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Thursday, April 27, 2000
By Reg Henry, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
HANOI -- In a quiet courtyard building off an otherwise ordinary street in the Ba Dinh district of this bustling capitol, a small group of Americans is doing the extraordinary unfinished business of the Vietnam War.
This is the home of the U.S. MIA Office, 130 Doc Ngu St. Its half-dozen permanent staff members take as their watchword President Ronald Reagan's pledge to the families of those missing "that the nation will work unceasingly until a final accounting is made. It's our sacred duty, and we will not forget them."
Although not a single American prisoner of war has been returned alive from Southeast Asia since 1973, when 591 American POWs came home, those still missing have not been officially forgotten.
The latest sign of this took place Tuesday with the Vietnamese government handing over remains in six small boxes at a solemn formal ceremony at Hanoi's Noi Bai Airport -- one similar to others held in recent years except this one was attended by the most famous POW, U.S Sen. John McCain.
The cooperation of the Vietnamese has been good, according to U.S. officials.
"We work with the Vietnamese office seeking missing persons. It is a very cordial relationship that we have with our counterpart," said Army Lt. Col. Franklin F. Childress, a public affairs officer. "We talk to them about problems; they talk to us about problems, so there's interface all the time going on. It is a unique situation we have here," he said.
Gary Flanagan, a casualty resolution specialist, explained that the American teams must deal with numerous provincial officials as well as up to 250 Vietnamese workers at recovery sites. "You can't get that work done unless you have the local support, so I'd say that [cooperation] is good."
The U.S. MIA Office in Hanoi, which opened in 1991, is one of three regional offices -- the others are in Bangkok, Thailand, and Vientiane, Laos -- helping to coordinate a much larger effort. These detachments come under the umbrella of the Joint Task Force Full Accounting, which is based in Hawaii, where recovered human remains are sent to be identified.
Five times a year in Vietnam, more than 100 U.S. specialists, broken up into six teams, are sent out into the field for about a month to conduct searches and recoveries with help from the Vietnamese. Six other such major efforts are made elsewhere in Southeast Asia each year.
By now, all the easy cases have been exhausted. What are left are searches in extremely difficult terrain.
"We had a team go out yesterday," Childress said. "They had to land on a landing zone, up in the Central Highlands, up on a mountain, then walk 70 minutes up a slope, up a stream bed that had large boulders ... to get to the excavation site.
"The site was of a C-123 [aircraft] that has a lot of 105 mm rounds on it, so the site was strewn with unexploded ordinance and rockets.
"They also encountered a bamboo viper and numerous centipedes as well as leeches, so it is not an easy task these guys -- and ladies -- are being charged with," he said.
Yet, progress is being made. In 1975, after the shooting had stopped in Southeast Asia, 2,583 Americans were unaccounted for (not all of them were military; 39 civilians went missing, among them journalists, CIA operatives, civilian contractors and two missionaries).
Today, 2,028 are listed as missing, with 1,518 coming from Vietnam.
It is in the chaotic nature of wars that they do not always give up their dead easily. After World War II, 78,000 American servicemen were missing, 7,959 from D-Day operations alone. After Korea, it was 8,100 missing. The Vietnamese themselves say they cannot account for 300,000 of their soldiers.
Could some American, somewhere, still be in captivity? It is the first priority of the MIA office. Yet of the 96 "live sighting investigations" since 1992, none of them has led to what the office believes is credible evidence of an American prisoner still being held against his will. The number of live sighting reports has diminished in recent years, and none is currently under investigation.
"It's hard to prove a negative," Childress said. "It's very difficult to prove that there are no Americans being held against their will in Southeast Asia. Therefore, we can't rule that possibility out. Anytime we hear of a report, we investigate it fully."
U.S. Ambassador Douglass B. "Pete" Peterson, himself a returned POW, allows that the chances of an American being held are highly unlikely at a time when U.S. government officials and ordinary Americans have wide-ranging access to virtually every part of Vietnam, save for a few sensitive military facilities.
But, like the staff at the MIA office, he added: "I never say never."
And so the search continues, quietly, methodically, toward that elusive full accounting.
