News-Info-Alerts

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Re: Opinions From The Other Side

Date: April 11, 2001

"Vietnam's missing highlight suffering

By HUW WATKIN

ANGUISHED Vietnamese have paid their respects to relatives killed when a helicopter searching for the remains of US servicemen missing from the Vietnam War crashed into a rocky hillside in central Quang Binh province. Hundreds of people gathered in an emotional ceremony at a Vietnamese air force base just outside Hanoi yesterday to mourn the loss of eight Vietnamese servicemen and a Foreign Ministry official who were killed last weekend when the aircraft struck the hillside in a ball of flame on Saturday afternoon.

The tragedy also took the lives of seven Hanoi-based US servicemen whose remains are to repatriated to the US later this week.

"It has been a profound loss to both nations doing something very great in a humanitarian spirit together. And we deeply share the loss of our Vietnamese friends who perished . . . and we feel their loss as deeply as they feel ours," US ambassador to Hanoi Pete Peterson told reporters at the memorial service.

A team of US investigators is working with Vietnamese military and aviation officials to determine the cause of the crash which has been blamed provisionally on bad weather. But the accident has done more than subdue the 300-strong expatriate American community in Hanoi; it has brought into focus the relationship between the two former foes and raised difficult questions about US priorities in Vietnam.

Chuck Searcy, director of the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial Fund office in Hanoi, said the crash was a tragedy, but remained insignificant compared with the suffering that Vietnam still endures as a legacy of what is known here as the "American War".

"We've really got to ask ourselves, is it really worth losing 16 people trying to account for those who died more than 25 years ago," he said.

"We're spending $US75 million ($152 million) a year looking for teeth and fragments of bone, yet we spend a fraction of that on the humanitarian assistance Vietnam so desperately needs," he said.

Since 1992, the US has conducted an average of five excavations a year to recover the remains of its war dead in Vietnam in what amount to sophisticated archaeological digs involving thousands of people and enormous logistical effort.

A single mission reportedly costs $US5 million, not to mention the costs of maintaining hundreds of full-time support personnel in Vietnam and the taskforce headquarters in Hawaii.

When, and if, remains are found – most often merely bone fragments or teeth – they undergo forensic tests at a state-of-the-art laboratory in the US, again at enormous expense.

Since its activation nearly 10 years ago, the taskforce has recovered the remains of more than 500 servicemen. By comparison more than 300,000 North Vietnamese dead remain unaccounted for, and the war's legacy continues in the hundreds of thousands affected by Agent Orange, the hundreds that continue to be killed and maimed by unexploded ordnance and an infrastructure which in many parts of the country bears the scars of conflict.

Mr Searcy said the US should take more responsibility for that legacy, but that US humanitarian aid to Vietnam is still less than $US10 million a year.

"I'm really surprised that Vietnamese aren't more indignant when they see the difference in the resources we devote to our MIAs and those we devote to the humanitarian crisis we helped to create here," he said.

"It really is time that we got our priorities right – most American people understand that, but our policymakers just don't seem to get it.""