Hearts & Bones : Thirteen Years After Lt. Col. Thomas Hart Disappeared in Laos, the Army Said It Had Found His Remains. His Wife, Anne, Couldn’t Be Sure. Finally, the Army Admitted It Wasn’t Either.

It is barely 8:30 a.m. on a sweltering August day, but the kitchen of Anne Hart’s home in Pensacola, Fla., has already become a frantic command post. While the rest of the neighborhood awakens, Hart’s phone rings incessantly.

As her children stumble in for breakfast, Hart dials attorneys in distant cities, rummages through boxfuls of U.S. Army documents and talks heatedly about her husband, missing in action from the Vietnam War. Holding a faded map of Southeast Asia, she stubs out her sixth cigarette of the morning and explains why she thinks hundreds of American MIAs--including Lt. Col. Thomas Hart III--may not be dead. Leaning forward, she speaks knowingly of conspiracy and a cover-up at the highest levels of the U.S. government.

To the casual observer--and a growing number of government officials--Hart appears to be disturbingly obsessed. “That woman wouldn’t believe her husband was dead if it happened right in front of her,” snaps one Army official.

More than 13 years ago, an Air Force plane carrying Thomas Hart and 15 other crewmen crashed into a Laotian jungle as it was returning from a search-and-destroy mission along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The Army maintains that most of the men, including Hart, were burned beyond recognition that night and should be presumed dead.

Indeed, the armed services excavated the remote crash site last year and, after examining 50,000 bone fragments, scientists at the Army’s Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii identified the remains of all the men aboard. The proof of Thomas Hart’s death could not be more clear, officials thought. It was time, they added, for Anne Hart to get on with her life.

But they underestimated the 42-year-old mother of six. Bucking opposition from the Army and from some of the crewmen’s relatives, Hart temporarily blocked return of the fragmentary remains. Meanwhile, she recruited forensic experts to review the Army’s conclusions. They agreed that the seven bone fragments said to be her husband’s--most of them no larger than a quarter--could not be identified as Lt. Col. Thomas Hart, or anyone else for that matter.

Last summer, in the wake of a critical report on the identification techniques used by the Hawaii laboratory and under pressure from Hart, Army officials backed down and rescinded the identification of her husband. It was the first time in history that such a decision had been reversed, and several other families are now seeking similar reversals.

Largely as a result of Anne Hart’s persistence, the Army has instituted sweeping changes in identification techniques at the Hawaii laboratory. More important, the possibility that several identifications may have been mistaken--or even fraudulent--has prompted charges from members of Congress and forensic scientists that the Army is under pressure to identify as many fragmentary remains as possible, and thus defuse the politically troublesome MIA issue.

Beyond that, the story of Hart’s 14-year search for information about her husband has come to reflect the emotional ups and downs of the 2,434 American families whose loved ones never returned from the Vietnam War. Torn between the absence of convincing word from the government and tantalizing reports from Indochina, they cling to shreds of hope as the years pass.

On the night that her husband disappeared, Hart says, “I was a shy, dutiful little Air Force housewife who believed everything the government told us about the war in Vietnam . . . but I’ve gone through some pretty major changes.”

Now, as she lights another cigarette and twists her hair into tight, angry ringlets, Hart says she is combative, disillusioned and outspoken--but still no closer to an answer about her husband.

“On this issue, you learn very quickly to be a fighter, to not let somebody push you around,” she says. “You learn that questions which surfaced long ago never really go away.”

“At the time of the Paris peace talks, there was an inherent wariness that we were never told the full story about men still captive in Vietnam and Laos.”

--Former Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr., a negotiator at the peace talks.

ON THE AFTERNOON OF DEC. 21, 1972, ANNE HART WAS decorating the family Christmas tree and making plans for a whirlwind trip to Thailand. Within days she would enjoy a brief visit with her husband, who had left for Vietnam two months before.

Suddenly, one of her children rushed in to announce that a police car had just parked outside, its red light flashing. A grim-faced officer was approaching the door. “I knew immediately what it meant,” Hart recalls. “Before that poor young man could even get a word out, I asked, ‘Is he dead?’ ”

The news was painful--and direct. Hart’s C-130 gunship had gone down near the Laotian village of Pakse; all the Army could say was that he and 12 others were missing. The remains of one crew member were recovered the next day. Two men who had parachuted to safety reported seeing no other survivors.

