A determined dig in Vietnam for the missing
Team tries to recover remains of Americans
By Matt Steinglass, Globe Correspondent
NGHE AN PROVINCE, VIETNAM -- ''They tell me to dig a hole," said Derek Benedix, ''and I dig a hole."
Benedix is not a GI; he just talks like one. He is a civilian forensic anthropologist working for the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command. For the past seven weeks, he has been living on a mountain near the border between Vietnam and Laos, along with 12 US military personnel, 22 Vietnamese military and civilian officials, and 89 ethnic Tay villagers, trying to recover the remains of an American airman whose F-8E Crusader fighter-bomber crashed here during the Vietnam War.
The operation is one of 21 such recovery operations this year at sites around Vietnam. The 1,410 American MIAs in Vietnam are among roughly 88,000 US servicemen listed as missing in action around the world, from World War II through the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Every year, the joint command spends more than $50 million trying to recover them.
The MIA accounting program dwarfs that of any other nation. ''We're the only country in the world that does this," said Major Rumi Nielson-Green, a spokesman for the group.
The scale of the effort in Nghe An shows why. The site is in a region of jagged peaks and thick jungle, broken by the thatched huts and fields of Montagnard tribes. It is accessible only by helicopter.
Teams of local workers have cleared a landing pad, constructed bamboo platform shelters and latrines, and cut stepped paths to the excavation site. The Americans have brought their laptops, their satellite phone, their DVD player, and their guitars.
The American team includes two linguists skilled in Vietnamese (though the local Tay language is closer to Laotian); an explosives-detonation specialist, in case any live ordnance turns up; and two mortuary affairs specialists. It also includes Master Sergeant Dwayne Roberts, a ''life-support systems analyst." Roberts's job is to know exactly what type of parachute, harness, and oxygen mask would have been worn by the pilot of an F-8E in 1966.
Such expertise is crucial because the physical evidence of the aircraft and pilot is meager. By the time US investigators first inspected this site in 1998, locals had carted off most of the plane for scrap. What remains has been corroded by Vietnam's acidic soil to a brittle aluminum cake.
Excavations have revealed an accelerometer, part of a parachute, and a layer of stained dirt that still reeks of aircraft fuel. But the cockpit may have been driven deep into the mountainside.
If past finds are any guide, very little may be left of the pilot's remains -- perhaps just a tooth.
''It's sort of like Gulliver's Travels," Benedix said. ''What we're looking for is very small, and the archeological feature [the crash crater] is very large."
Soil excavated from the pit is sifted by local workers in a shed housing dozens of wire sieves. They look for anything that could be metal or bone. Appearances may deceive: bone left in the ground can turn black, brown, or green. A shard of bamboo can strikingly resemble the frontal plate of the human skull.
Once artifacts are positively identified, JPAC's Vietnamese partner organization, the Vietnam Office of Search for Missing Personnel, formally transfers custody to the US agency. Remains are then flown to JPAC's headquarters at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii for DNA testing and other identification.
The Vietnamese say they enjoy working with the Americans, apart from having to live on remote mountaintops for weeks at a time.
''It's very far away from Hanoi," said Hoang Van Lop, a Vietnamese officer at the Nghe An excavation.
The first US delegation visited Vietnam to discuss repatriation of MIA remains in 1988. Since Vietnam agreed to allow the United States to search for MIA remains here in 1992, the remains of 503 American servicemen have been retrieved.
Cooperation on this issue has paved the way toward US-Vietnam rapprochement. The formation in 1991 of the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, then chaired by Senator John Kerry, eventually proved key to the normalization of relations between the United States and Vietnam in 1995.
Critics have argued that the MIA recovery operations cost too much to justify their emotional value to service members' families. The Accounting Command's Central Identification Laboratory authenticates the remains of some 100 Americans every year; the organization spends more than half a million dollars for each soldier recovered.
''I believe we owe our military a tremendous debt of gratitude," countered the US ambassador to Vietnam, Michael Marine. ''And fulfilling our obligation to them in this way is something that perhaps no other country would do. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't do it."
At a ceremony in the town of Nghi Xuan last Friday, Marine and a JPAC delegation accepted what appeared to be a US serviceman's remains from the vice chairman of the local People's Committee. Locals had discovered and buried the remains years earlier.
In the courtyard of the district People's Committee, an alcove had been closed off with blue plastic sheeting, traditional for a Vietnamese funeral ceremony. A small red, wooden ossuary with a glass top lay between a pair of candles.
The ossuary was open, revealing a pile of brownish rags that might have been a military uniform or part of a parachute, and a length of shiny metal tubing like an air hose. Benedix, the forensic anthropologist, examined several pieces of what might have been bone and pronounced them ''consistent with a traumatic event, like an airplane crash."
Then he dropped them into Ziploc bags and placed them in a shock-proof case for transportation to Hawaii.
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