Vietnamese border guards have received new information from a resident of Laos that could help locate the remains of a female Vietnamese soldier who died during the war.
On July 27, the Quang Tri Provincial Border Guard Command said it had taken testimony from Ho Van Moi, 67, of Xa Dun Village in Sepon District, Savannakhet Province, Laos, regarding the location of a Vietnamese war grave.
Moi said a grave believed to belong to a female Vietnamese soldier lies on his family's farmland, about 6.2km from the Vietnam-Laos border.
He recalled that the area once contained eight graves of Vietnamese soldiers. Around 1972 or 1973, he personally witnessed the burial of a female soldier with long black hair.
Moi (left) and Lao residents at the site believed to contain the grave of a female Vietnamese soldier killed in Laos (Photo: Hoai Nam).
According to Moi, Vietnamese authorities later recovered the remains from seven of the graves. However, the woman's grave was buried beneath a large boulder that fell from the mountainside over the years, leaving it unrecovered.
The Quang Tri Provincial Border Guard Command said it had conducted an initial interview with Moi and would use the information to survey the site as part of efforts to locate and recover the remains.
Earlier, the border guards also received information from another Lao resident, Ho Van Vang, 83, of May Village in Sepon District, Savannakhet Province, about additional burial sites of Vietnamese soldiers who died in Laos.
Vang said his family's rice field contains the grave of a Vietnamese regular army soldier believed to have been killed between 1971 and 1972, as well as another location suspected to contain a mass grave.
He said the site originally contained eight graves. In 2009, he helped Vietnamese recovery teams locate and exhume the remains of seven identified soldiers.
At the time, however, his family was cultivating upland rice on the site and, because of local customs, he did not disclose the location of the remaining grave, which remains undisturbed.
A canteen used by a Vietnamese soldier, kept by the family of Ho Van Vang in Savannakhet Province, Laos (Photo: Hoai Nam).
Vang also identified a separate location on a nearby hillside, about 80 metres from the original burial site, where he believes a collapsed bunker may contain the remains of three to five Vietnamese soldiers.
He said the bunker, used as a shelter by Vietnamese troops in 1971 and 1972, was destroyed in a US air strike. He later found a Soviet-designed SKS rifle, a military canteen and the lid of an aluminium cooking pot at the site.