Addressing a dialogue on war legacies in Southeast Asia organized by the Stimson Center in Washington, D.C on October 21, Vietnamese Ambassador to the U.S. Nguyen Quoc Dung briefed representatives of U.S. government agencies, non-governmental organizations and experts on Viet Nam’s efforts to address war consequences, while calling for international support and cooperation in urgent humanitarian work.
He said Viet Nam has consistently cooperated fully and in good faith with the U.S. in seeking information on missing U.S. servicemen and remained committed to this humanitarian mission. Viet Nam is also pursuing the national 500-day campaign, launched in April, to search for, collect and identify the remains of fallen Vietnamese soldiers.
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Vietnamese Ambassador to the U.S. Nguyen Quoc Dung (second, right) attends a dialogue on war legacies in Southeast Asia organized by the Stimson Center in Washington, D.C on October 21. |
Under the campaign, Viet Nam has mobilized unprecedented resources, aiming to recover around 7,000 sets of remains. Efforts are also being intensified to match DNA samples through a centralized database of martyrs’ relatives, and clear unexploded ordnance left over from the war in key former battlefields.
The diplomat said that time is becoming critical in the search for fallen soldiers as former battlefields have increasingly been transformed into residential areas, roads, farms and industrial zones, erasing physical traces. Meanwhile, veterans and witnesses are ageing, narrowing opportunities to collect firsthand accounts. Achieving the campaign’s goals requires combining Viet Nam’s field records and oral histories with U.S. wartime archives, forensic anthropology and advanced DNA technology.
Dung said Vietnamese experts will partner with those from Texas Tech University to return to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)’s facility in College Park, Maryland, in the coming weeks to continue examine roughly 2-3 million pages of wartime archives that may contain clues to fallen Vietnamese soldiers, including coordinates in military reports, temporary burial sites, troop movements, old maps and aerial photographs.
He noted that universities, veterans, historians, archivists and technology experts could all make meaningful contributions. Artificial intelligence (AI) could help search and cross-reference millions of pages of documents, but could not replace human memory. Technology must therefore be combined with eyewitness accounts, and action is needed now.
Reflecting on past progress, the ambassador affirmed that cooperation in addressing war legacies had played a pivotal role in transforming Viet Nam-U.S. relations into a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, the diplomat said, adding that the most profound results were reflected in children being able to attend school safely, people with disabilities gaining greater independence, and families finally welcoming loved ones home after decades of waiting.
Earlier, on October 19, Dung discussed the objectives and significance of the campaign and Viet Nam’s cooperation with U.S. partners with lecturers and students from the University of Georgia in Washington, D.C.
The university is an active partner in training on remote-sensing technologies to locate suspected burial sites, environmental DNA research, field sampling methods, and the analysis of commingled remains. It is also helping advance the establishment of a joint research and working group for a DNA laboratory in Hanoi.
According to the diplomat, Viet Nam has been working closely with U.S. partners to examine NARA archives, including clues to mass graves. The U.S.’s cooperation in sharing military operational data and providing DNA identification technologies was not only an expression of responsibility but also a profound gesture of reconciliation, demonstrating how the two countries could overcome historical legacies through mutual respect and empathy.
Source: VNA