COLUMN ONE : MIA Hunt: The Puzzle of Vietnam : Joint teams dig sand, sift debris and query villagers in their search for remains of missing Americans. Progress is steady but slow, much like U.S. relations with Hanoi.

On a desolate beach buffeted by winds from the South China Sea, a team of American experts in surfer shorts and Vietnamese workers in straw hats struggled to remove the powdery brown sand from an immense hole.

Sweating profusely, the Americans heaved spadefuls of the talcum-like sand into buckets, which were passed along a line of chanting Vietnamese. A gust of wind blew without warning, sending an eddy of sand back into the hole despite a retaining wall improvised from wooden planks.

“The last six days have been unbelievable,” griped U.S. Army Capt. Marshall Nathanson, who wrapped his head in a towel, Bedouin-fashion, against the beating sun. “It’s like trying to hold back water.”

Despite a vacation-like setting, the search party had a somber task. Guided by a toothless Vietnamese Communist Party cadre, the Americans were searching for the graves of two U.S. pilots killed when their small observation plane crashed in 1965.

In a sense, the slowly widening hole on the beach--with the Americans and Vietnamese joined together in a struggle to excavate before the elements fiendishly filled it up again--was a metaphor for the current state of U.S.-Vietnamese relations and the search for servicemen missing from the Vietnam War: Progress is being made, but it is tedious and incremental, not dramatic.

Since the signing of an agreement last October to end the civil war in Cambodia, resolving the cases of 2,267 Americans still listed as unaccounted for in Indochina has stood as the only impediment to normalization of relations between the two countries.

In late February, the United States and Vietnam carried out investigations and excavations in three southern Vietnamese provinces--the largest effort of the 16 joint investigations held so far. In response, the United States offered stepped-up financial aid to Vietnam of about $3 million a year.

The problems the American teams face are evident from the searches being conducted in the area around Ho Chi Minh City, the former southern capital known as Saigon.

Truong Long Hoa village is in the Mekong Delta less than 75 miles south of Ho Chi Minh City, in what in 1965 was a “liberated area” controlled entirely by the Viet Cong, the Communist guerrillas.

But the proximity on the map is deceptive. To get there, it takes eight hours by car, including a packed ferry ride, followed by two hours’ journey in a motorized sampan. At the end, there is a half-mile hike through fields of mangroves to the sea.

James Coyle, a Southeast Asian scholar who was the U.S. team leader for the excavation on the beach, visited the area in 1989 and interviewed two witnesses who pinpointed the site of the two graves. But when Coyle returned to the village in February along with his 12-man team from Hawaii, the witnesses were far less precise.

“We were just not equipped to handle such a big area,” said Coyle, whose group includes U.S. Army mortuary technicians, bomb disposal experts, interpreters, even a medic, but no heavy excavation teams.

Under the guidance of a civilian archeologist on contract to the Pentagon, the U.S. team began excavating a hole 36 feet long and 48 feet wide in hopes of hitting one of the original graves.

“In this case, we are either going to hit them or not,” said Peter Miller, the archeologist. “We can spend a lot of time and money digging up this beach.”

Pham Van Lich, a party cadre in the village, recalled that the Army light observation plane crashed in the sea in 1965 and the two bodies were washed ashore. He remembered the spot where one pilot was buried because it was next to a path that has led from his house to the sea since he was a boy.

One of the Americans, who had a severe head wound, floated ashore almost as soon as the plane crashed at dawn. The second pilot washed up on the beach that evening, and people in the village were too scared to go near the corpse.

It fell to Truong Minh Khanh, as the oldest man in the village, to take charge of the burial. Khanh, now 63 and a former political commissar, provided the general location of the graves to the search team.

Khanh vividly remembered the white emblem one pilot wore on his shoulder. Grabbing a reporter’s pen, he wrote out in shaky capital letters an American name, which Coyle said was remarkably close to the name of one of the lost pilots. (As a condition of being allowed to visit the crash site, reporters agreed not to print any names of missing servicemen.)

“It’s good for the families to see the remains of their relatives again,” Lich said. “It’s a right and proper thing for us to do.”

While everyone in this case was willing to help, conditions conspired against the searchers. Heavy winds made digging difficult. The U.S. team spent personal funds to buy wood in nearby villages to shore up the excavation site.

Food and water supplies were running out, and the visitors had only two more weeks before they had to pack up and leave. The heat took its toll--one member of the team flew home, unable to handle another day in the broiling sun.

