportunity arose. He had previously been sceptical of the idea of visiting as some kind of war tourist, but then the US Institute for Peace (USIP) offered to cosponsor the mission along with VTV4, covering the travel costs and facilitating the trip logistics. The USIP later screened the documentary that emerged from the effort at its annual War Legacies and Peace Dialogue.
“The opportunity to actually do something concrete – that’s what appealed to me,” Hassett explained.
He, too, noticed how 50 years had changed Xuan Son Hill.
“When we left,” he said, “that battle had been turned into a free-fire zone. All the people had been forced out and it was basically depopulated. Nobody was able to go back in until after 1975. It had been sprayed with Agent Orange.”
But the people returned and rebuilt.
“It really struck me how much it had recovered,” said Hassett, adding that he had expected that the countryside would be “poisoned” and “permanently devastated”.
Now it was time to get down to the
