Quan was tired and looked out the window. This was his third trip up to Dien Bien. The first two times he hadn’t accomplished what he wanted. This time, though, with meticulous planning and preparation, he was convinced that he would accomplish his mission.
Mr. Hung sat next to Quan in the bouncing Toyota. He was a veteran who had fought in the same unit as Binh, Quan’s brother, whose body we had come to this place to look for. Other people in the car included the driver, Quan’s younger sister Lan, her husband, and myself.
Quan was an atheist and didn’t believe in fortune-tellers or ghosts. He had faith only in friendship, witnesses, and hard evidence. The Province Military Headquarters had drawn a detailed map marking the location of his brother’s grave and given it to the family. Our trip relied upon it.
Around noon, we arrived at the peak of Pha Din Mountain. Thick fog covered the mountains, and some local people had set up shops along the side of the road selling wild game that smelled really good. Looking back down at the road we had just traveled, winding back and forth through the layers of fog, I recalled some lines in a poem by To Huu: “At Pha Din, she carries things on her shoulders, he transports goods by bicycle / At Lung Lo Pass, he chants, she sings.” The poem talked about the nation’s heroic years and the difficult time Quan’s brother and Mr. Hung had experienced. Now that our country was unified and socio-economic conditions were starting to improve, we needed to look for the bodies of fallen soldiers—it was the duty not only of their families but also of the entire society. Finding his brother’s body was Quan’s most important wish. He knew it would make his elderly parents happy, and it would give him peace of mind because he would finally be able to pay respects to his brother.
Quan and I worked together at the same company in Hanoi. We were colleagues. But unlike Quan, I myself was spiritual. I believed that, in the afterlife, the dead had the same kind of lives as the living. The dead had wishes and desires, just like the living. After all, our ancestors had always said, “The earthly life and the afterlife are similar.” I had already participated in finding and exhuming nearly twenty graves, of both civilians who had been killed in the war and fallen soldiers. Quan had asked me to accompany him because he believed that I would be able to help him with his mission.
Before we left, I had told Quan to prepare himself for dealing with the spiritual world on this trip. But he had insisted, “As long as I am sincere, I will be able to bring my brother’s remains back. Plus, this time we’re going with one of his old war friends, and we have the map of the grave.”
The area of the woods where Nguyen Thanh Binh, Quan’s brother, was apparently buried was located on a steep hillside. Beneath the hill was a creek that ran all the way to the border with Laos.
Quan stood quietly, studying the map and looking at the area in front of us. The forest here was thick, dense with green, leafy trees and vines. It would be difficult to find the grave.
Mr. Hung walked back and forth, measuring and doing mental calculations. Then he paused for a moment. His face looked agitated.
“Everything has changed,” he said finally. “This path”—he pointed at a thin sliver of dirt running up the hillside—“I don’t know if it’s the same path. There was a cement factory on that side of the lake before, but everything is gone now. This map won’t be much help. What should we do?”
I tried to stay calm and recalled my previous experiences with exhumation.
I told Quan, “Maybe we should go into the village and ask around. Maybe someone will know something.”
Quan seemed excited and agreed to my suggestion.
We met Ut, an older man who was one of the village leaders. Ut told us that back during the war, Company C3 had been stationed right next to the Na Hai Mountain village. There was a young soldier who went with his unit into the forest to collect bamboo for building huts, but he was swept away when Pam Not Creek flooded. Three days later, the other soldiers in the unit found his body and buried him on a hillside, which contained an old Montagnard cemetery, just as indicated on our map.
Quan was extremely happy about this information. Right away, he and his sister hired a group of strong laborers who had all the necessary tools to begin the work of digging up the grave site. They dug for a whole day and cleared away a section of the forest. By the end, everybody was exhausted. Quan and Mr. Hung ran back and forth anxiously.
Elderly Ut said, “It must’ve been in this area, because up there is the old Montagnard cemetery.” As is customary among the Montagnards, the earth directly above the graves had been flattened and no incense had been burned, so trees had grown everywhere.
It was already late in the afternoon at this point. Dim sunlight pierced the forest leaves, making everybody’s face look pale. I thought of a spiritual explanation for our failure: something hadn’t been done right on the trip up here in the white Toyota SUV, and that was why the gods and maybe even the spirit of Quan’s brother were not happy. That was why we found nothing.
I had certainly witnessed plenty of incredible incidents on trips like this before. For example, I’d seen the relatives of one fallen soldier who chose to stay at a luxury hotel, spent money extravagantly, and displayed no patience; they’d looked for the grave several times but always failed to find anything.
Perhaps Binh was testing us.
The next day
