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Nearly three decades after the end of the Vietnam War, Vietnamese soldiers are hitting the Ho Chi Minh Trail again.

But this time it is not to fight the enemy - but to search for friends missing-in-action (MIA) or buried along the famous trail which ran all the way from North to South Vietnam through neighbouring Laos and Cambodia.

In July, the first official search team from Vietnam arrived in the south-west province of Takeo in neighbouring Cambodia under a recent agreement between the two countries to cooperate in searching for Vietnamese MIAs.

After a month of hunting in remote parts of the province, the team went back to Vietnam with the remains of 95 former comrades - all killed in Cambodia between 1965 and 1975.

''They were extremely organised, with maps, names of the dead and brought along army veterans who remembered the places where they had buried their colleagues killed in the war,'' said Yim Suvann, the military police chief of Kiriwong district in Cambodia's Takeo province, where much of the excavations took place.

According to him, the old maps brought by the search team were not very useful and most of the graves of Vietnamese soldiers were found with the help of local villagers, the older among whom remembered many of the locations.

The remains found in excavated graves were identified as being that of Vietnamese by the material used to wrap the body, caps, belts and the ubiquitous bottle of penicillin that was part of standard supply provided to each soldier in those days.

Catastrophic losses

There are an estimated 20,000 Vietnamese soldiers who went missing in action in Cambodia during the Vietnam War.

Most of them are believed to have died, along with hundreds of thousands of Cambodian civilians, in the massive bombing of the country carried out by the US air force between 1965-75.

The area close to the Vietnam-Cambodia border was an important theatre of action and used by the North Vietnamese troops as part of the legendary Ho Chi Minh Trail to send supplies and attack US forces in South Vietnam.

''The Americans spend millions of dollars every year searching for their 2,000 missing servicemen from the Vietnam War, but a poor country like Vietnam can hardly afford that kind of an effort,'' says an Asian diplomat in Phnom Penh.

Vietnam's losses in the war with the Americans were catastrophic and effectively wiped out an entire generation. As many as 3.8 million Vietnamese, from the north and south, soldiers and civilians, were killed. Another 300,000 are listed as MIA.

While lack of resources in the initial years after the end of the war in 1975 hampered the Vietnamese government's ability to search exhaustively for its MIAs, since 1991 the authorities have come under increasing pressure from veterans' groups and party organisations within the military to resolve the issue.

Since the end of the war, the remains of about 80,000 of Vietnam's 300,000 MIAs have been recovered.

In Ho Chi Minh City in southern Vietnam alone, it is estimated that 500 to 700 remains are found each year, mostly on tips from fellow veterans.

Political hurdles

But the search for the rest is hampered by the fact that the North Vietnamese Army did not have sophisticated medical and dental records, or any special identity markers for its soldiers. Search parties have also been thwarted by unexploded bombs and mines, difficult terrain and endemic malaria along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Apart from logistical obstacles, there are political hurdles too, particularly in the search for Vietnamese MIAs in Cambodia. The last time Vietnamese army trucks rolled over the Cambodian border was in 1979, when they came in to oust the despotic Pol Pot regime from power.

The Vietnamese army presence in Cambodia throughout the eighties was opposed by Western nations led by the United States who preferred to back the genocidal Khmer Rouge simply because they were considered an enemy of Vietnam.

The last of the Vietnamese troops left Cambodia in 1989 but the presence of large numbers of Vietnamese migrants in the country has been often exploited by opposition politicians to attack the Hun Sen government for being 'too close' to Vietnam.

Cambodia has a sordid history of racism against the Vietnamese. In the early seventies, when the US-backed military government of General Lon Nol came to power, thousands of migrants from Vietnam were massacred.

The Khmer Rouge, though once part of the united Indochina Communist Party in the fifties, turned rabidly anti-Vietnamese and executed several thousand of its own cadres suspected of being 'pro-Vietnam'.

''With elections to the rural communes coming up in early 2002, the Hun Sen government has naturally played down its cooperation agreement with Vietnam to search for the MIAs,'' says Puy Kea, a political analyst in Phnom Penh.

Bitter memories

Though Hun Sen and the Cambodian People's Party he leads came to power with the help of the Vietnamese and are still perceived to be very close to them, they are wary of upsetting urban middle-class Cambodian voters, who tend to be anti-Vietnamese.

In the border province of Takeo however, there is no such antagonism among the locals to the Vietnamese. In fact, there is much admiration for their role in liberating Cambodia from the clutches of Pol Pot.

''The Vietnamese offered cash to villagers who helped search for the remains of Vietnamese MIAs but most of them declined to take any money,'' said Yim Sovann.

According to him and other Cambodian officials dealing with them, the Vietnamese too, on their part, were extremely courteous and carried out their search only with the explicit permission and cooperation of the local authorities.

The search team is expected to return to Cambodia in a few months to carry on with its long and onerous task of finding the thousands of missing Vietnamese soldiers.

While digging up bones from the past is bringing back bitter memories of the tragic Vietnam war for many in this region, the discovery and proper reburial of the MIA remains is also offering a sense of closure to thousands of Vietnamese families who lost loved ones during the conflict-ridden decades of the past.

The above article was first written for the Inter-Press Service (IPS).