News-Info-Alerts

Re: The Search For Remains

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Date: July 24, 2002

"U.S. doggedly pursues a mission in Indochina: the search for remains
 
Seth Mydans The New York Times

VIENTIANE, LaosThree decades have passed, and often now the payoff is little more than a handful of what American investigators call "possible osseous material." Sometimes they get lucky and find a tooth, the hardest and most durable bone in the body.

.The latest trophy is a sliver of what is believed to be human bone - dry, brittle, about five centimeters, or two inches, long. Unearthed near the old Ho Chi Minh Trail in southern Laos, it is on its way to Hawaii for testing in what the U.S. military calls the world's largest forensic identification laboratory.
.If the tests are positive, it could be the remains of the 733d missing American to be identified since the United States withdrew its combat troops from Indochina in 1973.

.It will certainly not be the last; there is no military mission more relentless than the United States' hunt for its missing soldiers in Indochina. Every year, 10 search and recovery missions are sent to Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia by the military operation, Joint Task Force/$ Full Accounting.

.Where the North Vietnamese are said to have won the war through sheer determination and doggedness, it is the Americans who have made the search for their missing a consuming mission. It is part of a policy, and a passion, to account for all the men and women missing in wars that go back as far as World War II. The United States has made the search the top priority in its relations with postwar Vietnam and Laos. "It's expensive and it's really time-consuming," said Douglas Hartwich, the U.S. ambassador to Laos, "but we've got families back home who really would like to know something before they die."

.The operation's annual budget is $40 million, 40 times the American contribution to the clearing of unexploded bombs that lie buried and hidden across Laos. Of that $40 million, $15 million represents the cost of air transportation, said Brigadier General Steven Redmann, commander of the recovery operation, based in Hawaii.

.For all its intensity, the search for the missing is a long haul. The military still lists 1,908 Americans missing or unaccounted for from the war in Southeast Asia: 1,442 in Vietnam, 400 in Laos, 58 in Cambodia, and 8 in the territorial waters of China.

.About 700 of the missing have been placed in a category called "no further pursuit" because of the assumed futility of any further search, the general said. At the same time, there is no reliable count of the missing from the armies of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, either those who fought with or against the United States. The figure 300,000 is generally used for the North Vietnamese Army's unaccounted-for losses.

.From time to time, American and Vietnamese investigators find themselves combing the same, heavily bombed areas along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, although American military officers say they have never crossed paths.

.The Vietnamese searches are small and thinly financed by comparison with those of the Americans; indeed, Vietnamese families are mostly left to search for their missing on their own.

.Using everything from satellite imagery to the fading memories of villagers to direct them, the American recovery teams hire local residents to dig and haul and sift for bits of bone - often the remains of pilots who bombed those villages a generation ago.

.Redmann acknowledged the political delicacy of the searches in countries where many residents had lived in fear and countless people were killed by American bombing.

."It's tough, quite frankly, to have American military people running around here," he said.

.The search has extended into the shallow waters off the coast of Vietnam, said Redmann, where specialists in heavy diving suits have explored in the vicinity of a downed aircraft.

.In another hunt in southern Laos, repeated missions were made to dig in rice fields to search for a missing CIA operative, Ambassador Hartwich said. The initial clue was a report of a one-tooth denture that matched the dental records of the missing man. Laotian officials finally recovered the denture from a villager and handed it over.

Copyright © 2002 the International Herald Tribune "