Hội An is a UNESCO World Heritage Site located in Quảng Nam province in Central Việt Nam. In the daylight, Hội An dazzles with architectural riches reflecting its history as a trading port and cultural hub: well-preserved wooden Chinese shophouses, French colonial buildings, traditional Vietnamese tube houses, and Japanese covered bridges. By night, the town is illuminated with colorful lanterns crafted from bamboo, adorned with silk, and fashioned into elaborate shapes, like bánh ú– a traditional Vietnamese glutinous rice cake. These lanterns serve as symbols of reverence for Gods and ancestors, while also representing wishes for luck, prosperity, and peace.
Off the bustling main street Lý Thường Kiệt, nestled away in an alley just wide enough for a car, sits Nhà Lao Hội An (Hội An Prison). The building is reclusive and unassuming amid the charming city of its namesake. The prison in this serene and ancient town bore witness to some of the most intense fighting in the region’s history.
On July 14, 1967 the nightly symphony of crickets outside the prison was interrupted by pops of gunfire.
“Comrades, we are advancing to the prison to liberate you. Everyone move to the back of the cells and lie down; we will blast the doors with explosives.”
The locked gate of Hội An Prison Relic. At 5PM the prison closes as the local considers it is the time in which the dead rises. Photo by author.
The prison’s iron door was blown, and the detainees rushed out, directed to run toward nearby liberated areas in the Điện Bàn district. There, their fellow comrades and local civilians were waiting to assist their escape with boats, laden with baskets of sweet potatoes and cassava. A helicopter circling overhead rained bullets down on the escaping prisoners and the liberating soldiers. How many remain beneath the blooming wildflowers on the empty prison grounds where I now stand? Is my grandfather buried here?
50 Years Later: War Legacies Live On
The Vietnam-American War originated as a colonial war against the French, which then got picked up by America as part of the Cold War to stop the spread of Communism (Kwon, 2008). The war created a deep division in both the US (anti-war and nationalist groups) and Vietnam (the North vs. the South) (Nguyen, 2016). Those who fought and died for the North were recognized and categorized as martyrs, or “liệt sĩ.” Five decades after the war, 200,000 Vietnamese liệt sĩ remains are still missing, and 300,000 are unidentified. An estimated 200,000 to 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers were killed during the war, though the exact number of South Vietnamese missing or unaccounted is not known (Võ, 2024) and the current Vietnamese state, against whom they died fighting, does not recognize them. Faced with this staggering number of unidentified remains and families searching for their loved ones, the Vietnamese government turned to DNA technologies to identify their war dead.
In order to understand the cultural and political process by which the remains of unknown martyrs are identified, I conducted fieldwork at the Center of DNA Identification (CDI)– a government-funded forensic laboratory, in the capital city of Hà Nội. Only the remains of the North Vietnamese liệt sĩ were included in this identification project, despite attempts by some American politicians to persuade the Vietnamese government otherwise. Determining whose remains belong to the nation– and whose do not– is a key arena in which Vietnam articulates its postcolonial sovereignty.
Other scholars have studied how the shift toward DNA forensics has diminished the roles of families and activists (Smith, 2017), priviliged identification of the dead over justice for the living (García-Deister & Smith, 2020), and reinforced a narrative of American exceptional care for its war dead (Wagner, 2019). My research explores how the emphasis on DNA technologies has allowed Vietnam and the United States—once adversaries—to move beyond their historical political divisions, particularly in relation to the treatment of Northern and Southern Vietnamese soldiers. CDI’s government-funded forensic laboratory provides a site to study how the divisions between martyrs and non-martyrs (i.e. North and South Vietnamese war dead) are maintained or contested on a scientific level.
Tasting Death in a Forensic Laboratory
I followed and observed CDI researchers as they worked with bone remains, from cleaning and grinding to extracting DNA and quantifying the results. Taking fragments of tooth, tibia, and femur, the researchers cleaned and sanded the outer surface before cutting them into smaller specimens weighing around 2 grams each.
I had mentally prepared to witness bones being sliced and broken apart. And yet no one warned me of the intense smell that emanated from the bones as the electric blade sliced through them. One scientist described it as burnt protein, similar to the smell of singed hair. The char was secondary, however, to a more dominant note: mildew, reminiscent of wet clothes left for days. Many of these fallen soldiers had been buried under the damp soil of tropical forests for decades. This dewy essence of the earth blended with the burnt traces of the bone dust and lingered in the back of my throat for days afterward. Huy, the lead technician of the bone cutting process, had become so accustomed to the dust getting stuck in his mouth that the taste of death no longer bothered him.
The next steps included cleaning the specimens with bleach, drying them overnight, and grinding them into powder under the smashing power of a stainless-steel grinder. The researchers then transferred this powder to another lab to carry out “total demineralization.” This process completely breaks down the cellular materials and mineral structures, releasing all the DNA from the bones into a clear solution, called lysate. After an overnight incubation at 56 degrees Celsius, some powder remnants were left at the bottom of the tube.