Hart felt as though she had been kicked in the stomach. Her mind reeled under the weight of terrible questions. How would she tell her young children? How could she break the news to her husband’s elderly parents? And how could she ever accept the fact that Thomas Hart was dead?

The timing of the crash would also become an obsession. Only a few weeks after Hart’s husband left for Southeast Asia, believing he had a patriotic obligation to return for another tour of duty as an Air Force navigator, Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger had dramatically announced that “peace is at hand.” Less than a month after the plane went down, American and North Vietnamese negotiators hammered out a cease-fire plan and an agreement to exchange prisoners of war.

As streams of American POWs began returning home, Hart parked herself in front of the television for days at a time, slumped in a bean-bag chair. She searched for a familiar face among the hundreds of returnees, but there was no word about her husband.

“We were never told anything; we had no idea what might be going on behind the scenes,” she says. “The Army said it had no information, but we always suspected that some final deal was being worked out . . . that some things were going on which we just didn’t know.”

By March, 1973, Anne Hart was functioning “on automatic pilot . . . in a state of shock.” Trying to maintain a brave front for her children, she would still break into tears without warning and had difficulty sleeping. As the last American troops returned home, she says, “I guess I sort of reached a point. I said to myself, ‘Well, OK, now you’ve cried for three months. What else can you do?’ ”

That month, she joined the local branch of the National League of Families of American Prisoners Missing in Southeast Asia, a fledgling group formed to focus attention on the MIA/POW issue.

At first, she was overwhelmed by the large numbers of outspoken and politically contentious family members who had joined the league. But, in time, she learned the nuts and bolts of contacting congressmen, alerting the press to league events and probing Army officials for information. Anne Hart--shy, skittish and unsure of her public speaking abilities--slowly began to evolve into a political animal.

Within two years, she was elected Florida league director and later regional coordinator for the southeastern United States. In October, 1973, she and 50 other members traveled to the capitals of Vietnam and Laos “to bring attention to the issue and the plight of the missing.” The trip produced no major breakthroughs, Hart recalls, but she would be back. And there were discoveries to be made at home.

“No survivors were found, but five parachutes were located, two of which were charred. The source also saw two small piles of what he described as ‘bloody bandages’ . . . .”

--U.S. Army report on the crash site of Lt. Col. Hart’s plane.

BY APRIL, 1975, WHEN U.S. Embassy personnel fled Saigon and the city fell to North Vietnamese troops, Anne Hart had heard very little from the Army about her husband. But what she did know led her to question whether he might have survived.

Several months after the crash, for example, Hart learned through Army friends in Thailand that her husband’s plane was thought to have taken a direct hit from anti-aircraft fire and that fuel had been leaking heavily into the cabin shortly before the plane exploded. Angered that the Army had not made such information available to her, she contacted military officials and got them to confirm the story.

It was not until two years later that the Army would release a more intriguing bit of evidence: Five deployed parachutes from the plane had been found by “friendly” military forces at the crash site, the Army said in a letter to the families. The news raised “more than a ray of hope” that there may have been additional survivors, Hart says.

“The question began growing . . . why couldn’t they have told us this sooner?” she says. “I realize the Army has to take time to review its intelligence reports and all, but in so many ways we were just left in the dark.”

At the same time, the MIA/POW issue was fading from the headlines. When the Paris peace accords were being negotiated, the news media had been filled with stories about American soldiers who might still be held in Laos and Vietnam. Now, Watergate and related events “just blew us off the front page.”

Hart was coming to believe that the country “just didn’t want to hear about Vietnam anymore.” In 1977, when President Jimmy Carter granted amnesty to more than 10,000 Vietnam draft evaders, she marched onto her front porch in tears and flew the American flag upside-down.

The Carter Administration subsequently announced plans to explore normalization of relations with Vietnam. And a commission headed by former labor leader Leonard Woodcock, after visiting Hanoi in 1977, said in a report to Congress that there was “no evidence to indicate that any American prisoners from the Indochina conflict remain alive.” Ann Mills Griffiths, now executive director of the League of Families, says “those were the wilderness years . . . when this organization would demonstrate in front of the White House and demand more action on the issue. We had a completely adversarial relationship with the U.S. government.”

The friction increased in 1978, when the armed services--citing the Woodcock report and other findings--began reclassifying many of the MIA cases from “prisoner of war” or “missing in action” to “killed in action/body not recovered.” In place of the full combat pay and benefits, families were now entitled only to veterans’ and Social Security benefits.

For some, it was a devastating psychological blow--a signal that the government had given up the search, and that the families would always be beset by nagging questions about their missing sons and fathers.

