News-Info-Alerts

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Re: Vietnam's Missing

Date: November 26, 2000

300,000 remain unaccounted-for.

"THE VIETNAMESE MISSING

Last Hope to Find Dead: Psychics
By SETH MYDANS


HANOI, Vietnam, Nov. 18 ó "Master Lien! Master Lien!" came the tiny voice over a distant telephone line, "Please give me directions. It's so hard to find."

Nguyen Van Lien, a glass of cold tea in his hand, replied without a pause. "Just go down to the southwest about 200 meters and you'll find a small road," he said. "You see a hill with a lot of rocks on it? That's where he's buried."

With a little whack he turned off the speaker phone and returned to the map he was drawing on his desk: blue rivers, yellow roads, red landmarks, black grave sites.

"It's like a screen in front of my eyes, like a movie screen," he said. "I can see 1,000 kilometers away. When they call me on the phone I can see them."

Mr. Lien, 38, markets himself as a psychic, offering a last resort to desperate Vietnamese whose relatives are still missing, 25, 30, 35 years after they died fighting against the United States. Nobody knows just how many Vietnamese soldiers are unaccounted for; the most common estimate is 300,000.

"Better than the American methods, isn't it?" Mr. Lien said. "I just sit here in my room and I never need to go out."

As he spoke this morning, President Clinton was touring an excavation site near Hanoi where a search team was sifting through the dirt for the remains of American servicemen missing during the war.

The dig was part of a major operation coordinated in Hawaii that includes a permanent office here and periodic search operations that can deploy well over 100 American military personnel.

About 1,500 Americans are missing from the war, a tiny fraction of the number of missing Vietnamese. But while the Vietnamese government has set up a well-run office to assist the United States in its search, it has no organized program to try to find its own missing soldiers.

On his visit here, Mr. Clinton has promised to share more than a million American military documents - in addition to hundreds of thousands already provided ó to help Vietnam locate its missing. But for the moment, the Vietnamese have no mechanism to collate the mounds of material. Instead, families pool their resources for freelance expeditions, sometimes with the assistance of veterans' associations and the logistical help of local military units.

And still, decades after the war ended, they send photographs and documents to a television station that regularly broadcasts information about the missing in the hope that someone will remember.

"The searches are still going on here in Vietnam, and the pain of the fathers and the mothers, I guess, is just the same as the pain of the American families," said Nguyen Ngoc Hung, 51, a veteran who lost a brother in the war.

"You know, the Vietnamese honor the dead, and they would like to bring them home to bury in the village cemetery so that later generations can come and worship, rather than leaving them in the jungle," he said.

The psychic searches are frowned on by the government, but they work, said Mr. Hung, who has a master's degree in foreign languages and runs an English-language institute.

"My family went to a psychic, and she directed us to the place where my brother was buried," he said. "She summoned up his spirit and talked to him. My whole family - my son, my younger brother, my father - went to the site and dug up my brother and brought him back. Now, he is buried in a veterans' cemetery in Hanoi, and so we can go and pray at his grave."

As with the families of recovered American servicemen, the discovery and reburial lifted a burden from the hearts of his parents.

"I guess they will live 10 years longer now," Mr. Hung said.

A dozen people crowded into the small, spare office of the psychic, Mr. Lien, this morning, as a portrait of Vietnam's Communist hero, Ho Chi Minh, smiled and waved down at them from the wall.

They stared at Mr. Lien in a silence broken by the ticking of an electric clock as he quickly sketched a map, sitting cross-legged on a swivel chair at a little metal desk.

"What are all those green things?" asked Nguyen Duc Hai, 29, a military officer, who would use this map to seek his uncle, who died in 1969.

"They're mountains," said Mr. Lien. "This is northern Laos."

Without any apparent consultation with the spirits, Mr. Lien told the story of Mr. Hai's uncle, as if chatting about a friend.

"This is not your first uncle, but your second uncle," he said, correctly. "He joined the army before 1970, and he died about 1971. He never married. He had an argument with his girlfriend, and that's why he signed up. He became a scout searching for forward positions and was assigned to Base 42 in Xiang khouang Province; that's in Laos. Eight men went out on his last mission. Only two returned."

As far as Mr. Hai could tell, the psychic got most of it right, and he was impressed.

"Oh, yes, master," he said from time to time.

The master's narrative was interrupted frequently by more telephone calls from people who were already out in the countryside attempting to follow his directions.

"Who's there? Speak up!" he demanded each time, slapping at the button on his speaker phone.

"It's Miss Khoan," said one caller. "I'm so tired."

Mr. Lien was gentle. "Just take a rest for a while," he said, "and you'll feel better."

He had less patience with another caller who couldn't seem to find his way. "Where are you going?" he said. "Does it look like the map I drew you? You have to go on past the village and ask the farmers to point you to the coffee grove."

As he filled in the colors of his map, Mr. Lien gave directions to Mr. Hai, speaking quickly and sometimes unintelligibly. But he had a tape in a deck beside him that the young officer would take with him on his journey into the green mountains that were taking form on the map.

"It's a tough hike," the psychic said. "You can't get in by car; even by horse it's difficult. Down here is Hill 308. And up here, you'll see some trenches. And the grave of your uncle is right at the beginning of the Cut Stream."

Standing outside afterward, holding his map and his audio tape, Mr. Hai said he had paid the equivalent of $3.50 for the sÈance and for the right to telephone in from his expedition for more directions.

It would be his family's second search attempt, after an earlier failed trek into the mountains of Laos, where tens of thousands of soldiers died along the old Ho Chi Minh trail.

Asked if the government had done anything to help search for his uncle, Mr. Hai answered in English, "No. No." Then he added, "We have to manage on our own, with our own money."

Asked how he felt about the contrast between the searches for Americans and Vietnamese lost in the war, he paused a long moment before answering.

"Vietnam is a very poor country," he said. "There is only so much our government can do. We expect in the future that our government will have better programs for people looking for lost soldiers." "