At the edge of a closed amusement park where cartoon rabbits greet visitors, a dozen young soldiers tugged at the mud, searching for the remnants of comrades killed during the war.

Ho Chi Minh City — noisy, neon, frenetic — seemed to quiet down. It was a busy weekday in October, and only the scratch of a trowel could be heard near tiny Vietnamese flags marking the locations of decaying warriors, lost when the city was still the southern capital known as Saigon.

“Why are you moving the dirt there?” asked Lt. Col. Le Ngoc Ha, a commander, pointing toward a young soldier inside a pit the size of a soccer field. “Did you find something?”

The soldier nodded. He deposited a brownish lump into a red plastic tray. Another soldier carried it to a building with more than 700 bodies already pulled from the park’s graves.

The exhumations led by Vietnam’s Communist government are part of a 500-day campaign that began in March. Returning to battlegrounds across the country, the goal is to find 7,000 “martyrs” who died fighting for North Vietnam’s victory over the South and the United States.