After a perfunctory, late-summer hearing, a military board declared that Lt. Col. Hart was legally dead, even though he was technically still “unaccounted for.”

“Their system stunk,” Anne Hart says today. “They acted and still do as the judge, jury, witness--as if they had all the information and we had nothing to offer at all. . . . The decision was just a piece of paper. On Sept. 30, officially, my husband was missing in action. On Oct. 1, 1978, although there was no difference in the evidence . . . he was now legally dead.”

As the fall approached and Hart prepared to send several children to high school, the belief that her husband might still be alive had been reduced to a simple act of faith. Although the Army had all but shut the door on his case, she was convinced that new information would still come to light. In particular, Hart clung to the hope that she might one day visit the site where her husband’s plane had gone down.

At the conclusion of her husband’s reclassification hearing, Hart had been asked if she had any further comments.

“Yes,” she replied angrily. “The location of this crash site is well known not only to our government, but to the Laotian government, and I fully expect that (when) the government or individuals are allowed back into Laos, that one of us will go to that crash site and make some recovery of any possible remains. I hope if the opportunity arises, the federal government will get there before I do.”

“What changed? The U.S. finally got serious. Before, we had been screaming in the darkness and getting no response.”

--Ann Mills Griffiths, League of Families .

Although Griffiths and other MIA activists are officially nonpartisan, they readily acknowledge that Ronald Reagan’s election as President in 1980 breathed new life into the MIA issue. Overnight, the government’s official policy was reversed--now holding that the presence of American prisoners in Southeast Asia could no longer be ruled out.

Calling resolution of the issue “the highest national priority,” Reagan directed that staffing be increased for military agencies monitoring the problem. More important, his Administration embarked on a round of negotiations with Vietnamese and Laotian officials to press for more information.

“It was a major breakthrough,” says Hart. “We didn’t think that one day he (Reagan) is going to make this statement and the next day we’d be marching guys out of there, by any wild stretch of the imagination. But we certainly anticipated some real results.”

In February, 1982, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Armitage led a high-ranking U.S. delegation to Hanoi to discuss the MIA problem. Vietnamese officials later pledged to hold four regular sessions a year on the issue.

At the same time, interest in the plight of Vietnam veterans and missing American soldiers was growing among both Republicans and Democrats. Refugees and “boat people” from Vietnam and Laos were pouring by the thousands into camps along the Thailand border, some giving vivid--if sometimes questionable--accounts of Americans still being held captive. Although the Vietnamese and Laotians repeatedly denied holding any prisoners, some in America suspected that the Vietnamese--hoping to use the MIA issue as leverage to exact badly needed economic aid--were not telling all they knew.

Hanoi officials steadfastly deny a connection, calling the MIA issue “purely humanitarian.” America has a “moral obligation” to provide economic aid, contends Tran Trong Khang, second secretary of Vietnam’s mission at the United Nations, but Vietnam will continue to discuss the MIA issue--particularly the return of combat remains--with no strings attached.

“We are not saying that you have to give us billions to buy your American bones,” he says, adding that the persistent questions about U.S. prisoners in Vietnam are “an American problem . . . a psychological problem.”

The new round of talks encouraged many activists. But for Anne Hart, a visit by several Vietnam veterans to Southeast Asia the year before seemed even more promising, showing that the “door was open” for private groups to press the MIA issue with Communist governments.

Indeed, Hart, Griffiths and several other league members received permission to visit to Vientiane and Hanoi the following September. More important, Laotian officials said they could visit the spot where Lt. Col. Hart’s plane went down.

After years of searching for answers, Anne Hart braced for the end.

“You see, Mrs. Hart, your husband could not have survived. Now you’ve seen it with your own eyes.”

--Laotian official.

IN VIENTIANE, HART AND OTHER LEAGUE MEMBERS chartered a Soviet-made helicopter for the 300-mile flight to the crash site. The delegation, accompanied by several diplomats and American reporters, flew to a remote jungle area and, circling slowly, landed near a sprawling rice paddy.

Hart stepped off the helicopter and strode toward the impact point in mud up to her knees. Curious villagers appeared from the surrounding brush.

The crash site lay down a narrow jungle path and across a stream. But there was little evidence that a massive American airplane had slammed into the ground there 10 years earlier. While searching through dirt and foliage, Hart and other league members picked up small pieces of what appeared to be metal from an airplane. Pressing on, they discovered a large piece of metal sunk into the ground.

