Issue of MIAs in Vietnam Losing Steam

On the official records, it’s Case No. 1474: two American pilots--a captain and a lieutenant--shot down on a bombing run over the jungles of Vietnam in 1969.

For 28 years, the unnamed hill where they crashed, 130 miles southwest of Da Nang, lay as undisturbed as a ghost-town cemetery, even as the lost airmen became part of what for the U.S. is the great unresolved issue of the Vietnam War--the fate of 1,568 Americans still listed as missing.

Now, just as excavation crews have descended upon the site, some U.S. officials and veterans groups are privately raising a question no politician would dare ask publicly: At what point should the United States say it has done everything possible to account for its missing and start winding down a campaign that has cost hundreds of millions of dollars?

Congressional Mantra

Although the MIAs are a mantra for every member of Congress visiting Vietnam--the issue, each is quick to point out in news conferences, is the first topic raised with local officials--the fact is that MIA groups no longer have the access they once did on Capitol Hill. And, U.S. diplomats say, the issue is gradually being relegated to a less prominent position on the agenda of foreign affairs.

“To a large extent, the whole MIA issue was manufactured,” said Michael Leaveck, associate director of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation in Washington. “The Reagan administration used it for political purposes; the Bush administration perpetuated it; a cottage industry profited from it; some political forces used it as leverage for a broader agenda.

“I would never deny the importance of putting a family’s pain to rest, and I know there are still a lot of unresolved feelings, but at some point you have to say there is nothing left we can do that will produce--alive--returning Americans. You have to accept a certain number of unresolved missing cases whenever you go to war.”

Actually, it may be nature itself that determines the eventual end of the MIA campaign, because before long there won’t be anything left to find. In Vietnam’s acidic soil, bones disappear in 30 years or less. Of all the body parts that can be used for identification, only teeth have an indefinite life span--and, in the new-growth tangle of thick jungles, they can be impossible to find.

Perhaps mindful of nature’s deadline, a dozen U.S. military men and women arrived recently to set up a tented encampment on the long-ignored battlefield near the Ho Chi Minh Trail where the two pilots’ F-4 Phantom crashed. They were joined by a team of Vietnamese army men who a generation ago would have been the Americans’ mortal enemies. And for eight hours a day, six days a week, they dug, sifted and marked the hillside with tape, searching for clues that may have lain hidden and that with luck and perseverance might bring closure to Case No. 1474.

The helicopter that circled over the sweating excavators one day was made in Russia, was piloted by a Vietnamese and carried an American ambassador. Normally, Douglas “Pete” Peterson is a gregarious man, but on the 50-minute flight from Da Nang the ambassador had sat silently, staring out the small, round window, his chin resting in the palm of one hand. The Vietnam veteran watched the jungle whisk by, and he knew that, had history taken a different twist, it could have been his remains that the joint task force was searching for.

“How can you put a value on an effort like this that is unprecedented in history?” Peterson asked the GIs after his chopper landed in a blinding whirl of dust. “You know, sometimes people ask how many dollars it costs to look for our MIAs. Well, I think we should tell them proudly how much we’re spending.”

The search for America’s missing costs about $100 million a year. But that is money well spent, the young soldiers on the mission said, and one of them, born a year or two after the last Americans fled Saigon, in 1975, asked Peterson, “Were you ever in Vietnam during the war, sir?”

“Yes, for quite a while,” replied the ambassador, a former Air Force pilot who was shot down in 1966 on his 67th mission over the country and spent more than six years as a prisoner of war.

Linchpin of U.S. Policy

The question of the MIAs’ fate has been kept alive by bereaved families, concerned veterans, a few congressional leaders and a specialized business that has profited by not letting the controversy fade.

It is the tit-for-tat linchpin on which U.S. policy toward postwar Vietnam is based: Hanoi’s cooperation on MIA accountability in return for Washington’s normalization of diplomatic and economic relations.

Those in the United States who could never accept a Vietnam lost to communism seized on the MIAs as a wedge to keep Hanoi and Washington apart, convinced that Vietnam would never be a partner in the search for missing GIs. It was a way, they believed, of keeping Vietnam isolated indefinitely, but they had it wrong.

Vietnam’s cooperation, long in coming but now substantial, has made the MIA issue the bridge to an increasingly fruitful relationship between two former enemies.

“I’m enormously impressed with the cooperation that exists on the POW/MIA issue,” U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin said in April during a visit to Vietnam. Lt. Col. John Kelly, commander of the U.S. detachment for MIA accountability, concurs: “Cooperation is excellent. Otherwise we couldn’t be out here doing our job.”

The Vietnamese secretly let U.S. searchers into Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum when rumors surfaced that American prisoners were being held there in underground caves. They have allowed U.S. teams into cemeteries under the cover of darkness to reinter bodies that reports indicated might be those of Americans. They’ve opened archives, handed over 28,000 documents and let U.S. military personnel fly off to remote villages on an hour’s notice and check reports that remains had been found or an American prisoner of war seen.

