News-Info-Alerts

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Re: POW-MIA Familes Respond to Vietnam Visit

Date: November 20, 2000

"For kin of MIAs, president's trip stirs pain, anger
Monday, November 20, 2000
By CHRIS McGANN SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

When you ask Dolores Alfond about U.S. policy in Vietnam, she talks tough. But ask her about the day she learned her brother had been shot down in Vietnam, and words stick in her throat as she chokes back tears.

On that warm June morning, she had just started planning her day when her husband returned home from his shoe factory job oddly early. He'd received a call from her parents in Colorado. It was 1967 -- "a thousand years ago," Alfond said yesterday after bridling her emotions.

Discussing President Clinton's just-ended trip to Vietnam, her pain turned to anger.

"What did he do? He just went over there and stood next to a place where they were digging," Alfond said, referring to a crash site of an American warplane. "He didn't ask about live Americans, he didn't ask about remains that they have. It's an insult to other families of missing soldiers and myself."

On Friday, Clinton watched excavation teams search for remains of an American fighter pilot downed on a bombing run 33 years ago. He praised Vietnam for its help in trying to account for missing Americans. He also handed over U.S. documents to help Hanoi determine the fate of 300,000 missing Vietnamese.

Other relatives of MIAs share Alfond's displeasure.

Gwen Davis of Vancouver said that by lifting sanctions against Vietnam, Clinton left no leverage whatsoever for the families of MIAs.

She questions why only two people of MIA families accompanied Clinton to Vietnam, but U.S. corporate executives numbered in the dozens.

"To me, it's like a slap in the face," Davis said. The Vietnam visit "was for business reasons only."

Davis' brother, Harley H. Hall, a Navy Blue Angel commander, was shot down in 1973, just 10 hours before a cease-fire. The Defense Department told Davis that her brother's was one of the most compelling cases, if not the most compelling case, for capture, it ever reviewed.

Although Defense officials recovered three of his front teeth and gave them to her in a plastic bag, she has no sense of closure.

"Three teeth does not a brother make," said Davis, adding that while the teeth were confirmed as her brother's, they showed signs of extraction marks and extensive disease, which indicate they were removed while he was alive.

Both Davis and Alfond believe Vietnamese officials kept detailed records of every downed American plane, which could provide answers and bring closure for many MIA relatives still living in uncertainty.

"My brother has a daughter who was 5 when he was shot down and a son who was born two months after. They deserve to know what happened to him," Davis said.

Alfond is chairwoman of the National Alliance of Families, a group calling for more information about Americans who were captured or missing in action in Vietnam. Her years-long pursuit of the questions that Clinton didn't ask has included meeting with experts, ambassadors -- and the president himself.

When Clinton first took office, she asked him to find out about live Americans. And she asked him not to approve international financing for or to lift the trade embargo on Vietnam until the government there agreed to full cooperation with an American MIA search.

Clinton assured her at the time that POWs and MIAs were among the nation's top priorities. But he eased trade sanctions in 1994. And, Alfond said, he has done little to fulfill his promises.

The Central Intelligence Agency still refuses to declassify information about American POWs and MIAs.

"If we don't declassify the information, how can we expect that of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, China and Russia?" she asked.

What happened to her brother, Victor J. Apodaca, one of the 1,498 American servicemen still considered MIA, remains clouded.

Monsoon weather prevented helicopters from going in for a rescue, but reports that at least one rescue beeper was detected at the crash site, and a mountain of documents from which Alfond has parsed a sketchy picture, leave her heart in limbo.

Alfond is not satisfied with what Clinton accomplished on his three-day trip or during his eight years in office, and she refuses to give up.

"This goes on forever," she said."