But the most interesting discovery came a few minutes later, when Hart found two small, dusty fragments that looked like human or animal bones.

“I had my pocketbook with me, and you know, the thought crossed my mind that these might be part of the remains of somebody who was on the plane,” she says. “So I wrapped them in a piece of Kleenex and put them in my purse.” She later gave them to the Army.

At first, the visit “rocked me. . . . I had all the same emotions as when the young officer first told me that Tom was missing.” But when a Laotian official suggested that she accept her husband’s death, Hart recoiled.

“ ‘Wait a minute,’ I said, ‘I haven’t seen anything, except that a plane did go down here. And it doesn’t prove anything.’ I wanted to stay at that site much longer. . . . Lord knows what I would have done, but I couldn’t bear to leave.”

The following summer, Hart met with several wives of crewmen from the Pakse crash. All were eager to hear about her trip, but one, Jane Meder, had some information of her own. After filing a request for details about her husband’s case under the Freedom of Information Act, Meder received a summary of a startling Army report.

An aerial reconnaissance photo taken 100 miles from the crash site in July, 1973, had revealed a cryptic message burned with 20-foot letters into elephant grass: “1973 TH” or “1953 TH.” According to the report, “it was believed that the numbers could be the year or an authentication number, while the letters could indicate a person’s initials. This was thought to be Capt. Hart (his rank at the time).”

Anne Hart was floored, but also suspicious. Believing that the report had been kept from her deliberately, she was afraid to ask the Army directly for a copy. And for the first time, she did not tell her children and in-laws, fearing that rumors about the new information might fall into “the wrong hands.”

“I figured, I’ll just have to try and track this information down on my own,” she says. “By this point, I was so frustrated with the Army. I just came to the conclusion that they were not providing me with all the information they had. They may not be lying; they’re just simply not telling you the truth.”

Hart later learned that the Army had reanalyzed the cryptic message and concluded that it could not have been left by her husband. It ordered the original report deleted from his file. No other information was provided.

“We have a bunch of beer-can commandos in Bangkok who’ll pay some boatman $100 to smuggle them into Laos so they can play Rambo. It’s a joke, and it gets in the way of our work.”

--Garnett Bell, Joint Casualty Resolution Center

It took the U.S. government a bit longer to get to Pakse. By early 1983, the Army was laying the groundwork with Laotian officials to survey the site and dig up whatever human remains might be found. Members of the Joint Casualty Resolution Center, which maintains records on all soldiers missing from the Vietnam War, were prepared to quickly send in digging equipment, ground personnel and forensic experts.

But several weeks before a key meeting with Laotian officials, James (Bo) Gritz, a Vietnam veteran, led an armed band into Laos in an effort to rescue Americans he said were being held prisoner. Gritz found no POWs and, amid great media hoopla, was arrested upon returning to Thailand.

The charismatic Gritz, who said he had received financial backing from several Hollywood celebrities, including actors William Shatner and Clint Eastwood, also claimed that his mission was backed by the U.S. government. American officials issued strong denials, but the Laotians were incensed.

“We went to Laos with great expectations . . . with hopes to get things moving with them in terms of the (the Pakse excavation),” recalls Col. Joe Harvey, head of the Joint Casualty Resolution Center. “But what we really received was a lecture . . . about Gritz’s activities and what the Lao government would like to see the U.S. government do to make sure that nothing like that happened again.”

The Laotians broke off all talks about Pakse for nearly a year. According to Harvey, the crash site had already been looted by Laotian villagers and “profiteers” who scour the jungles of Southeast Asia for bone fragments, pieces of plane wreckage, personal effects and any other physical evidence linked to American MIAs. With the delay, more pilferage was likely--and the families were left waiting.

When their displeasure subsided, the Lao government agreed to permit the Pakse excavation in February, 1985. It would be the first such project since the war ended, and Washington officials hailed it as a major breakthrough.

Back in Pensacola, Anne Hart greeted the news cautiously. “This was an important change. . . something long overdue” she says. “As with all things, I decided to wait and see. But I felt, deep down, that we might be getting closer to an answer.”

“When the Pakse excavation took place, it was a brand- new ballgame for everybody. No one ever dreamed they would come up with 13 identifications.”

--Ann Mills Griffiths, League of Families

IN EARLY FEBRUARY A CREW FROM THE JOINT CASUALTY resolution Center flew to the Pakse crash site and linked up with Laotian laborers to begin the long-awaited excavation. Based on earlier intelligence reports, Army experts believed that most of the human remains would be found 10 to 15 feet underground. The heavy ammunition load on the C-130 had continued to explode for hours after the crash, creating a crater and burying the passengers and aircraft.