The unearthing of these 27-year-old remains had become a priority because a Vietnamese refugee reported seeing one of the missing pilots in a Cambodian prison camp in 1970. That suggested he survived the crash and was taken prisoner. Finding the remains would put the doubts to rest, but as the team’s deadline approached, the chances of success appeared slim.

The United States has presented the Vietnamese with a list of what the Americans term “discrepancy cases.” The term means Washington believes that Vietnam knows more than it has divulged, usually involving Americans last seen alive as prisoners during the war and never heard from again.

The first list of 119 cases was presented by retired Army Gen. John W. Vessey Jr., a presidential emissary for MIAs, in 1987. Since that time, the two sides have been able to determine the fate of 61 missing persons.

But even as limited progress was made, the list has grown to 135 with the addition of new cases.

In March, one investigation took place in Son Be province, a two-hour drive northwest of Ho Chi Minh City, where the Americans and Vietnamese were investigating 15 cases involving 22 missing Americans.

At a briefing, Pham Van Ruyen, head of the Vietnamese team, said that because the area had been engulfed in almost constant warfare, it was difficult to find witnesses. No records were kept by the Vietnamese, he said.

James Webb, the U.S. team leader, agreed that the investigators often have trouble following the thread of a story more than 20 years old.

In one case, a former nurse in a Viet Cong jungle hospital said he could help find the spot where an American POW was buried, but he had forgotten where the hospital itself was located. The team had to find another witness to help pinpoint the hospital before they could even begin to look for the remains.

“It’s like a jigsaw puzzle, only you don’t have all the pieces,” Webb said.

Add to that the physical difficulties of the search. Webb described how during one investigation a boat carrying an American team sprang a leak and had to be abandoned, and another sampan broke down and had to be lashed together with others and floated downstream. Another search will use elephants because the terrain is so difficult.

But Webb also politely disputed Ruyen on a key point: The U.S. government knew, he said, that the Viet Cong kept detailed records, including death certificates for Americans who died in captivity. The United States is seeking access to those documents.

In one village, an American team found two witnesses who knew where an Army observation plane had crashed. Suddenly, a witness came forward who volunteered that he had buried an American pilot’s decomposed remains in his plasticized aviation map after scavenging the airplane’s wreckage for scrap.

The American team then drove in a convoy of jeeps to the site. As each bucket of topsoil was carefully removed, American experts passed the dirt through a large metal screen looking for clues.

Almost immediately, they found shards of metal and a piece of a watch. Although there was a palpable air of expectation, the searchers found no remains.

But some disturbing questions also arose: If the Americans could locate two witnesses who knew the exact location of the crash site in a morning’s work, why had the Vietnamese never before found these witnesses or searched the crash site for clues?

Such nagging doubts continue to plague U.S.-Vietnamese relations despite the obvious progress that has been achieved.

Last May, the two nations agreed on the establishment of a U.S. POW/MIA Affairs office in Hanoi, the first permanent U.S. presence in Vietnam since the end of the war.

Located on a floor of the Boss Hotel, which is owned by Vietnam’s public security police, the U.S. POW/MIA office has a staff of five Americans headed by Garnett E. Bell, a charming Texan who speaks fluent Vietnamese and who has been following MIA affairs since 1968, when he was still in the U.S. Army infantry in Vietnam.

As much a diplomat as an investigator, Bell coordinates with Hanoi’s Office of Seeking Missing Personnel, requesting access to witnesses and trying to pry open files and archives that have been sealed for years.

In light of past hostility, Bell regards the current state of cooperation as “good” but insufficient.

“Obviously, we don’t have full cooperation,” Bell said. “I mean, they haven’t thrown the doors open and given us complete access to the records, nor have they given us complete access to former cadres who were involved in the capture, detention, evacuation and medical treatment of U.S. prisoners of war. We’ve had limited access to witnesses and records. That’s why I say it’s short of full cooperation.”

The Vietnamese offer another perspective. Ho Xuan Dich, who heads the Vietnamese search for the missing, said in an interview that the U.S. side had set such stringent criteria for resolving cases that it is virtually impossible to satisfy them nearly two decades after the war. “I sometimes wonder whether the American side really wants to solve the MIA question,” Dich said.

The Vietnamese, who remain a Communist-controlled society, are clearly still suspicious of granting access to Americans, especially investigators from the Defense Intelligence Agency, the military’s equivalent of the CIA, who are presumably regarded as spies in their midst.

