U.S. Remains Recovered in Vietnam; Deaths of Captives Told

U.S. teams have recovered remains believed to be of missing American servicemen and heard villagers’ accounts of others who died in captivity, a team member said Monday.

Kim Schneider, an anthropologist with a U.S. military search effort, said bones were found last week near a wrecked T-28D Trojan aircraft that smashed into a mountain near Laos in 1967 during the Vietnam War. Two crewmen were missing in the crash.

Villagers told U.S. investigators of another case in which an American soldier captured by North Vietnamese guerrillas was shot to death by a nervous fighter who had been told to watch him.

Another American, injured when he parachuted from his damaged plane, reportedly died in captivity from his wounds, Schneider told a reporter in Dong Hoi, in the central province of Quang Binh.

Villagers elsewhere described the final hours of an American, injured in a parachute jump, who communicated with a rescue helicopter by radio until guerrillas found and shot him.

Unanswered questions about the fate of missing Americans is the major remaining obstacle to normalization of relations between the United States and Vietnam. The United States, citing increased Vietnamese cooperation toward achieving a full accounting, has begun to relax its decades-old embargo against Hanoi.