News-Info-Alerts

Re: Searching

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Date: June 20, 2002

"The Vietnam War timeline
Sunday, June 16, 2002


Searching for the remains of missing soldiers

By Tanya S. Biank
Staff writer

QUANG NAM PROVINCE, Vietnam -- As the helicopter whips up dirt and debris, I find myself crouching in a huddle with other Americans. The chopper that deposited us lifts off and I stand, pushing up my wide-brimmed straw hat to survey a world I have seen only in pictures: the jungles of Vietnam.

Staff photo by Tanya S. Biank
Members of an MIA recovery team discuss setting up camp near the site of a 1963 helicopter crash in a remote area of Vietnam’s Central Highlands.

Everything seems to be magnified: the oven-hot heat, the lush shades of green and the grinding hum of unseen insects.

For this group of 13 Americans, many of us born after the Vietnam War, this is hallowed ground, a graveyard for lost Americans.

“We’re bringing our boys home, finally,’’ says Staff Sgt. Brian Miller, a Special Forces medic from Fort Bragg whose father fought in the war.

The U.S. military is back in Vietnam, this time scouring the oceans and jungles to find evidence of Americans who disappeared in the Vietnam War.

More than 58,000 Americans died in Vietnam and more than 1,900 of them have never been found.

Now the United States is trying to repatriate the remains of the last of its missing -- and bring the kind of peace and closure that has eluded Americans since the end of the war.


‘‘These guys have been waiting 30 years to go home,’’ Miller says. ‘‘To be on U.S. soil, to go home.’’

As a civilian reporter covering the military, I have accompanied troops to Bosnia, Albania, Korea and Germany.

But this is different.

I am the daughter of a Vietnam vet. I have always had an interest in the men who never came home from a war that was mostly over by the time I was born.

For me this is not an assignment, but a pilgrimage of sorts, an opportunity to walk on the same ground where so many Americans fought and died.

For me it is a chance to better understand a war that I did not live through, but that has nevertheless touched my life and my family’s. I am here to see, touch and smell a place that has left such an impact on the history of our country -- especially my adopted hometown of Fayetteville.


The scars of war


Vietnam. Just the name evokes such vivid memories for many Americans that it doesn’t have to be paired with the word ‘‘war.’’

Three decades after the fighting, Americans cannot close the door on the longest and most unpopular war in our history. The war left us with indelible images -- desperate South Vietnamese clinging to helicopters as the U.S. abandoned its embassy, a Vietnamese officer executing a Viet Cong infiltrator in Saigon, a naked girl screaming as she runs from a napalm attack. Vietnam scarred America everywhere: the military, the government and the national spirit.

Few U.S. cities have been more deeply affected by the war than Fayetteville. Tens of thousands of draftees passed through basic training at Fort Bragg. Many of them ended up in the bars and brawls along Hay Street in downtown Fayetteville before they shipped out.

The boisterous war years gave the city a derisive nickname -- Fayettenam -- that three decades have failed to erase.

The name still conjures memories of rowdy soldiers, seedy strip malls, pawnshops, topless bars and crime. For many soldiers who passed through during the war, that’s all they remember of the city.

Despite efforts in recent years to clean up Fayetteville’s image, the ’Nam slam has stuck.

Photo by AIr Force Staff Sgt. George Thompson
Capt. Nate Chamberlain, right, and Sgt. 1st Class Dan Wright sift through dirt looking for human remains.

Fayetteville is coming to grips with its war-years history. While the city hopes to erase the negative associations with the Vietnam War, it is working to recognize the role its residents played in the conflict. Cumberland County, where Fayetteville is the county seat, lost 101 men in the war. That’s the highest total in the state. Thousands of Vietnam veterans -- and hundreds of former Vietnamese nationals -- live in Fayetteville. Just recently, the city dedicated a memorial engraved with the names of its Vietnam dead.

The Vietnamese see their war with the United States as one of many fought in their country, part of a struggle first against French colonial rule and then between the communist North and the nominally democratic South. The fighting began in the 1940s and didn’t end until the 1970s. From the comfort of victory, the Vietnamese communists say they have left it in the past.

That’s not true in America. Not when Vietnam movies like “We Were Soldiers” still draw millions to theaters. Not when every U.S. military mission, including the latest one in Afghanistan, is measured against the failures in Vietnam. Not when there are mothers like Elfriede Capps of Fayetteville, who still visits the grave of the son she lost in the war.

Perhaps that is why bringing home a handful of human remains from this lost war means so much.


MIA recovery


The only way to get to the jungle crash site 43 miles west of Da Nang in central Vietnam -- where guerrilla forces shot down a Marine helicopter in 1963 -- is by helicopter.

The downed crew had been on a search and rescue mission for a T-28 Air Force pilot when their own helicopter was shot down. Four of their bodies were recovered the day of the crash, but the bodies of a 22-year-old Navy corpsman and a 20-year-old Marine were never found. Enemy troops in the area at the time kept U.S. forces from continuing the search. The bodies were believed to be under the wreckage.

Now a team of 12 Americans from the Joint Task Force-Full Accounting and the U.S. Army Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii is on its own rescue mission of sorts.

Staff photo by Tanya S. Biank
Water and other supplies are unloaded from a helicopter. Since U.S. military aircraft are barred by Vietnam, the MIA team relies on Vietnamese transportation.

The MIA missions are an effort to achieve the fullest possible accounting of Americans still missing from the Vietnam War.

Since its 1992 inception, the task force has conducted 3,400 case investigations and 590 recovery operations, which have resulted in the repatriation of remains of as many as 500 Americans. More than 1,900 are still unaccounted for.

The American MIA teams see their work as fulfilling a promise to bring everyone home from the battlefield. That means something to soldiers serving today.

