Living in a house nestled in a rubber forest in Long Ha Commune of Phu Rieng District under Binh Phuoc Province, located in southern Vietnam, Nguyen Thi Ket, 101, wakes up early every morning and does push-ups, her favorite exercise.

“My mother loves doing physical exercise. She does it twice a day to improve her health,” Nguyen Thi Hien, who is the elderly woman’s daughter-in-law, said happily.

After spending 30 minutes warming up, she does 30 press-ups every morning, but she shows no shortness of breath or exhaustion.

She is seldom sick. 

After doing exercise, she washes her face and has breakfast, and then goes to her garden to take care of a chicken flock and a grapefruit tree.

“My mother frequently tells us that she remains healthy and strong, so she needs no help to hold her while she is walking,” Hien, 68, said.

“Last year, she often wore a helmet and stood in front of the house to ask someone for a lift to visit relatives and acquaintances.

“They asked her how she came back, she just smiled and replied that she would return home by herself.”

Ket said, “I live with my oldest son and his wife. They go to work in cashew farms every day, while I stay at home to cook, feed chickens, and do housework.”

Once Ket scared her family.

“In 2019, my mother slept in a hammock for two days and two nights, frightening us a lot, and we took her to hospital. After medical check-ups, doctors concluded she was suffering no illnesses,” Hien recounted.

After such a long sleep, Hien and other family members looked after her more carefully.

On a weekend, her children and grandchildren gathered in the home. Thuy, Ket’s granddaughter, happily massaged her grandmother’s hands and back, while Ket was caressing her grandchild’s cheeks.

Their laughs warmed the whole house.

Nguyen Thi Thanh Bang, Ket’s 56-year-old daughter, and her son returned home to visit their mother on the weekend.

Bang boasted that she had bought a fish to cook tasty dishes for her mother.

Bang said that though her mother is old, she always follows the etiquette of polite behavior.

She often tells the adult children moral stories, Bang recounted.

A role model for family members

One of many things Ket’s family members admire about her is her excellent memory.

Telling stories about her life, Ket said that she moved to Binh Phuoc Province for work in 1978 from a northern locality.

On deserted land, she and her husband built a house, grew rice, and landed several jobs to nurture eight children.

“A few years later, my husband was ill and passed away, so I had to bear the burden and became the breadwinner,” she recalled.

She still remembers all stories clearly, while her adult children admitted that they could no longer recollect the details.

“My mother can remember all the wedding presents in our wedding parties, and put a name to any of her grandchildren and relatives,” Bang said.

Her children and grandchildren see Ket as their role model, and they are following her behavior, lifestyle, and moderate exercise.

“My mother is warm-hearted. She often gives money to her neighbor, who is a victim of Agent Orange, when he visits her home though she has little money,” her daughter said.

Regardless of her age, she takes a bath by herself every day without any help from her family members. 

Furthermore, she made banh tet, a glutinous rice cake, to celebrate the 2022 Lunar New Year holiday.

Her family members are often delighted with her recitations.

“Last year marked her 100th birthday, so she was presented with a strip of red brocade fabric by the state president. She was highly excited,” Bang said.

“My mother got the strip of fabric made into two ao dai [a Vietnamese traditional costume] and one ao ba ba [a traditional garment of people in the southern region],” she added.

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Nguyen Van Thien, a war veteran from Tien Hai District in Thai Binh Province, northern Vietnam was astonished when the U.S. Department of Defense presented him with a diary he had lost 60 years prior.

In a very special moment during U.S. President Joe Biden’s two-day visit to Vietnam, which wrapped up on Monday, Thien finally received the notebook he believed to be lost forever. 

The diary’s long journey home began about a year ago when Thien received a phone call asking if he was the writer of a war diary. 

Immediately, Thien realized the diary in question was a notebook he had lost during a military operation called ‘Junction City’ in early 1967.

Now, decades later, the diary is a stark reminder of the fierce war and the camaraderie he shared with his fellow soldiers.

Thien is the only son of a martyr from Vietnam’s revolution against France. As such, he was exempt from conscription during the American war in Vietnam. 

