Hung Tran pauses as he recounts a memory that has haunted him for decades, his voice trembling with anger and sorrow.
"I can still see their faces — the men I served with, the ones who didn't come home. They fought, they bled, and they died for their country," said the 73-year-old, who fought for South Vietnam in the Vietnam War.
Warning: This story contains some imagery that readers might find confronting.
Half a century since the war ended, Mr Tran and others like him are still fighting to locate and bury the bodies of their fallen comrades.
"They have no graves. No names. It's like they never existed," he said.
The Bien Hoa National Military Cemetery outside Saigon — now Ho Chi Minh City — was a "sacred place" before 1975, said Mr Tran, who has lived in Australia for 40 years after fleeing Vietnam as a refugee.
"But after the communists took over, they destroyed it. They smashed the tombstones, dug up the graves, and planted trees to cover the land.
"Their aim was clear: to erase us from history."
Australian historian Robert Hall, who has aided the Vietnamese government in locating burial sites of North Vietnamese soldiers and returning personal artefacts recovered from the battlefield, says time is running out to find the remains of South Vietnamese troops.
"It was extremely nasty straight after the war. South Vietnamese military cemeteries were bulldozed by the government," he said.
While attitudes have softened and progress had been made, Dr Hall said "added sensitivities" made the logistics of locating remains even more difficult.
Vietnam's ambassador to Australia, Pham Hung Tam, said the government had allowed relatives to restore and relocate graves of South Vietnamese soldiers at cemeteries such as Binh An — formerly the Bien Hoa National Military Cemetery — which is now a civilian cemetery.
"Thousands of these graves have been restored by relatives, many of which have been cemented," Mr Tam told the ABC.
The cemetery had undertaken cleaning and refurbishing efforts, including the erection of stone altars, he added.
On the broader challenge of finding remains, Mr Tam said: "The task of locating the remains of these individuals is immense, challenging, costly, and time-consuming.
"Even thousands of our patriotic martyrs remain unaccounted for."
The challenge of finding South Vietnamese soldiers
After the Vietnam War ended in 1975 an estimated 165,000 soldiers were sent to "re-education camps" in North Vietnam, according to Columbia University's Dart Center.
Mr Tran, a survivor of one such camp, described it as a "torturous place" for his South Vietnamese comrades.
"Many died from starvation, torture, or illness. They were buried in remote forests and mountains, their graves unmarked," he said.
"Their families had no way to find them, let alone bring them home."
Finding the remains of fallen soldiers after the Vietnam War was especially difficult explained Dr Hall, himself an Australian veteran and honorary lecturer at UNSW Canberra.
"For North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers, their bodies tended to remain on the battlefield," he said.
"They didn't have detailed reports or precise burial locations like we did. In many cases, they'd report burials in vague terms — like a rubber plantation or a district covering thousands of acres."
Organisations such as the Vietnamese American Foundation continue to advocate for the return of South Vietnamese soldiers' remains to their families.
It has recovered 504 remains so far, with many more still awaiting identification and return.
The organisation excavated the Lang Da re-education camp cemetery in Yen Bai province in 2010, recovering 12 skeletons — 11 of which yielded viable DNA.
A team exhumed skeletons and unearthed personal items such as ceramic bowls and toothbrushes over several days despite challenging soil and climate conditions, archaeologist Julie Martin later wrote for an academic journal.
But the Vietnamese American Foundation's advocacy efforts with the US and Vietnamese governments were often slow and arduous, Mr Tran said.
The foundation has proposed rebuilding the Bien Hoa National Military Cemetery, but there has been little progress with the Vietnamese government.
"We don't want any fanfare or politics, just a dignified resting place," Mr Tran said.
'Everyone wants to sweep us away'
Every year, US and Australian veterans return to Vietnam to commemorate their dead.
They even partake in events marking the anniversary of the Battle of Long Tan.
For Mr Tran, that compounds the pain of not being able to lay his fellow soldiers to rest.
"How can the Vietnamese communists claim to reconcile with their former enemy while treating us — people who share the same language, skin colour, and history — as enemies?
"It's a cruelty that nobody who isn't Vietnamese can truly understand," he said.
But the Vietnam embassy's Mr Tam said diaspora members, including prominent members of the South Vietnamese regime, had been welcomed back to the country as part of reconciliation efforts.
"The Vietnamese government has always regarded overseas Vietnamese as an inseparable part of the Vietnamese nation," he said.
The rights of overseas Vietnamese including the South Vietnamese were "equivalent to those of any Vietnamese citizen", he added.
Mr Tran said locating lost South Vietnamese soldiers remained the greatest battle he will ever fight.
"We don't have a government to represent us anymore. We're like dust — everyone wants to sweep us away," he said.
"But we won't stop fighting. Those men gave their lives for something they believed in. They deserve to be remembered."
