A Ho Chi Minh City park likely conceals a mass grave of about 900 soldiers killed in the 1968 Tet Offensive, officials concluded on June 8 after an eight-year forensic search. The site is Le Thi Rieng Park, an eight-hectare green space in Hoa Hung Ward built in 1983 over the former Do Thanh Cemetery, also known as the Chi Hoa-Cho Quan Cemetery. That the city’s wartime authorities buried large numbers of dead there after the 1968 fighting has long been local lore. What was never established, until now, was where the soldiers lay and how many. At a verification workshop on June 8, Colonel Bui Yen Tinh, deputy head of the Operations Department under the General Staff of the Vietnam People’s Army, said the evidence pointed to three burial trenches of between 500 and 1,200 sq.m, lying behind the park’s traditional house between a children’s playground and a fishing lake. Together with declassified files, he said, they could hold about 900 soldiers. Teams plan to probe the best-documented trench, roughly 500 sq.m, before widening the search. The breakthrough came from architect Nguyen Xuan Thang, who has helped locate martyrs’ graves before using aerial imagery. Over eight years his team tracked down three photographs of a mass burial, then fixed their position by layering declassified U.S. reconnaissance satellite images from 1968 to 1972, archived by the U.S. Geological Survey, against French military aerial photos from 1951, commercial satellite imagery from Maxar and Airbus, and a run of old Saigon city maps. A water tower and rows of two-story houses in the neighboring Bac Hai quarter served as fixed reference points, narrowing the moment the photographs were taken to between 8 and 10 a.m. on Feb. 12, 1968. « We spent eight years studying the images to pinpoint the mass burial trenches with the smallest possible margin of error, to help the authorities search for the martyrs’ remains, » Thang said. Residents who came forward to the Ho Chi Minh City High Command over the past week described the same scene. Nguyen Thanh Phuoc, 70, who grew up nearby, remembered the cemetery manager spreading DDT over the bodies as they went into the ground. « Mr. Muoi Bi, the cemetery manager at the time, said these were the bodies of commando fighters who died in the assault on the radio station and the U.S. Embassy, » Phuoc recalled, describing corpses that were bloated and, in places, burned. Some of the dead still wore belts of AK ammunition. Phan Van Mua, 63, a park guard since 1987, said workers digging a lake about two meters deep once turned up human bones, clothing, rubber sandals and a grenade, later moved to a nearby pagoda. The men were among the urban commandos who fanned out across Saigon when the Tet Offensive opened on Jan. 31, 1968, striking the U.S. Embassy, the Saigon radio station and other targets in fighting that became a turning point in the Vietnam War. Deputy Prime Minister Pham Thi Thanh Tra, who chaired the June 8 workshop, said the findings showed a strong likelihood that cadres, soldiers and civilians who died in the offensive lay at the park, and ordered the city to finish its field survey and begin excavation before June 18 while protecting the park and any relics. Major General Tran Chi Tam, deputy political commissar of Military Zone 7, said the dig, set for late June, would move slowly and scientifically because nearly six decades have reshaped the ground. The city will bring in the University of Natural Sciences for ground-penetrating radar and stratigraphic analysis. The search is one piece of a national « 500-day » campaign running to July 27, 2027, the 80th anniversary of Vietnam’s War Invalids and Martyrs Day, which aims to recover some 7,000 sets of remains and run DNA tests on about 18,000 samples. The country still counts roughly 175,000 fallen soldiers whose remains have never been found and more than 300,000 graves whose occupants remain nameless. Among the witnesses at the June 8 workshop was Robert Ambrose Connor, an 80-year-old former U.S. Air Force serviceman once stationed at Bien Hoa Air Base, who with other American veterans has handed Vietnamese authorities more than 20 sets of coordinates for suspected wartime burial sites. By Dinh Van – VnExpress.net – June 8, 2026
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