After clearing the site, the crews dug to a depth of 15 feet, using mostly hand tools. Much of the work consisted of sifting dirt through fine screens and retrieving every fragment that looked like it might be a bone or piece of wreckage. Each item was labeled, and its location in relation to other fragments carefully noted. After 14 days, the work was completed.

The teams retrieved about 50,000 bone fragments, which were flown to the Army’s Central Identification Laboratory in Honolulu. A report later issued by the lab--which attempts to identify combat victims of World War II as well as the Korean and Vietnam wars--said the evidence consisted of “extremely broken, fragmented and shattered skeletal segments. . . . The size of the fragments range from powder to the largest, which is 13 cm (5.1 inches) long. The majority of them are approximately equal to the size of a dime.”

Anne Hart and other family members were told that all the remains would fit into five small bags. The task of identification, the families concluded, would be extremely difficult. But they patiently awaited the verdict of the scientists working on the case--one of whom had acquired an impressive track record in forensic analysis.

Tadao Furue, the lab’s Japanese scientific chief, first began identifying combat remains for the U.S. government in 1951. Army officials believed that no one scientist had more experience in the area. Furue gained wide attention in 1983 by identifying 22 men whose Air Force plane had crashed on a remote island in New Guinea during World War II.

At the same time, Furue and his assistants had been attempting to identify about 170 sets of skeletal remains received from Vietnam, Laos and China at the conclusion of the Vietnam War. The lab had made positive identifications of individual soldiers in most cases, and only rarely recommended a group interment of fragments that could not be identified.

The Pakse identifications presented a special challenge.

“This was, in the number of years I’ve spent in this business, probably the most difficult case that I’ve ever been involved in,” says Lt. Col. Johnie Webb Jr., commander of the lab. When Furue and his aides were nearing their final decision on IDs, Webb worried “that we haven’t had much to work with.”

Initially, lab officials sorted the fragments into what appeared to be more than 10 sets of individual remains. But then, in a June 27 report, Furue and his assistants startled everyone--including Webb--by announcing that they had positively identified all 13 missing men.

The identifications were made, the report said, through “systematic, simultaneous anthropological and odontological processing of all skeletal remains. . . .” In a later report, the Army would boast that the Pakse cases had utilized “the latest in analytical techniques.”

“Mrs. Hart, I could weep.”

--Dr. Michael Charney, forensic anthropologist, after reviewing the Army’s identification.

At 1 p.m. on July 1, the phone rang in Anne Hart’s kitchen. The Honolulu laboratory had positively identified her husband’s remains and would be sending them to her for burial. Other families were getting similar news. “It took my breath away and left me virtually speechless,” Hart recalls.

Even so, she had already prepared a plan of action. At a time when other families were simply trying to cope with the announcement, she was determined to hire her own forensic specialist and get a second opinion. The Air Force “was supposed to be looking after my husband’s best interests,” she says. “But after all these years, that was no longer the case.”

Within hours, Hart began receiving calls from several other families and soon learned that there had been 13 positive identifications. The news made her “edgy . . . because it’s not that neat and tidy, that everybody would have conveniently died in this one location.”

The same day, another Army official called with more details. When Hart asked how all the identifications were possible, he said they had been made partly through process of elimination--by comparing the remains with one another, sorting them and then verifying each identification through medical and dental records.

“I said, in that case, wouldn’t it stand to reason that if you wanted to get a second opinion, it would be necessary for an anthropologist to have an opportunity to look at all the remains, to be able to reach the same conclusion?” Hart recalls.

She asked the Army to hold up distribution of the remains until an independent forensic expert could examine all the evidence. The request was denied.

Army officials told Hart that it would be an invasion of the other families’ privacy. Moreover, a ceremony already had been set for July 4 at Travis Air Force Base in California, after which the remains would be sent to families across the country. With time running out, Hart threatened to hold up the proceedings with a lawsuit. At that, an Army official snapped, “Mrs. Hart, I can’t believe you would do this to the other families.”

Working quickly, she won a court order in San Francisco temporarily halting distribution of the Pakse remains from the U.S. Army Mortuary in Oakland, where they had been flown. That cleared the way for Dr. Michael Charney, a forensic specialist hired by Hart, to examine Lt. Col. Hart’s remains.