This leftover powder sparked debates among the researchers: Some believed it was acceptable to discard given that no traces of DNA remained and, therefore, neither did any personhood of the fallen soldiers. Others kept the leftover powder out of respect for the remains. The director of the lab at the time insisted on not discarding any bone powder of the war dead, particularly not disposing of it in the trash. He reminded staff that, beyond scientific procedures, they must also uphold the “nhân văn,” or humanity, and maintain the “bản sắc,” or essence, of the Vietnamese. For this director and some Vietnamese technicians, the Vietnamese essence is rooted in sacred beliefs or obligations, in which the personhood of the war dead does not end at the moment of death but continues on even after DNA is fully broken down.
This sacred obligation to the dead allows the Vietnamese forensic scientists and technicians to think beyond the dichotomies of martyr/non-martyr, or North/South Vietnamese. A high-level scientist at CDI once confided in me that there are many commingled remains between North and South Vietnamese or between Vietnamese and American soldiers, especially due to bodies getting tangled up in bombs and explosions. To this high-level scientist, these past political differences did not matter. They expressed to me their desire to identify everyone, meaning remains of not just the martyrs, but also the Southern Vietnamese soldiers and American soldiers. To my scientist interlocutors, every mother who has lost her children in the war deserves to know where their remains lie.
A Floating Head
I had come to Hội An partly as tourist and partly as ethnographer, searching for where my ancestor had gone missing. I made two attempts to visit the prison, now converted into a war museum.
The first visit was with my partner who drove us there on a rented scooter. By the time we arrived at the cluster of residences which surround the prison at 17:15, it had already closed for the day. Exploring the surrounding area on our own, we were startled by the presence of a prison guard, clad in a green uniform, kneeling down and training his gun on us with intense focus. Upon closer inspection, we realized that he was a statue, part of the museum’s effort to show the prison in its historical context.
Lifelike statue of a prison guard by the entrance gives eerie effects of transporting visitors back in time. (Photo credit: Michael de Zwart)
While my partner marveled at the lifelike statue, I chatted with a nearby resident whose house bordered the prison. He instantly knew of the 1967 raid that had killed my grandfather, a night that claimed many lives as the helicopter rained gunfire on the escaping prisoners. Many remains are still buried in mass graves on the premises. When I asked if he was ever scared to live near such a tragic site, he answered sternly: “Everyone who lives in this alley is very brave.”
I returned the following afternoon at 15:15, alone. The gate was open and I was immediately greeted by the groundskeeper. After learning about my grandfather’s story, he took me to the main building at the heart of the prison grounds.
Originally built by the French colonists in 1947 and later expanded by what many Vietnamese consider a puppet regime of the U.S., Hội An Prison detained and tortured Communist civilians and soldiers until the end of the war in 1975. At its height, it housed over 1,000 prisoners.
As the museum’s sole visitor, the groundskeeper gave me a private tour of the cells where more than 100 prisoners were held in spaces no larger than 300 square feet with minimal food, water, and ventilation. The unbearable heat of Quảng Nam summer is a form of torture itself, let alone crammed in among a hundred other bodies.
He then took me to the xà lim (solitary confinement) area where top political prisoners or soldiers had been confined and tortured. He urged me to come inside the solitary cell to observe closely the restricted space. I didn’t have the courage to walk too close to the statues. But even from afar I could make out another lifelike statue of a guard, this time beating a prisoner. There were other guard statues placed at the entrance as well as on the roof of some of the buildings. We were surrounded by Vietnamese statues.
“So were these prisoner guards all Vietnamese back then?” I asked.
“Well, yes, they were all Vietnamese. Even the Americans couldn’t have fathomed the cruelty the Vietnamese inflicted on our own people” the groundskeeper reflected.
As we strolled back to the main yard and looked out over the grassy green landscape of the prison lot where the female cells once stood. When asked if he ever comes to the prison in the evening, the groundskeeper responded:
“No, of course not. During a roof renovation, the workers heard cries and screams from the cell at night. Many spirits are still lingering here.”
Not long after the statement, while I was gazing into the horizon, I noticed a figure—a head with dark black hair—floating along the roofline.
I chose to ignore it. However, the groundskeeper promptly drew my attention to it, “Did you see the head floating by on the roof?”
I was too stunned to answer.
“It’s the neighbor from next door, climbing up to fix something. If I hadn’t spotted him, I would have dashed out of that gate so quickly.”
“Are you certain it was the neighbor? I only caught a glimpse of a head,” I questioned.
“I’m positive. Otherwise, I would have bolted already,” the groundskeeper affirmed. We both burst into laughter, relieved that this haunting had an logical explanation.
Before leaving, I lit three incense sticks for the local deities and the fallen souls at the prison, one specially for my grandfather.
This post was curated by Contributing Editor Aaron Neiman.
References
García-Deister, V., & Smith, L. A. (2020). Migrant flows and necro-sovereignty: the itineraries of bodies, samples, and data across the US-Mexico borderlands. BioSocieties, 15(3), 420-437.Kwon, H. (2008). Ghosts of war in Vietnam (Vol. 27). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Nguyen, V. T. (2016). Nothing ever dies: Vietnam and the memory of war. Harvard University Press.Smith, L. A. (2017). The missing, the martyred and the disappeared: Global networks, technical intensification and the end of human rights genetics. Social Studies of Science, 47(3), 398-416.Võ, A. T. D. (2023). Accounting for the stateless: In search of the Republic of Vietnam war dead. Human Remains and Violence: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 9(2), 76-95.Wagner, S. E. (2019). What remains: bringing America’s missing home from the Vietnam War. Harvard University Press.
