A Visit to Binh an Military Cemetery. This was a site started in 1965 with a design capacity of 30,000. As shown on Wikipedia, there are roughly 12,000 graves or sites at this former Bien Hoa military Cemetery. My previous attempts to visit this military cemetery were not successful for various reasons.
My tour guide, a former sergeant in ARVN was an interpreter for both American and Vietnamese units. He was incarcerated in a “Re-education” Camp after the final battles of the war here for some seven years. He has little respect for the regime that has violated so much of Vietnam’s heritage and culture and restrictions on those who once opposed them.
What I remember during our support years here that the cemetery was a short drive from the Gia Dinh District of Saigon out past the 519th MI Battalion and 525th MI Group compounds over the old Saigon Bridge and along Route National 1 towards Bien Hoa. Traffic was split between military and civilian vehicles along animal drawn carts, shops, and pedestrians. The moped’s predecessor, a motorbike was in abundance as well. What was experienced today was one traffic jam after another on a multi-lane road, mostly commercial trucks, and mopeds. Flyovers and elevated lanes are under construction for miles. About two kilometers past a theme park, there is a turnoff onto a two-lane track that takes one past vehicle repair facilities and traditional Vietnamese Cemeteries. The statue of the seated ARVN Soldier that brought one back the sense of the fatigue and loss of battle was missing, destroyed by the new rulers in 1975.
We stopped to buy some bottled water as it was a bit warm and incense sticks to burn in tribute to those who rested with their fellow soldiers who paid that ultimate sacrifice. A rusty blue painted gate stood ajar and our Toyota SUV drove in. The immediate impression was that of disrepair. Unlike the trim and well-maintained North Vietnamese military cemeteries one sees throughout the central provinces south of the old DMZ area. There was noticeable overgrowth of vegetation in several areas. although there were some small rubbish fires burning after cleanup was done.
Several security guards were in attendance. The senior one, an apparent sergeant equivalent requested passports but settled on my military ID and driver’s license. I had to fill out a page in their visitor’s register book.
The workers had what looked like a pretty good chicken farm operation off the entrance to augment their government pay.
After lighting the incense sticks, the tour guide honored the fallen soldiers in the traditional matter then we both placed an incense stick on graves that contained the remains of mostly ARVN soldiers from infantry units. Perhaps 80 percent of the graves with memorial plaques indicated the date of death as connected with the North’s Easter Offensive in 1972.
When asked, the security chief replied that there was no registry of graves nor did anyone know exactly how many fallen soldiers were buried there. There was destruction of many gravesites during 1975. Some of the new local government officials made money on the side by selling the bones back to relatives for reburial. Outcry stopped this but one can see some of those gravesites. The government put the cemetery off-limits and under guard until 2006. 
Now, the government allows families to restore gravesites for prices ranging from 3,000,000 Dong to around 20,000,000 Dong. There was an on-site crew that were preparing some marble slabs for grave coverings. I have this suspicion that the government found this as an ongoing source of revenue.
As we drove around the cemetery, it was apparent that all memorial writings were absent at the center monument and there has been work at restoring some earlier damage.
A feeling of sadness was lightened when we came across a large grouping of gravesites with artificial memorial flowers at the sites. Most these graves belonged to members of the 8th Parachute Battalion, ARVN Airborne, and the flowers were provided through funds collected by Vietnamese-American War Veterans in the U.S. honoring their former colleagues.
There are some stories around about the spirits that roam in this area. One is of a Marine Battalion aboard trucks in route to Vung Tau being saved from an ambush near this cemetery site. Visit http://vnafmamn.com/BienHoa_cemetery75.html. For this and other stories and better photographs than mine.
To me, this visit was another lesson in how governments and special interests attempt to rewrite history. One side calls themselves heroes and labels the others as puppets. One’s enemy can become one’s ally when honor is maintained. Along with revenge type programs, the early denigration of one’s own people held up social and economic progress for years.
I became interested in visiting military cemeteries while touring both WWI and WWII battlefields in Europe and was a volunteer escorting veteran groups to visit their fallen comrades. There is a lot of history recorded at the sites and facts rarely read in books. Escorting visitors to old Berlin cemeteries during the Cold War revealed the real character of the regimes on both sides of the wall. Items such as the largest per capita group to serve in the German Army of WWI were Jewish. http://www.jg-berlin.org/en/judaism/cemeteries/weissensee.html. Of course, history is even being rewritten in our country, disregarding the sacrifices made by those who died fighting for a cause and flag they believed in. History should be recorded as factually as possible as it might prevent future recurrences of events better avoided. However right or wrong the cause might be thought of today, at the time, it was reality. Removal and destruction of the symbols and record won’t change history.
The character of a people can be found on how well former enemy soldiers who sacrificed their lives for what they believed in are cared for. Arlington National Cemetery is an example and its website has the details on how this occurred. http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/csa-mem.htm.
A good short article on American Military Cemeteries overseas can be found at http://edition.cnn.com/2012/11/10/travel/american-cemeteries-overseas/index.html.
And one American Cemetery that was forgotten by the U.S. Government and maintained for many years by volunteer veterans such as VFW Post 2485 in Angeles City, Republic of the Philippines and supporting corporations, go to http://cvcra.org/content-history/CVC_History.pdf. or https://www.facebook.com/cvcra. Their efforts were finally successful in legislation that placed the Clark Veterans Cemetery under the care of the American Battle Monuments Commission.
Lou
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