Charney, who directs the Center of Human Identification at Colorado State University, says he had no reason to doubt the competence or honesty of Central Identification Laboratory personnel. Hart, he says, was simply entitled to a second opinion.

Then he examined the remains.

“I was horrified,” Charney says. “The fragments were so minute, there was no way they could be identified as Lt. Col. Hart. The things Furue claimed to detect from the bones--age, sex, race--were just not possible. It was incompetence of the worst sort.”

None of the seven bone fragments was longer than six inches, and the smallest was less than one inch. But on the basis of those fragments, the Army lab had estimated that the victim was a male Caucasian; 30 to 35 years old; 69 inches tall (give or take 1.6 inches), and with a slightly larger-than-average build. By comparing those findings with the known characteristics of the men on board the C-130, the Army scientists concluded that the fragments were those of Lt. Col. Hart.

There was one final bombshell: The Army had concluded that the same two fragments Anne Hart found at the Pakse crash site two years earlier were, in a startling coincidence, part of her husband’s remains.

Hours after examining the bones, Charney called Anne Hart. By now, she had been getting angry calls from other families, who demanded that the remains of their loved ones be sent home. Even when Hart told them of Charney’s findings, the families were infuriated that she had held up the distribution.

In an angry letter to the court, the Delma Dickens family of Omega, Ala., said that any delay in the burial of their son, Ernest, would be “intolerable and outrageous.” The family feared that his body would become “a battlefield for the experts.”

Hart finally agreed to allow the Pakse remains to be returned to the other families. But she adamantly refused to take possession of the seven bone fragments identified as her husband.

“The Secretary of the Air Force has arranged for the interment with full military honors of your husband, Lieutenant Col. Thomas T. Hart III, in Arlington National Cemetery.”

--Air Force letter to Anne Hart.

By August, 1985, Anne Hart felt under siege. Army officials brushed aside Charney’s analysis and endorsed the Hawaii lab’s identification. They also noted that most families from the Pakse crash had by now buried their loved ones. Why, they asked, couldn’t Hart give her husband a dignified burial?

“There was just no way I could do it,” she recalls. “It would have been a lie. I felt very much alone at that point.”

Unknown to Hart, two other Pakse families had begun raising similar objections to the Army’s identifications. The relatives of Command Sgt. James R. Fuller, a flight engineer, and Capt. George D. MacDonald, a TV-sensor operator, were also questioning the fragmentary evidence returned to them.

Donald Parker, Fuller’s nephew, took possession of the remains and flew them back to the family’s home in Portland. At a mortuary, the family opened the flag-draped coffin to find several bone fragments wrapped inside a bed sheet, resting on an empty but neatly pressed military uniform.

“The total amount of remains could have fit in the palm of one hand, the largest fragment being the size of your thumb,” he says. “We saw no teeth, no joint bones. There was nothing that you could look at and say, ‘This was a human being.’ ”

In Chicago, James MacDonald reacted skeptically to the news that his brother’s remains had been identified, citing the unsolved mystery of the five deployed parachutes found at the crash site. “I wondered right off the bat what had happened to the remains in the parachutes,” he says. “How did they all get into one crash site? That didn’t make any sense.”

During the next few months, other forensic experts across the nation began challenging the Army’s identifications. But the Army was not moved. On Oct. 9, Anne Hart received a letter informing her that if she did not accept the remains of her husband by Nov. 13, the Air Force would have them buried.

When Hart refused to budge, the Air Force played its trump card. It invited her, in a two-paragraph letter, to attend funeral services for her husband. “The ceremony and interment will take place at 3 p.m. on 2 Dec. 1985,” it said. “You are invited to contact Mortuary Services by calling toll-free 1-800-437-5914 for assistance in making any personal arrangements for attending the ceremony which might be helpful to you.”

By now, the Fuller and MacDonald families were also protesting publicly. Fuller went so far as to appear at a press conference in New York City in which he displayed the bones to an astonished audience.

As the date set for the funeral neared, Hart began to panic.

“We were approaching Thanksgiving and, you know, I just couldn’t believe that they were going to do this,” she says. “I had reached the limits of my ability to cope. I felt that the Air Force had abandoned me. . . . I’m one of theirs, we’re an Air Force family, but they didn’t care.”

In a last-ditch effort, Hart called Florence Morgan, the Air Force’s general counsel, and asked that her husband’s funeral be postponed. A few days later, Morgan agreed. Hart had no way of knowing that the tide had finally begun to turn.

