Ngo Thi Thuy Hang has voluntarily spent the years of her youth searching for the tombs of fallen Vietnamese soldiers for more than a decade.

Ngo Thi Thuy Hang is talking with a relative of a fallen soldier. 

All began on a day when the then student, Nguyen Van Tuan, was watching a TV documentary about a veteran called Le Van Cam in the northern province of Thai Binh. The veteran had been cycling everywhere to look for information about his fellow combatants who lost their lives on the battlefield. A question occurred to Tuan “Why not use information technology to look for the tombs of fallen soldiers?”

Tuan the discussed the idea with his close friends at the Hanoi College of Sciences. The group decided to develop a website called Nhan Tim Dong Doi (Inquiries for My Brothers-in-Arms) and after only three months, all the design and coding for the website were completed.

On the day of its launch, the eight young men were as anxious as if they were going to welcome the birth of their first child. After the website went online, they began to look for documents and made a list of fallen soldiers whose tombs were yet to be found.

One day, they got an email from a young woman named Ngo Thi Thuy Hang, asking them to look for the tomb of her elder uncle who died in the resistance war against the French. Hang added that if they ever needed help with editing the content of the website, just let her know. Later when Tuan asked Hang for help, the young woman quit her editing job at a fashion magazine in Ho Chi Minh City to become the administrator of the Nhan Tim Dong Doi website without any pay.

Thanks to Hang, the website content has become clearer and more detailed. Almost whenever she has free time, instead of hanging out with her friends, Hang quietly visits cemeteries for fallen soldiers and then goes online to look for information. Hang once planned to fill in the information gaps about the tombs of fallen soldiers on the website by spending her own money to visit all cemeteries throughout Vietnam to take photos of the tombstones.

But Hang was unable to carry out the journey as she was strongly urged against the intention by her friends and the veterans, who feared that Hang, a small woman, would not be fit enough for such an arduous journey.

As time went by, the students who founded Nhan Tim Dong Doi graduated from college, went to work and got married, so they could not spend as much of their time on administering the website and at the end of the day Hang was the only one who remained committed to the website. She seemed to have forgotten love and marriage.

From an unknown date, Nhan Tim Dong Doi has become her love and the MARIN centre, which now runs the website, has become her home. During that time, Hang worked for a ceramic tile manufacturer in Vinh Phuc province to the north of Hanoi. She rented an old flat to be used as both her home and the office. In the morning, she took the bus to work and in the evening, she returned home to deal with a pile of work on the website.

Inside the flat, there are plenty of government certificates, history books and stacks of documents while lipstick, mirrors, combs and perfumes are nearly nowhere to be seen. While people of her age are fixated on romantic love, Hang was working quietly on a matter that few of her peers are interested in or hear of.

But Hang later thought to herself that such an amount of time was not enough and decided to quit her high-paying job at the tile company. Her decision shocked many, including her boss, who fell silent for a while when listening to the reason she gave for leaving the job. He then took out VND20 million (nearly US$1,000) to give to Hang and said “I support your cause.”

The website is now under the management of a centre called MARIN, which provides legal advice and assistance to the relatives of fallen soldiers, where Hang is its deputy director.

Peace has been restored to Vietnam for more than 40 years but considerable information on fallen soldiers remains elusive. Many documents are missing, numerous tombstones are being worn down over time, and a great many pieces of memory are fading. For now Hang still frequently travels outside Hanoi to meet responsible persons at local social affairs departments, visits cemeteries and the defence ministry or meets anyone with information about the tombs of fallen soldiers.

Hang said, “According to the Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs, 1.1 million soldiers were killed during the resistance war against the US. Currently MARIN has created a database of 900,000 fallen soldiers and their tombs at 3,000 cemeteries nationwide. Whenever a fallen soldier is identified, there is one more family whose pain is relieved.”

Nhan dan