Its lined pages were decorated with beautifully intricate drawings of flowers and landscapes and what appeared to be poetry, songs and journal entries.
The battle of Dak To in November 1967 was a brutal monthlong fight in the wild terrain of the Central Highlands. Mathews’ unit had come in to help the soldiers there who were exhausted from weeks of combat.
That the book was found during such a major battle may help in the search for its author, said Grant Coates, the chair of Vietnam Veterans of America’s POW/MIA Affairs Committee.Through a program called the Veterans Initiative, Coates works with counterparts in Vietnam to recover the bodies of missing soldiers.
“You put it in a box, it goes in the attic and it’s not on your mind,” he said. “My son has always complained how I never talk about it. This has opened me up a bit.” He spotted a nón lá, a traditional conical straw Vietnamese hat in a customer’s home office. That sparked a conversation with the client, who had adopted two children from Vietnam and had visited the country several times. Mathews returned to the man’s home with the diary, and the client offered to have one of his friends translate some of its pages.
As he got some of the pages translated, to Mathews’ surprise, one of them held the soldier’s name, Cao Xuan Tuat, as well as his address in a commune in the rural Ky Anh district of Ha Tinh province on Vietnam’s north central coast.
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