2 - Mass excavation

Summary

Coffin making was a thriving business in the Quang Nam – Da Nang region. The owner of a funeral parlor in Da Nang recalled in 1998 that the current boom reminded him of thirty years earlier when the area suffered its most intense battles and extensive mass killing. Having inherited the small family business in the early 1960s, the man decided to industrialize it in 1968 due to the escalating demand for coffins. He bought timber from the highlands through a middleman who he was sure was a Vietcong contact and hired war refugees. Business prospered; the labor was cheap and dead bodies were plentiful. His only competitor at the time was a group of amateur artisans who assembled makeshift coffins from ammunition containers or the boxes of US PX supplies. Only the poor bought these rude products, the owner recalled, made from foreign trees and which sometimes had “Made in USA” or “Property of US Army” printed on the side.

The shop produced three distinct types of caskets whose prices varied from one third of a schoolteacher's monthly salary to three times this salary. The more expensive ones were lavishly decorated and emitted a pleasant perfume. In an ideal world, all dead people should have one of these sandalwood coffins, the owner argued. He had made many of them during the war, stopped producing them after the liberation, and resumed making them recently. A simple, inexpensive product which he called “people's coffin” was also on display.