Just after this picture was taken, these boys were evacuated from their village. Nearly half a century later, would American veterans be able to find them?

Thành (third from left in blue shirt) served in the South Vietnamese army; Thanh (middle, in hat, partially obscured), whose father was accidentally killed by the US army; Minh (second from right, back, partially obscured) moved to a refugee camp; Son (in helmet) tried to leave Vietnam illegally. Photograph: Bob Shirley

Larry Johns was 14, and in a school gym class, when he learned his brother had died. It was September 1969 and President Nixon had recently taken office, swearing to end the hugely unpopular war that was raging in Vietnam. The nation was already fervently polarised, and protesters were leading large rallies on the streets and university campuses of America. Larry’s older brother Jeff had been shipped out to a reconnaissance unit 35 miles north-west of Saigon on a mission to end the war. He’d only been gone five months when he was shipped back home in a sealed casket fastened down with a US flag.

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“It was an accident,” says Larry, nearly 50 years on. “But those kinds of accidents happened all the time.”

After serving in the navy and then establishing himself in the book-printing business, Larry began seeking out veterans who had served in the same base camp as his brother. The army had been largely silent on the details behind his death, so Larry dug for photographs and details. Bit by bit he learned the truth: Jeff, then 19, had been in a group of soldiers sent out to the perimeter of their base camp to fit a 40lb shaped charge, an explosive intended to ward off enemy Vietnamese soldiers. But artillery blasts from the camp had caused a heavy static electricity that detonated the charge by accident, killing eight men. Severed fingers, limbs and shreds of uniform had rained down all over the camp. Only two of the eight bodies had remained partially intact, Larry later learned, and one of them was Jeff’s.

In his quest for contact with veterans who could tell him more, Larry kept coming across photos taken by a young medic named Bob Shirley, who had been stationed at the base around the same time as Jeff. “They were by far the best photographs – very well preserved and colourful,” says Larry. One series, of a group of Vietnamese children, stayed with him.

Larry Johns’ brother Jeff was killed in Vietnam in 1969. It was Johns who, nearly 50 years on, tracked down the boys from Bob Shirley’s original photographs: ‘I wondered, “Where are they now? Did they survive?” I didn’t know if there was some kind of connection there to my brother. Maybe that’s why I wanted to know if those children were still alive.’ Photograph: Reed Young

“I wondered, ‘Where are they now? Did they survive?’ I didn’t know if there was some kind of connection there to my brother. Maybe that’s why I wanted to know if those children were still alive.”

So Larry contacted Bob, printed off some flyers and photographs, and flew out to the Vietnamese village of Chon Thanh to see what, or who, he could find.

Chon Thanh is located a few miles north of Firebase Gela, where Jeff was killed, and where the American troops had once set up a medical tent for Vietnamese villagers. One day in October 1969, Bob “Doc” Shirley was afforded a rare opportunity to photograph and speak with the locals. Long a hobby photographer, Bob recorded everything, from life at the base camp to the aftermath of enemy action, using a cheap 35mm camera he’d picked up.

Until Larry’s visit to find the children of Chon Thanh, none of the veterans knew that the entire village had been evacuated just after Bob’s photos were taken. Incoming north Vietnamese troops forced everyone to flee south and abandon their homes; the communists were killing anyone who had anything to do with the Americans. Yet many of the families found themselves living in the same area down south – around the seaside city of Vung Tau – and today most of the villagers are still neighbours and friends.

Thanh now owns a contracting business and lives in Vung Tau with his wife. Photograph: Reed Young

The process of tracking down the children took a couple of years and the help of one man, Thé, who has a photographic memory. After coming across one of Larry’s flyers at a wedding, Thé helped Larry to find 16 of the children Bob had photographed all those years before.

In one of those pictures, a girl called Sa peers into the lens cautiously, her thick black fringe blowing in the breeze. Her brother, Loc, stands beside her, impatiently awaiting treatment for his injured foot. The photograph is one of Bob’s favourites and, seeing it nearly 50 years later, Sa bursts into tears. “I was just a small kid, fine, happy, because I lived with the Americans,” she says at her dragon fruit farm near Phan Thiet, where she lives today with her husband. “I would go to school in the morning, then they’d take me to their camp and give me food.”

