Đồng Tháp residents aid search for soldiers’ remains

In Đồng Tháp Province, Vietnam, residents are assisting the K91 Team of the Đồng Tháp Military Command in locating the remains of soldiers killed in past wars.

Several landowners, including Lê Thị Đón and Võ Văn Vinh, volunteered their land, durian and sapodilla orchards, for excavation, even sacrificing valuable crops. Đón requested the search after learning her family’s land once held a temporary cemetery, and her father had previously found remains while farming.

The K91 Team used machinery and manual digging to carefully excavate the land, finding 77 sets of remains in Đón’s orchard and 16 in Vinh’s. The team prioritised careful removal of soil and roots to avoid damaging remains, sometimes switching from machinery to hand digging when signs of burial were found. Local residents like Đặng Văn Hai, who remembered the land being used as a cemetery decades ago, provided valuable historical context and helped guide the search.

The recovered remains are being sent for DNA testing, requiring samples from both the remains and relatives of missing soldiers. As of October 4, Đồng Tháp province had collected nearly 5,000 DNA samples from relatives and exhumed remains from over 12,000 graves as part of a nationwide campaign to locate and identify fallen soldiers. The province is also working with Cambodian authorities to recover remains of Vietnamese soldiers who died in Cambodia during wartime.