During the inaugural experiment at FLASH, the first vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) free-electron laser facility, Wabnitz et al. [Nature 420, 482 (2002)NATUAS0028-083610.1038/nature01197] irradiated xenon clusters and sparked a concerted theoretical and experimental effort to understand how dense, finite plasmas behave under intense irradiation. In this work, we revisit this experiment with a model that is based only on well-established atomic processes. We find that the experimental results can be explained by hybrid quantum-classical molecular-dynamics simulations if collisional excitation, recombination, and a sufficiently deep soft-core potential is used. Our recent theoretical model for inverse bremsstrahlung heating (IBH) is used to show that the measured energy absorbed by the cluster in the experiment is well predicted by our model.