Son tried to escape Vietnam illegally by boat in 1984, but was stopped by police. Photograph: Reed Young

One day at base, an ammunitions dump exploded and Sa’s leg was pierced with a stray bullet, disabling her for life. She underwent surgery at the American hospital but never fully recovered. When she and her family were forced to flee communist troops in 1970, life became unbearable. “There was no food, just death and horror,” she recalls. “After 1975 [when the communists took over], life went from one misery to the next.” Eventually Sa married and set up a farm. She now has three children who live nearby, but is in constant pain. “My leg still hurts, and I need help to stand up.”

Yet the greatest and most unexpected joy, she says, has resulted from being visited last December by Larry, his photographer friend Reed Young and two Vietnam veterans who had served at Firebase Gela in 1969 – Rod Rodriguez and Del Hiesterman.

“I can’t even imagine all the love they had for us ‘no name’ kids,” she says, choking up. “I just feel so touched that they remember us.”

Thé was only eight when his photograph was taken, a small boy in a farmer’s hat and striped shirt (pictured above). “I was at school when the Americans came to give us medicine and gifts,” he says. “They were always nice, very generous. Life at that time was difficult – I was in Binh Long, the hotspot of the war, and there were bombs and gunfire every day. My mother, father and uncle were all killed because of the Viet Cong, but I lived amid the war and knew nothing else.”

Thành is married with four children. Photograph: Reed Young

Like many children in the photos, Thé has worked since the war as a farmer and labourer. Life is still difficult, he says. “From 1969 to 1975, we lived amid war, death and hunger. But today society still isn’t free. There are no human rights.”

Thé has framed Larry’s flyer and regularly studies Bob’s photographs. “It’s brought back so many memories from many years ago,” he says. “I’m happy, not because he was someone important to me, but because he came back, wanting to know more about us.”

Some of the children remember surviving off the scraps of the American troops. “We’d go down to the base where the Americans threw out their rubbish and pick up the leftovers – eggs, cheese, ham. If we asked for food, they’d give us candy,” reminisces Tuàn. When communist troops chased them out of their village, Tuàn’s mother was shot in the leg and his sister became lost – they had to go back to find her. “We were always running away from the Viet Cong. When the war ended, we had to ask for mercy from them, had to ask them for land to live and work on. It’s hard to get on with life when you’re on the losing side.”

For most of the children in the photos, any prospect of education was over once they were forced out of their homes. Thanh’s father, a soldier in the South Vietnamese army, was sent to prison in 1975 by the incoming communist government, forcing the children out to work in the field. Other children, like Minh, went to live in a crowded refugee camp.

Back in America, the vets who had served in Vietnam were often met at the airport by anti-war protesters, who jeered at them. “To admit you had served in Vietnam was social suicide,” says Del Hiesterman, now 69, who served from August 1968 to October 1969. “We, the soldiers, were blamed for politicians’ [decisions]. It was very hard.”

Del witnessed the explosion that killed Jeff, emerging that night from a bunker to see half a brain land at his feet. For decades after, Del suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder so severe that he would lie awake at night terrorised by the smells and sounds of battle. Returning to Vietnam with Larry and Rod for the first time since he left a burning Saigon 45 years ago has helped him, he says, “to see Vietnam as a country and as a society, rather than only as a war”.

Minh is now a cockfighter, who lives in Vung Tau with his wife and children. Photograph: Reed Young

Rod, now 70, agrees. “It gave me the sense of finishing the circle.”

Using old army maps and GPS satellite images, Larry, Del and Rod were able to pinpoint exactly where Jeff had been killed, and they buried a box of mementoes and medals there.

“There was so much laughter and so many tears,” says Larry of meeting the Chon Thanh villagers and his time in Vietnam. “It was the most incredible experience of my life.”