MIA Searchers Find Pieces of Human Bone

U.S. and Vietnamese workers searching for the remains of four American MIAs today found human bone fragments, fiberglass, webbing and metal in a village garden where the Vietnamese say a B-52 bomber crashed 13 years ago.

The search began in the garden of a woman who said her husband and 12-year-old son were killed when the bomber slammed into their house on Dec. 20, 1972. The Vietnamese say the B-52 was shot down by missiles.

First Sgt. Dave Kelly of the Army Central Identification Laboratory said workers found a dozen human bone fragments in clumps of wet, chunky earth. He said the fragments were large enough to be tested to see if they belonged to any of the 1,797 Americans listed as missing in action in Vietnam.

Information Needed

“We found several bone fragments that we know to be human but we can’t go any further than that without scientific investigation,” said Col. Joe Harvey, head of the 13-member U.S. military team.

Vietnamese officials said they hope to find the remains of four U.S. airmen believed to have died in the crash. Two other crew members who parachuted were taken prisoner and returned to the United States in 1973, they said.

The American side has no record of a B-52 crash on Dec. 20, 1972.

“This is a pretty big piece (of metal) here,” Capt. Paul Bethky of Lombard, Ill., said as he pointed a humming metal detector at an area in the corner of the garden. Any other metal in the about 30-by-40-foot plot, believed to be the center of the crash site, may be too deep to be detected, he said.

Scooped Out Earth

After metal detectors pinpointed the depth and area of the wreckage, a U.S. soldier used a 7 1/2-ton tractor to scoop out a wedge from the corner of the garden plot that Vietnamese officials said was the center of the crash site.

The Americans used knives to pick at the red-brown earth inside the four-foot-deep wedge.

The excavation at this agricultural commune of 500 people is expected to take 10 to 12 days.

The joint excavation, the first in Vietnam since the war ended in 1975, is the latest in a series of Vietnamese steps to account for 1,797 U.S. servicemen and civilians still listed as missing.