A Quest for Truth : Vietnam vet Anne Label hoped to cleanse her soul of war’s pain. Instead, she opened old wounds.

She had been there before, to China Beach and Da Nang and up the fabled Marble Mountain, working as an Air Force medic in a country heavy with the stench of death that was the war in Vietnam.

At the U.S. field hospital in 1970, soldiers were shot and dying. Anne Label knew some of them, including her fiance, an Air Force flier lost in combat. Others were soldiers without limbs, soldiers without hands, soldiers who could not write home. So she wrote their letters for them and, over time, could no longer bear the stress of trying to save lost lives.

Anne Label cracked up. She was sent home after suffering a nervous breakdown. She resigned from the Air Force, and for the next quarter of a century she locked away her past, forgot Vietnam. It was only after her wedding that she was even able to tell her husband that he had married a veteran.

That much of Label’s personal odyssey, while unique in its particulars, is of a familiar type for those who bear the emotional scars of Vietnam.

What happened next is not familiar at all. Label, now a medical-textbook illustrator and mother of two little girls in Westlake Village, followed a different road--one that she now dearly wishes she had avoided.

She found a whole new way to make Vietnam’s agony live on. Hoping to cleanse her soul of the guilt that rode with her on her helicopter flight out, last summer she went back to Vietnam as a tourist, planning to make a charitable donation to help rebuild that ill-fated country.

Instead she came upon strings of dog tags she believes may have belonged to missing American GIs. She was given the decaying skull of what could be a dead soldier.

It brought back the nightmare, made all the worse when U.S. military officials working in Vietnam dismissed her evidence as phony and told her that she had been duped by a Vietnamese subculture that preys on the good intentions of well-meaning Americans.

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She had gone back looking for salvation. She left with a suitcase of sorrow and a new and broiling anger over the U.S. legacy in Vietnam.

“I couldn’t wait to leave that country again,” she said. “I ran out of there.”

Sgt. Stephen E. Thompson, a career Army field investigator who has spent five years in Southeast Asia hunting for clues to American MIAs, had never met anyone like her in Vietnam. He remembered that she seemed so bent on trying to absolve herself of the blood spilled in Indochina. He had seen others with similarly noble aims, but nothing like this, least of all a female veteran knocking on his door in Ho Chi Minh City with what appeared to be more than 2,000 American dog tags and the skull and teeth of a dead man.

Thompson, who commands a unit assigned to search for the remains of Vietnam War veterans, and other Pentagon officials said they reviewed the dog tags and twice sent the skull out for forensic examinations. None of it turned out to be authentic, Thompson said. Rather, he said, Label was most likely duped by Vietnamese traders who deal in fake booty and hope to make a U.S. dollar off American naivete.

“I think her intentions were probably honorable, but she got caught up in it and saw herself as somebody trying to do the right thing,” Thompson said. “Maybe now she realizes she was taken and that perhaps is hardest of all for her.”

Forty-two years old, with rich black hair and eyes as dark or darker, Label cannot hide her anger over how she says she was treated by Thompson and other U.S. military officials. She is stunned that she was so quickly dismissed as a rube.

Since returning to Southern California, she has managed to channel her anger into work with veterans groups. It has helped her embrace her troubled past. She has joined the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post in Thousand Oaks. She purchased personalized license plates that identify her as a AMVET.”

“She’s very gung-ho now on veterans issues and especially MIAs,” said Gerald Reingans, past commander of the VFW Post named after Eric J. Huberth, a 25-year-old Air Force captain from Thousand Oaks when his plane was lost over Cambodia and he joined the ranks of the missing.

But does he actually believe that some of Label’s dog tags, including one she asserts belonged to Huberth himself, can be real? Does he really think that the skull and the teeth are from one of the unaccounted Americans in Southeast Asia?

“It’s possible,” Reingans said. “Anything is possible.”

Tony Diamond, who runs BRAVO--the Brotherhood Rally of All Veterans Organizations--in Thousand Oaks, does not doubt her at all.

“I believe her story because of the sincerity I feel in her,” said Diamond, chain-smoking cigarettes in the BRAVO headquarters office not far from Label’s home. “Let me tell you: Her word is enough for me.

“And what she has been through, I’ve been down some of those same dark paths. But most especially I believe her because of how the Army has treated her.”

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“I am appalled and I am angry and I am hurt that the American Army would do this to me,” Label said. “I was no threat to them, but I think I embarrassed them because I came up with some items they couldn’t find.”

Label, the wife of a Southern California neurosurgeon, returned to Vietnam to help support a school in Hue, just north of Da Nang. The elementary school for poor Vietnamese lacks even toilets and water fountains, and Label agreed to donate $1,000 a month to the school.

She also did some sightseeing and shopping. Near China Beach, she met some street vendors. One said she was the daughter of a dead Viet Cong commander.

Label said this woman told how her father, during the war, hoarded weapons and dog tags and scrap metal taken from downed planes, and how he hid them in caves inside the nearby Marble Mountain range. The huge rocks of limestone and marble are home to dozens of caverns, which were used by Viet Cong guerrilla fighters as both sniper posts and hiding spots.

