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From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Re: Vietnam wants more MIA help, Ambassador disputes claims

Date: July 11, 2000

Vietnam wants more MIA help, Ambassador disputes claims
San Jose Mercury News July 11, 2000

BY MARK MCDONALD Mercury News Vietnam Bureau

HANOI -- Despite years of assistance in helping the United States find American soldiers missing in action from the Vietnam War, a senior military official in Hanoi says the US government has provided almost no reciprocal help in Vietnam's own attempts to locate some 300,000 of its missing soldiers.

"The United States administration has not given us any help yet," said Col. Do Quang Binh, deputy director of policy for the Ministry of Defense.

"We'd like more cooperation, but I'd like to say that so far we have only received cooperation from non-governmental (veterans) organizations."

US Ambassador Pete Peterson was clearly taken aback by Binh's remarks, especially because they come just as the two countries are about to celebrate five years of full diplomatic relations.

President Clinton normalized relations with communist Vietnam exactly five years ago, on July 11, 1995, a year after the US trade embargo was lifted. Peterson took pointed exception to the colonel's remarks on the MIA issue, saying the United States has given Hanoi "reams of archival material" while opening US military archives to Vietnamese researchers. Peterson said US assistance has helped the Vietnamese locate "well over 800 bodies," and he said there is an agreement pending for US experts to train Vietnamese forensic specialists. "We've actually done a lot," Peterson said. "It's a commitment we're trying to increase."

Washington places a high priority on the search for the remaining 2,017 American MIAs in Southeast Asia, and Peterson has been publicly appreciative of Vietnam's assistance, saying the two countries have built "a real partnership" on the MIA issue. "It's one of our big success stories here," said Peterson, himself a Vietnam veteran and a former prisoner of war in Hanoi.

"This is a very, very serious issue with us. It's the No. 1 issue in our relationship to Vietnam, and it's not taking a back seat to anything we do here." But Binh and other military officers suggest that a so-called partnership on the MIA issue has been anything but.

One US officer acknowledged, for example, that American personnel do not officially participate in Vietnamese searches or excavations. "We don't get involved in that, not at all," said the officer, attached to the US MIA office in Hanoi, which is known as the Joint Task Force-Full Accounting (JTF-FA).

"That's not part of our mission." Binh became angry and shaken when he was asked if US soldiers had provided decent battlefield burials during the Vietnam War. "No, no, no, the Americans didn't bury our Vietnamese properly at all," Binh said as his coterie of military aides nodded in agreement.

"They used earth-moving machines to push large numbers of bodies into mass graves. They also used fuel oil to burn up dead bodies. We have evidence of this from (US) veterans associations.

American soldiers themselves are the living testimony to this." Peterson acknowledged that the battlefield burials of more than 100 soldiers "probably would involve machinery."

"That should not be a surprise," he said. Binh was complimentary of the efforts of individual US veterans who have sent documents, map coordinates and soldiers' personal artifacts to Hanoi.

"That information has been very welcome," he said, "and we'd like even more cooperation." One US expert based in Hanoi said information provided by members of two veterans groups -- the Vietnam Veterans of America and the Veterans of Foreign Wars -- have helped Vietnam locate thousands of its missing soldiers.

"The (US) veterans have been extremely effective," said a JTF-FA supervisor who asked not to be identified. Eddie Pine of Fort Worth is one of those individual veterans who has provided information to the Vietnamese about mass burials of communist soldiers.

In November 1968, Pine was attached to an armored cavalry regiment that saw action near the town of Loc Ninh, in southern Vietnam, near the Cambodian border. After one battle, Pine says, the bodies of about 150 North Vietnamese soldiers were gathered up. "We buried them in a mass grave with a bulldozer," Pine said. Pine returned to Vietnam earlier this year and met with a group of Vietnamese veterans. They had lunch and traded war stories, and Pine gave them map coordinates of the big grave site.

It was not immediately known if the site has been excavated.