Vietnamese officials have not permitted Americans to see their maps or to bring in any communications equipment. Before giving permission for a facsimile machine, the Vietnamese extracted a pledge that the Americans would not send any encrypted messages--a rather blatant admission that they were eavesdropping on American communications.

There are other strange occurrences.

Members of the U.S. team, for example, recount the “green leaf” incident, in which an official Vietnamese witness led the Americans to a newly discovered crash site. After digging for a few minutes, the Americans unearthed a rare prize: the wreckage of an airplane that bore serial numbers that could be matched in Washington.

But under the wreckage, the Americans found a green leaf, indicating it had been planted in the ground only a few days earlier.

Similarly, a large number of the human remains that have been returned to the United States show signs that they have been stored since the war.

“In some cases, the Vietnamese will have processed the remains, such as gluing bones together. It’s obvious that the remains have not been lying above ground,” said Col. Johnnie Webb, the head of the U.S. Army’s Central Identification Laboratory Hawaii--CILHI.

This has raised the question of whether the Vietnamese are warehousing remains, holding back their release to create an impression of cooperation with Washington. In fact, an ethnic Chinese mortician who emigrated to the United States testified that he had visited such a warehouse in Hanoi.

Dich, the head of the Vietnamese search efforts, vehemently denied that the government was warehousing remains. So many people in the United States have publicly offered rewards for remains over the years, Dich said, that individual Vietnamese were digging up graves and unearthing crash sites in hopes of receiving money or gaining a visa to the United States. Six families in the Ho Chi Minh City area alone, he said, had turned in 742 sets of remains in hopes of earning a reward.

“We spend much time explaining this is a humanitarian issue, not a commercial issue,” Dich said.

A correspondent accompanied Dich on a daylong trip to a village in Hai Hung province northeast of Hanoi, where a woman had sent a letter that began: “I have the remains of an American pilot. Please come to discuss how I can return these remains. All is ready.”

The woman, Ho Thi Hong, had provided the name and dog-tag number of a missing American pilot who was known to have crashed in the same region, which Dich felt could not have been obtained without actually seeing the remains. But when Dich arrived, the woman had changed her story: A friend now held the remains, and he would hand them over for no less than $200,000.

“As a matter of policy, the U.S. government does not offer any reward for remains,” Bell said.

Apart from the nagging issue of normalization of relations, the current impetus to resolve the MIA problem is largely the result of domestic political pressure in the United States, where “MIA” days are still observed in most states, 17 years after the war ended.

Nothing demonstrated the domestic political muscle of the MIA problem like the appearance last year of a photo purporting to show three American pilots in captivity in Indochina.

The “three amigos” photo, as analysts dubbed it, was finally traced to a Soviet magazine in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and discredited. But the furor it created has transformed the entire effort.

In the months since the photo appeared, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney created a “humanitarian task force” called Joint Task Force Full Accounting, based in Hawaii. Led by Brig. Gen. Thomas H. Needham, the task force’s staff is set to rise from fewer than 50 last year to 150 next year, with teams flying out of Honolulu to visit Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

Anyone looking into the POW/MIA issue is soon confronted by a dizzying array of statistics. For example, of the 2,267 people listed as unaccounted for in Indochina, in reality only 1,172 are in the category of prisoner of war/missing in action. Another 1,095, or nearly half the total, fall into the category Killed in Action/Body Not Recovered.

The KIA/BNR description applies to hundreds of cases of airmen whose planes went into the sea, crewmen of helicopters that exploded in full view of American witnesses and even soldiers who were seen killed but whose bodies were simply not found.

But until the remains are located, each case is listed as unaccounted for, which suggests that there are several hundred cases, at a minimum, that will never be fully resolved.

Of the 61 “discrepancy” cases in which the fate of a missing person was determined since 1987, only five involved remains that were recovered in joint field operations between the Americans and Vietnamese, and 17 were unilaterally handed over by the Vietnamese.

But 35 were cases in which there was evidence that the servicemen had died but no remains were found, and four more were cases in which there was no likelihood of ever finding the remains.

While these 39 cases are regarded as resolved by the Vietnamese, the Americans consider them still “unaccounted for.”

“You can still be unaccounted for when your fate has been determined,” explained Maj. Gary Patton, an Army press officer who accompanied a recent high-level delegation to Hanoi.