Unprecedented Access

“Although questions remain about archival access, the Vietnamese military has let us do things the American military would never allow a foreign country to do,” said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). “We’ve gone into their prisons, gone into their defense headquarters. Can you imagine us letting a bunch of Vietnamese into the Pentagon to run around under similar circumstances?”

McCain, shot down over Hanoi in 1967, spent six years as a POW, volunteering nothing but his name, rank and serial number during months of interrogation and torture. Once freed, he wrote a magazine article titled “You Get to Hate Them So Bad That It Gives You Strength.”

Later, after Vietnam began cooperating on MIAs, McCain became a leading advocate of reconciliation and tried to move relations beyond the single issue of accountability. A flood of anonymous mail poured into his office, branding him the “Manchurian candidate” and accusing him of collaborating with the enemy.

“Many people,” he said, “don’t want to see this issue go away.”

More than 80,000 Americans remain listed as missing from World War II, but, as a victor in that conflict, the United States had unrestricted access to battlefields and archives in Europe and Asia. An additional 8,000 Americans are still officially missing from the Korean War, but, as part of the armistice, the U.S. was allowed to conduct thorough searches for their remains. But in Vietnam--where 300,000 North Vietnamese soldiers are listed as missing, in addition to the 1,500-plus Americans (including 23 civilians and a Marine believed to have drowned while surfing)--the United States initially encountered only stony silence, broken by an occasional release of remains when Hanoi wanted to curry favor.

Hanoi Perplexed

The Bush and Clinton administrations both tied improved diplomatic relations to increase cooperation on MIAs. Hanoi was perplexed. The government didn’t take linkage seriously at first, nor did it understand the emotional depth of Americans’ commitment to bringing their sons and husbands home.

“We’ve fought wars before, and, when they were over, we exchanged prisoners and that was it,” said Le Van Bang, Vietnam’s ambassador to the United States. “The unaccounted-for issue wasn’t even raised. So this was an issue many Vietnamese had a hard time understanding.”

In 1992, a significant breakthrough came when the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation sponsored Nguyen Ngoc Hung’s trip to the United States.

Hung, a former soldier who fought the Americans for six years and is now a university professor of English in Hanoi, is believed to be the first North Vietnamese whom Washington allowed to travel freely in the United States after the war. Moderate, articulate and non-ideological, he spoke at colleges, on talk-radio shows, in town forums, often encountering protests and hostile questions.

“I was amazed how the MIA issue had galvanized the United States,” he said. “I’d pull into a gas station in Georgia, and every car seemed to have an American flag and one of those POW/MIA stickers on it.”

When he returned to Hanoi, he was debriefed at the foreign affairs and interior ministries. Well, officials said, it looks like just a matter of a short time before Washington normalizes relations, right? Dead wrong, Hung replied: Relations are not going anywhere until the MIA issue is resolved.

Improved Cooperation

Cooperation improved, and the Joint Task Force for Full Accountability was set up that year to work in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Since then, it has repatriated the remains of 293 service members killed in Vietnam and identified 95 of them. An additional 568 case files have been stamped “no further pursuit,” meaning that investigations and inspections have failed to turn up evidence or leads.

Although returns are diminishing with the passage of time and there has never been any credible evidence of Americans being held prisoner in Vietnam since McCain, Peterson and the other POWs were released in 1973, the task force still solicits fresh information, advertising in Vietnam’s yellow pages and running TV ads. Its headquarters is marked on most tourist maps.

Much of the information the task force receives--none of which it pays for--leads nowhere. Sometimes, the bones that villagers believe to be American are those of a Vietnamese or an animal. Other times, “American GIs” seen in a remote village turn out to be Australian backpackers.

*

Investigators in the United States also have had to deal with phony dog tags, doctored photographs and deliberately misleading information conveyed by people who had hoped to profit by keeping alive the hopes of MIA families.

Still, Dolores Alfond of the National Alliance of Families, based in Bellevue, Wash., said: “I believe there are Americans left alive over there.” Her brother, a pilot, has been missing since 1967.

“The Vietnamese probably move them around and out of the way when Americans come into a village. The Americans don’t get to talk to anyone whose story hasn’t been rehearsed and checked out by the Vietnamese authorities. So basically, the statements you hear in the media from the joint task force are lies and misrepresentations.”

At the isolated site southwest of Da Nang, the joint task force’s excavation around the crash crater had grown to half a square mile by the time of Ambassador Peterson’s visit. The F-4 Phantom was lugged away by villagers years ago, part by part, and sold as scrap metal, and the acidic soil had obliterated any trace of bone fragments.

Only the most meticulous efforts resulted in the discovery of a few clues: a pocket knife, a boot sole, a life raft, a seat buckle, a portion of a helmet. They were not enough to prove that two men had died in the vicinity, not enough to establish anyone’s identity--as just the discovery of a tooth might have done.

“You’re disappointed when you don’t find more, when there aren’t remains to send back so a family can have closure,” said Denny Danielson, a civilian anthropologist with the task force who fought in this same jungle as a Marine in 1966.

“But beyond that, what keeps crossing my mind out here is that I was one of the lucky ones. I got home. These guys didn’t.”