“I was alarmed with the Pakse case. I think all of us were totally disheartened.”

--Dr. William Maples, member of a board reviewing the Hawaii lab.

By late 1985, U.S. officials expected that their continuing negotiations with the Vietnamese would lead to the return of more combat remains. As a result, the Army asked several forensic scientists to make an independent review of the Central Identification Laboratory to see if it could handle the increased workload.

But the study was also prompted by the growing controversy surrounding the Pakse identifications, acknowledges Maj. Gen. John S. Crosby, assistant Army deputy chief of staff.

Members of the survey team, which visited the lab Dec. 9-12, included Dr. Ellis R. Kerley of the University of Maryland; Dr. Lowell Levine, a forensic odontologist from New York, and Dr. William R. Maples of Gainesville, Fla., vice president of the American Academy of Forensic Science. The team examined all records of the Pakse crash at the lab, a small, barracks-like building on a sprawling Army pier near Pearl Harbor. But they were not able to examine the physical evidence, most of which had already been returned to the families.

“Only two of the cases from Pakse, Laos, could be identified by us with confidence,” their report said. “We were not able to make many of the identifications in these cases that had been made using standard methods with which we were familiar.”

Although the review team concluded that the laboratory was administered well and its staff was well-trained, it found the facilities “between inadequate and barely adequate in most respects.” In their key recommendation, all three agreed that the Army should appoint an internationally known forensic anthropologist to head the lab, with supervisory authority over all scientists there, including Tadao Furue.

In an accompanying report, Maples charged that the Pakse fragments had been improperly identified; that identifications by race, sex and age were not possible in a majority of the cases, and that any other group of forensic experts would have come to the same conclusions about the lab. During subsequent congressional testimony, he said it was not even possible to determine that 13 crewmen had been aboard the plane at the time it crashed.

The review team focused on a controversial procedure used by Furue called morphological approximation. It provides for the identification of human remains by using mere fragments of individual bones.

Forensic scientists long have been able to take a handful of complete bones and--based on key age, sex and racial characteristics--make rough approximations of what a victim looked like, Maples says. But it is difficult, if not impossible, to make specific identifications of a victim’s height, weight and other characteristics with such limited evidence, he adds.

Typically, anthropologists making such estimates allow for a healthy margin of error, preferring to say, for example, that a person’s height ranged from 5 feet, 6 inches to 5 feet, 10 inches, Maples explains. But Furue’s team ignored those caveats, he contends, and used small fragments to make positive identifications and even specific estimates of age, height and build.

The technique may have been useful for “very, very broad estimates,” Maples says, “but nothing like a complete identification. Based on the evidence, there is no technique known to science or even suggested to science that could have identified . . . those individuals.”

“There was no pressure on anyone in this laboratory . . . to make any number of identifications or to do it within any specific amount of time.”

--Lt. Col. Johnie Webb Jr.

Soon after the Army lab report was issued in January, Anne Hart was told that her husband’s funeral had been delayed indefinitely. In April, the Army in formed her that it was “reopening” her husband’s case and that she was welcome to submit additional information. Hart promptly furnished statements from Maples and Kerley that the remains were impossible to identify. On June 10, the identification was rescinded.

“I was elated, sure,” she says. “But I was also very angry. Why did I have to be put through this? Why did the Army do such a thing in the first place?”

Other families who had protested the identifications also wondered how the laboratory could have been so mistaken. MacDonald complained that even after the Army had volunteered to reopen his brother’s case, officials were still offering to bury the remains with a full military funeral.

“How could they offer such a thing, with all that’s happened?” he says. “Why would they still want me to bury those bones if we don’t know who they are?”

Parker continues to display the supposed remains of James Fuller to interested researchers and at public events. He says the Army has offered to quietly rescind the identification of his uncle.

“They want me to give the bones back, but they can’t threaten me, because I’ve got the bones, and they’ll have to take them from me by force. I said they’ll be returned only when Mr. Fuller is declared missing again and they actively look for him.”

In their defense, Webb and other lab officials note that the great majority of their identifications have not been challenged and that most of the Pakse families have buried the remains.

The laboratory has adopted most of the recommendations made by the review team--including increased personnel, changes in procedures and improved lab materials. But Webb acknowledges that the lab has not accepted the report’s most important recommendation: to appoint a more qualified forensic specialist to supervise the laboratory’s scientific personnel, including Furue. Instead, Kerley, who headed the review team, is now a permanent consultant to the lab and will review and approve all identifications.

