Close the Final Chapter : Vietnam War: The families of our MIAs have to accept the sad truth that their loved ones are never coming home.

You see them everywhere in the streets of Hanoi. Armies of ragtag young men, a few with missing limbs, hustling to sell souvenirs to visiting American journalists and businessmen.

Many, if not most of them, are victims of the Vietnam War’s last years, when U.S. bombers conducted intensive round-the-clock bombing raids on Hanoi and Haiphong. Besides those who lost an arm or a leg, there are many more who lost a father or an uncle in combat. And if you take time to talk to them, many will tell you in pidgin English that they have a relative “who disappear” during the war.

The Vietnamese government conservatively estimates there are more than 300,000 Vietnamese MIAs--nearly 200 times as many U.S. servicemen still unaccounted for from that war. Yet nowhere in Hanoi are signs of hostility toward Americans visible today. Indeed, visitors are greeted warmly by the general populace of the city, once a hotbed of anti-Americanism.

I did not serve in the Vietnam War. I was lucky--my draft lottery number was 320. But I feel more than the normal amount of sympathy for the families of American MIAs. My family is one of thousands that have become part of a phenomenon that I call “civilian MIAs.”

My next-youngest brother disappeared 13 years ago. He was, in a very real sense, a casualty of Vietnam. He opposed the war so strongly that when ordered to appear for a physical before induction in the Army, he quit his job and junior college classes and began hitchhiking around the country. We saw him only a few times over the next several years as he slipped further into drug and alcohol abuse. In 1981, his long-distance collect calls stopped coming, and none of us have had any news of him since.

Like other MIA families, we try to convince ourselves that my brother must still be alive out there somewhere, perhaps in a religious commune or in prison. Yet deep in our hearts, we sense the awful truth that no one dares to utter: My brother probably died alone and afraid in some strange city, and now lies buried in an unmarked grave.

There is one fact that has been ignored in the debate over whether to withhold diplomatic recognition of Vietnam over the MIA issue. At the end of World War II, there were nearly 4,800 American military personnel listed as missing in action. Should we have refused recognition of Germany or Japan after that war because thousands of bodies of American servicemen lay unidentified somewhere in the fields of Europe, or scattered across the islands of the Pacific? On the contrary, in 1946, the U.S. government officially declared all personnel missing in action from World War II to be presumed dead.

It is an uncomfortable but undeniable fact that slightly more than 1,600 American MIA families from the Vietnam War are using guilt and political intimidation to pressure the government of the most powerful nation on Earth into refusing to recognize the existence of the world’s 12th most populous nation. If the 75 million people of Vietnam have managed to put the pain and bitter memories of the war behind them--a war that took more than 20 times as many of their countrymen’s lives as it did of ours--why shouldn’t Americans be able to do so as well?

As harsh as it may sound, it’s time for our MIAs’ families to let go of the past and accept the sad truth that their loved ones are never coming home--not even to be buried. While the search for the remains of American MIAs should continue on the chance that some of their remains may be discovered over the next few years, the U.S. government should be judicious enough to extend diplomatic relations to the Republic of Vietnam immediately. Only then can the relatives of our missing servicemen, and the nation as a whole, heal the deepest wounds of the longest and most painful war in American history.