Bodies of 26 American MIAs to Be Released

Vietnam says it will turn over next week the remains of 26 Americans missing since the Vietnam War and will provide “material evidence” on six others, a U.S. Pacific Command spokesman announced today.

The remains and evidence will be given to a team of the U.S. Joint Casualty Resolution Center on Wednesday in Hanoi, said Staff Sgt. Larry White of the Pacific Command headquarters.

“We are making the necessary arrangements to receive the remains, which will be flown to the Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii for identification and subsequent return to the next-of-kin,” White said.

It is not know what the Vietnam government means by “material evidence,” he said.

The U.S. team going to Hanoi will be led by Lt. Col. Paul D. Mather of the center’s liaison office in Bangkok, White said.

Since the end of the war, the remains of 99 missing Americans have been turned over by Vietnam, White said. There are 2,464 Americans still unaccounted for in Indochina.

Earlier today, the United States proposed to Vietnam that a high-level delegation of Americans go to Hanoi to resolve the question of all Americans still listed as missing in action in Southeast Asia.

A State Department spokesman said that the U.S. delegation will focus exclusively on the humanitarian issue of the MIAs and that the United States will not make any move toward normalizing relations with Hanoi until the Vietnamese withdraw their invasion force from Cambodia.