However, when the war began to escalate in 1965, then-17-year-old Thien felt he could not sit back and watch as his fellow countrymen served in his stead. 

He then began sending in application after application until authorities finally allowed him to join the war effort.

Several months later, after spending considerable time training with a 443-strong air defense battalion from Thai Binh, Thien traveled south for battle. 

It was then, amongst the heart-breaking loses of heroic soldiers on the battlefield, that Thien began noting down the things he saw and the ways he felt.

According to Thien, losing the diary felt like losing a piece of himself and the threads holding him to some of the most profound, agonizing, and glorious memories of his youth. 

During those days, there were strict regulations on what information soldiers could record about the war. 

As such, Thien included no personal information in the diary and, therefore, believed he would never see it again.

Years later, when a group of Vietnamese researchers at Harvard University involved in a ‘Unseen Legacies of the Vietnam War’ project was researching, cataloguing, and sharing information about the memories of Vietnamese veterans during the war, they came across Thien’s diary.

Flipping through the pages, they stumbled upon a note Thien had written grieving a fallen comrade.

“February 13, or the 24th day of the first lunar month, [is] the most sorrowful day as my brother, my comrade, laid down his life while on duty. Nguyen Van Xuan, [in] Dong Quach Village, Nam Ha Commune, Tien Hai, Thai Binh,” Thien wrote at the time.

In early 1965, Thien’s battalion made a stop in the Central Highlands province of Kon Tum on their way south. Some soldiers took charge of gathering rice for the battalion, including Thien’s close friend, Nguyen Van Xuan.

Unfortunately, Xuan caught malaria while gathering rice and passed away. Xuan left three remembrances for Thien and asked Thien to transfer his watch to his wife in their hometown.

Xuan’s death marked the first fallen soldier in Thien’s battalion.

According to Dr. Nguyen Hai, director of the Unseen Legacies of the Vietnam War project, it was Thien’s note about Xuan that gave the researchers hope that they might find the diary’s rightful owner.

Researchers in Dr. Hai’s group later visited Xuan’s family, hoping they could shed some light on who the owner of the diary might have been.

During the meeting, Xuan’s daughter shared that she believed the author of the diary to be Thien. 

She added that Thien had returned to Thai Binh in 1972 to be treated for wartime injuries and had brought Xuan’s watch with him to place on his altar, where it still sits today.

Recognized as a martyr after nearly 6 decades

Among the documents and exhibits that the U.S. Department of Defense handed over to Vietnam during President Biden’s visit to the Southeast Asian country was a report by Dr. Hai’s team regarding the fate of 563 Vietnamese martyrs.

Vietnam goes to extraordinary lengths to search for the remains of martyrs in order to recognize their sacrifice to the country. 

One such martyr was Dang Thanh Tuan from An Duc Commune, Hoai An District, Binh Dinh Province, south-central Vietnam, who was recognized as a martyr in late 2022, more than 50 years after his death.

Tuan was a southern student studying in the north. He wrote letters with blood begging to join the army in 1964 and was accepted in 1965.

In early 1966, he left home for the south. His family never heard from him again despite spending nearly 50 years working with agencies to hunt down information.

Thanks to the support of many people, they found documents that the U.S. military confiscated during the war in Vietnam on the Internet, including the list of Vietnamese martyrs and their death notices, consisting of Dang Thanh Tuan.

At the beginning of 2020, Tuan’s family wrote to the U.S. Embassy in Hanoi asking for help to verify the information.

Dr. Hai and his team eventually dug up considerable information on Tuan and, on September 8, 2022, the Vietnamese prime minister signed a decision to recognize Tuan and eight others in Hanoi and nothern Hai Duong Province as martyrs.

“We never skip a single piece of paper because we understand that a piece of paper could decide the destiny of a soldier or family,” Hai said.

The Unseen Legacies of the Vietnam War project is part of a memorandum of understanding signed in July 2021 between the Vietnamese Ministry of National Defense and the U.S. Department of Defense.

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