Vietnam Gives Senators Relics of Lost Americans

Three U.S. senators on Tuesday were given fading photographs, flight suits and other sad relics of American servicemen missing from a war that ended two decades ago but left wounds on both sides.

On what he termed “an extraordinary day,” Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), along with Sens. Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) and Hank Brown (R-Colo.), became the first American officials to tour the Citadel, Hanoi’s equivalent of the Pentagon.

Vietnamese officials also gave the members of the Senate Select Committee on POW-MIA Affairs military logs of downed U.S. aircraft, a U.S. Army survival manual and a flight helmet said to have belonged to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a Navy flier who was shot down over Hanoi and taken prisoner in 1967.

The visit came amid rising optimism that the United States may lift the trade embargo and diplomatic freeze it has maintained against Vietnam since the Communist regime in Hanoi took over South Vietnam in 1975.

U.S. policy has been that relations with Hanoi will not be normalized until Vietnam offers a full accounting of the 2,265 American servicemen missing in the Vietnam War, including 1,657 in Vietnam.

“My hope is that the President will receive the information that we bring back, and that when we meet with him, he will listen carefully to the arguments for why there ought to be a U.S. response of some kind at this point in time,” Kerry said. “You cannot make this a one-way street forever.”

Vietnam’s leaders, eager to mend ties, recently handed over thousands of photographs of Americans taken during the war and are providing access to archives, prisons and military bases.

Daschle raised the possibility of reciprocating by providing information about Vietnam’s MIAs, thought to number about 300,000.

The senators also visited Hanoi’s Central Military Museum, the government’s main depository for items pertaining to the American MIAs.

Museum director Col. Pham Duc Dai said he had two nephews considered missing in action.

In the museum’s main hall, Dai also described how he was in a unit that ambushed four Americans in 1967 and dumped their bodies in a river. He then gave his tiny handwritten diary to the senators to copy.

In Washington, the Pentagon said an American serviceman listed as missing in Vietnam since 1966 has been identified from remains sent back by the Vietnamese in June.

He was identified as Marine Corps Gunnery Sgt. Joseph F. Trujillo, who was lost in Vietnam on Sept. 13, 1966, at age 20. His hometown was listed as Deming, N.M.

His remains will be taken from Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii to Travis Air Force Base in California on Thursday, a Pentagon statement said.