Maples and other forensic scientists say the Army has not gone far enough in revamping the lab. Kerley himself told a Senate committee earlier this year that his appointment as a consultant was not the “optimum” solution.

Soon after the report was issued, the secretary of the Army directed the lab to stop using Furue’s procedure as a basis for positive identifications.

Webb says the order has been strictly carried out, yet he agrees that the rescinding of Lt. Col. Hart’s identification and other controversies have cast a cloud over the laboratory. “But I’m firmly convinced that in the long run we’re going to have a much better operation,” he says, “If we have lost credibility, . . . I think we’re going to gain back anything we’ve lost.”

Furue stands by his technique and says the criticism has been “insulting” and “caused all of us unnecessary anxiety and doubt and distrust. We are doing our best to make good positive IDs. . . . We have nothing to hide.”

Others are not so sure. “You just have to wonder why they (lab personnel) would have rushed to make so many of those identifications. . . . You wonder if there wasn’t some political pressure they were under to rush through the Pakse cases,” says Charney.

Noting that the 1985 excavation was a diplomatic breakthrough, Maples speculates that the lab may have been under strong pressure to come up with dramatic identifications and thus set the stage for future cooperation with Vietnam and Laos.

At a recent congressional hearing, Sen. Dennis DeConcini (D-Ariz.) questioned whether Army officials had pressured the lab. Rep. William Hendon (R-N.C.) suggests that the Pakse case may have been part of a “larger plan” to rush through identifications and reduce the number of MIAs at any cost.

The most disturbing criticism, however, has come from inside the laboratory itself. Dr. Samuel Strong Dunlap, a forensic anthropologist who resigned from the lab in August, told a House Armed Services Committee hearing in September that he was asked on several occasions by Furue and others to alter his analyses of remains to help make positive identifications.

In one case, he said, lab officials asked him to change one of his earlier reports and identify one set of bone fragments as Caucasian. Dunlap said he refused, noting that “there was nothing inconsistent with it being a Caucasian. (But) there was no skull, there were no important bones for determining race in that set of remains.”

In a second incident, Dunlap said, he was asked to make a more specific estimate of a victim’s age. Dunlap said it would have been irresponsible to do that based on the limited evidence. He charged that lab officials were simply trying to match up the remains with the medical records available.

Army officials strongly deny there was any political pressure on the lab in the Pakse case, but they acknowledge that there were high hopes for the excavation--especially as a steppingstone to future digs.

“If the Vietnamese or Lao perceive that we have an excavation and we get identifications, and then if they begin to perceive that everyone’s going to question the identifications,” a White House official says, “it becomes a question to them of, why do we do this if we’re not going to resolve cases?”

“It all adds up to one question. If we’ve got all these guys missing in Southeast Asia, why aren’t we out looking for them?”

--Anne Hart

Ever since her husband’s plane went down, Hart has clung to the belief that he might still be alive. Like hundreds of other MIA family members, she expects the U.S. government to do everything in its power to investigate reports of Americans in captivity and to bring them or their remains home.

On that much, Hart and the U.S. government agree. But even as the Reagan Administration has stepped up its negotiations with Vietnam and Laos, it has been accused of dragging its feet on the issue. Indeed, Hart and several others filed suit earlier this year, charging that the government was not investigating all possible leads and was suppressing key information.

The friction has led to a bitter split within the League of Families, with Executive Director Griffiths and a majority of board members backing the Administration, while a faction led by Hart and others demands more action.

At the heart of the controversy are 861 firsthand sightings of Americans that the Army has collected from Southeast Asian refugees since 1975.

Pentagon officials say most of the reports have been discounted because they correspond to POWs who were either freed or whose remains have been recovered. Other reports have been ruled out because refugees were thought to be lying--often in the mistaken belief that they could win passage to America. A total of 128 reports are considered active cases.

Administration officials insist that they take the issue seriously and are pursuing “all responsible avenues” to get information.

At the same time, the official says, there is a “flood of misinformation . . . outright falsehoods” that have hampered the government’s efforts. Such controversy, he says, creates “domestic divisiveness” that “plays into Hanoi’s hands--just as it did during the war.”

Back in her kitchen, Anne Hart lights another cigarette and sits close to the telephone. In the last 14 years, she says, her faith in the U.S. government has been badly shaken. Still, she believes it may yet provide a truthful answer about her husband.

“People ask, Why don’t you just get on with your life?” she says. “But I can’t do that. I won’t forget Tom Hart until I know. That’s who I am.”