The woman told how her father, on one of the last occasions that he spoke to her, advised her to go back and sell the metal if the family needed money. Her father died in the war, and now the family was poor and the woman wanted $20 for the dog tags.

Label bought them, about 2,500 of them. Looped together in strings, the tags were dirty and spotty with what Label described from her medical training as blood. The tags also were worn and corroded and, in many cases, the names could not be made out. In addition, many of the serial numbers on the tags were no longer decipherable.

She also said she was led one night by a young man to a “very small, a very poor village which I did not get the name of.” There, she was told that villagers were superstitious about a small burial site near the scene where a U.S. helicopter had once crash-landed.

They took her to a burial site and unearthed what she said was a man’s skull and what was left of his jaw and teeth. Wrapped inside the eye and nose cavity, she said, was a chain and a dog tag belonging to a Marine identified only as E.A. Baker.

“They wanted these bones out of their village,” she said. “They were poor people who make 40 cents every other day taking firewood to market, and they were superstitious and they did not want the American soldiers to return and find them.”

In Ho Chi Minh City, she turned over the material--all of it--to Thompson and his crew. But she said she was immediately met with disinterest and skepticism. She said they told her she had been duped by Vietnamese traders.

The officials declined to keep the dog tags after examining them and concluding that they were fake. But they did accept the skull, and they promised to keep her informed on their progress in determining its origin, she said. She never heard from them again.

Label said she didn’t know what to do with the dog tags. She was afraid to take them to the airport, where she feared she might set off metal detectors and/or prompt Vietnamese officials to detain her. So she stayed up late three nights in her hotel room, writing down the names on the tags. She copied about 2,000 of them. She gave most of the names to Thompson, she said, and finally headed for the airport with her baggage and about 125 names.

There she reluctantly tossed the dog tags in the trash.

Thompson says the tags are part of a vast underground industry run by Vietnamese who make and sell them for money or for visas to get out of that country. “All the names were checked and none of them matched,” he said.

But of the 125 names Label brought back on her hotel stationery, about a dozen appeared to match the names of the dead memorialized on the walls of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. Two other names matched with MIAs. But the serial numbers were gone from both tags, making a positive identification impossible.

The first was Capt. Huberth. His mother, Jeanne Huberth of Mesa, Ariz., said only one boot belonging to the co-pilot was ever recovered. After all these years, she has concluded her son must be dead.

Could this now be her son’s lost tag? “Anything is possible over there,” she said. “I have no idea.”

The second MIA was Marine Corps Capt. Richard A. Miller, 26, of New York. He and three colleagues were lost during a combat mission in South Vietnam when they were shot down by enemy fire.

His brother--Eric N. Miller, an accountant in Westford, Mass.--said he believes that Richard survived the crash but was later captured and killed. It is only intuition that drives this belief. In the past, a pistol and the dog tag of one of the other men have been recovered. And now comes his brother’s dog tag?

“The Viet Cong could have kept his dog tag, so I don’t know,” Miller said. “It doesn’t surprise me that it could be his dog tag.”

The skull is another matter.

Thompson said it was examined by forensic anthropologists both in Hanoi and in Hawaii, where the Vietnam recovery team is headquartered. Exhaustive examinations determined it was human, he said, but also “definitely” Mongoloid. In other words, it was not Caucasian.

There are two Bakers who were Marines and who died in Vietnam and who could match the dog tag found with the skull. But the serial number on the tag was gone, making it unclear whether either of the Bakers was the right soldier.

One was Cpl. Ernest Austin Baker Jr. of Opelika, Ala., killed in May, 1968. But his mother, Kathleen Baker, said her son’s body was brought home and buried in Alabama.

The other was Lt. Cpl. Elwood A. Baker of Battiest, Okla., lost in June, 1967. He was also brought home and buried, but his family said military authorities would not allow them to view the body because they said it was disfigured.

“They said we would regret it if we looked in the casket,” said his sister, Wanda Bohannon, a classroom tutor in Battiest. “They said it was best we didn’t look inside.”

Told that it might not be her brother’s skull that Label found anyway because the Pentagon said it was Mongoloid, Bohannon grew very quiet for a long time. Then she said something that made it clear she believes it might be her brother.

“We are Native American,” she said. “We are full-blooded Choctaw Indian.”

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The truth, like so much that haunts the debate over whether Americans were left behind in Southeast Asia, will probably never be told.

Occasionally, stories such as Label’s journey back to Vietnam surface and fire up the debate. Rarely do they end in any definitive conclusions. This one does not.

Label and the countless other veterans who cannot let go of that war plod on with their scarred lives.

“The Army assumes I’m a stupid, naive housewife who was off on a little vacation,” she said, now back to her routine of driving the kids to school and doing volunteer hospital work for the local VFW.

“The Army is bigger than me,” she said. “Maybe I’m ready now to give up and let them win.”