‘‘It may not be today, tomorrow or when the incident happened, but hey, 30 years later someone is still trying to bring me home,’’ says Lt. Col. J.T. Taylor, who commands the Vietnam task force.

When the task force was created, it was the first step in normalizing diplomatic relations between the United States and Vietnam. Vietnam is still a communist country, but relations between the United States and its former enemy are improving.

‘‘The hatred is a memory,’’ says Tran Minh Tuan, an official in Vietnam’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs whose father fought against the Americans. ‘‘But now it is a victory because the two governments are now cooperating.’’

In 1994, President Clinton lifted the trade embargo against communist Vietnam, and in 1997 the United States sent its first ambassador since the war. In December 2001, a trade agreement was reached.


Risky business


But there are no military agreements between the two countries. The Vietnamese do not want U.S. military aircraft or pilots flying over Vietnam. U.S. MIA team members wear civilian clothes and rely on Vietnamese transportation.

A year ago, on another MIA mission in Vietnam, a Russian-made Mi-17 helicopter slammed into the top of a cloud-shrouded mountain, killing all 16 American and Vietnamese members of the search team. Among them was Lt. Col. Rennie Cory Jr., the task force commander. He was a Fayetteville native just off an assignment with the 82nd Airborne Division. His wife, Andrea, still lived on Fort Bragg at the time of his death.

An investigation cited bad weather and pilot error.

This time, as we near the jungle site in the middle of March, the skies are clear. The MIA team on board another Russian-made helicopter sits in silence as a Vietnamese pilot flies above the mountainous terrain.

But when several Vietnamese on board jump from their seats and start yelling at the pilot and pointing out the window, some Americans on board begin to pray.

The pilot appears disoriented and makes several passes before landing on a dirt clearing, hacked clean of vegetation, on the side of a mountain.

Then -- much like thousands of American troops three decades before them -- the members of the MIA team jump from the chopper and huddle for cover in the middle of nowhere as their only means of transportation disappears.

An unsettling silence replaces the helicopter’s clatter as the team stands on the only piece of level ground on the mountain and surveys what will be home for the next 30 days.

Below and above them is a dense bamboo jungle.

‘‘Try not to touch anything,’’ says Miller, the Special Forces medic, as the team makes its way down to a river at the base of the mountain.

The terrain is more treacherous than anyone was expecting. At times over the next few weeks, team members -- 11 men and women from all service branches and a civilian anthropologist -- will be working in safety harnesses.

But already there is hope. A few small pieces of the helicopter wreckage are visible on a slope a few feet from where the team has landed. Most of the wreckage has been covered by jungle growth and will have to be excavated.

The team members know that they will never learn exactly what happened to the helicopter and its crew. They just hope to find proof that the two missing bodies were there.

‘‘Only the people on the plane knew,’’ says Sgt. 1st Class Dan Wright, the senior team sergeant. ‘‘All I know is there are Americans out here.’’


The hill people


There are also Vietnamese out here. Not long after we land, a wiry, smiling man walks in from the jungle. He is about 5 feet tall and is dressed in a tank top and shorts, with no shoes. The man is a district official, and the team leader, Capt. Nate Chamberlain, is expecting him.

Moments later his family appears: his wife dressed in dirty pajamas and sandals, a naked boy who looks about 4 and a younger girl wearing a shirt but no pants or shoes.

Behind them is a small group of hill people holding handmade machetes and other tools. They have walked three hours from their village to get here, where they have been hired to help the team with the excavation. The U.S. government foots the bill for the recovery efforts.

The hill people seem amused by the Americans’ hiking boots, sunglasses and ball caps.


A stopped watch


We leave the crash site later that day, picked up by the same helicopter that had dropped us off.

In the weeks to come, the 12 American team members would come back and work side by side with 70 of the villagers, digging, shoveling and sifting through dirt one bucket at a time, looking for clues to unlock the past.

They would find four dog tags -- one belonging to one of the men they were looking for -- a small key, pieces of helmet, a razor head, bits of boot and a watch face, its hands stopped at 4:30.

‘‘Every time we found something, it reminded us of why we were there, ’’ said Joan Baker, the team’s anthropologist.

The real treasures, though, were teeth and tiny shards of bone.

Sgt. Rula Castro said she knew immediately when she found a piece of a human being.

‘‘You could just tell,’’ said Castro, whose find came after she had been shoveling and sifting through dirt for days.

Suddenly, there it was: a sliver of smooth bone no larger than a fingernail, stuck in a mesh sifting screen buried in a bucket’s worth of reddish brown dirt.

Other discoveries followed. By the end of the mission, the searchers had found enough fragments to cup in two hands.

‘‘In 30 days, to find a couple of teeth and a few bones is a significant deal to us,’’ said Wright, who has been on six MIA missions to Vietnam. ‘‘A piece of bone to us is worth any amount of gold in the world.’’

It was grueling, monotonous work. The sun baked exposed skin within minutes, and tarantulas and poisonous snakes were regular hazards.

During the first few days, a thunderstorm tore through the team’s base camp, destroying the kitchen tent and a bamboo bridge the villagers had built to cross the river, where most of the team bathed.

But most nights were serene.

‘‘When the generators went off, we were serenaded by the stars; you could hear the river down the hill,’’ said Wright, the team sergeant. ‘‘Besides a couple of water buffalo who walked through the camp, it was peaceful and calm.’’

And by the end, they had the sense that they had accomplished all they could.

‘‘In my mind, we dug that site until we ran out of dirt to dig,’’ Chamberlain said.

Another MIA search team in Vietnam at the same time would not be as successful.


Staff writer Tanya Biank can be reached at 323-4848, extension 370, or biankt@fayettevillenc.com

Copyright 2002 The Fayetteville (N.C.) Observer "