Remains of 9 More MIAs Sent Home
The U.S. military Tuesday sent home nine more sets of remains believed to be those of servicemen killed in the Vietnam War and said Vietnamese cooperation in the search for American war dead has improved since the economic embargo was lifted.
Nine wooden boxes of fragments--five discovered by joint U.S.-Vietnamese search teams at crash and burial sites and four handed in by Vietnamese villagers--were placed in metal caskets and loaded onto a U.S. Air Force C-141 transport plane.
The remains were flown to Hawaii, where military forensic and dental experts will try to make positive identifications.
They were turned up by eight teams that investigated more than 60 MIA cases and excavated 12 burial or crash sites during a search that ended March 22.
The search was the first since President Clinton lifted the 30-year-old U.S. economic embargo against Hanoi in early February.
Clinton said when he lifted the embargo that the action was the best way to help resolve the fate of 2,238 servicemen, mostly airmen, still listed as missing in Indochina.
But some opponents of the move feared the Vietnamese would stop cooperating in the MIA search effort once the embargo was lifted.
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