May 1999
Summary of news for the entire month.
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01 MAY 99: 2,063 Americans remain unaccounted-for from the Vietnam War: Vietnam - 1,537 (North, 556; South, 981); Laos - 444; Cambodia - 74; and the Peoples Republic of China territorial waters - 8. 152 Americans have been accounted-for during the present administration: Vietnam - 82; Laos - 64 and Cambodia - 6. 520 US servicemembers have been accounted-for through unilateral and joint efforts. Persian Gulf War - unsatisfactory accounting. Korean War - 8,139 remain unaccounted-for, 42 possible remains returned, 4 identifications. World War II - Over 78,000 remain unaccounted-for.
03 MAY 99: Vietnam Veterans of America's Veterans Initiative Delegation participates in a Repatriation Ceremony at Noi Bai Airport. The delegation escorted remains from Vietnamese soil to US custody aboard a C-147.
04 MAY 99: The three soldiers (Ramirez, Stone and Gonzales) were given a clean bill of health following their monthlong captivity. They were captured along the Yugoslav-Macedonia border on March 31. The evaluation revealed that Stone had a broken nose, bruised eyes and a chipped tooth; Ramirez two broken ribs, a cut on the back of the head and a swollen leg; and Gonzales a chipped tooth. All had abrasions on their wrist and had lost between 8 and 14 pounds, raising questions about how they were treated during their capture and imprisonment.
Large scale joint field operations resumed in Vietnam. Plans call for 118 US specialists to conduct investigations and excavations this month, including an underwater excavation of an aircraft on the coast of Vietnam.
10 MAY 99: Mark Gompertz, VP and Publisher of Touchstone Books, the nonfiction trade paperback imprint of Simon & Schuster, today announced the publication of John McCain: An American Odyssey (Trade Paperback Original; September 1999; $12.00) -- a biography of Senator John McCain of Arizona by Robert Timberg, the much-acclaimed author of THE NIGHTINGALE'S SONG. In John McCain: An American Odyssey, Mr. Timberg recounts the details of Senator McCain's rambunctious childhood, his madcap escapades as a Naval Academy midshipman, and his grim experiences as a combat pilot and POW in Vietnam. This book retains much of the McCain material from Nightingale, but expands upon it considerably to provide a no-holds-barred look at the full sweep of his life.
12 MAY 99: From the New York Times. Vietnam Marketing War Films. The black-and-white images are often blurry and rough, like very old home movies. Scenes show guerrillas planting bombs beneath a bridge and blowing up a US truck convoy; Communist soldiers sifting through US warplane wrecks to find identification, family photos and even Kodak cameras, and workers lugging ammunition along the Ho Chi Minh trail. Thousands of hours of film are available, and Vietnam is eager to strike deals with American and European documentary producers. The Discovery Channel, the History Channel and WGBH, Boston's public television station, have all taken a look at a short selection of material.
13 MAY 99: Jesse Jackson's recent mission to Belgrade came under fire by the Clinton administration who sought to discourage citizen diplomacy, saying it was undermining efforts to end the conflict in Yugoslavia. "Our efforts are not helped -- indeed they are hurt -- by uncoordinated, freelance efforts at negotiating with Milosevic," Undersecretary of State Thomas Pickering told a House committee considering a Russian peace plan.
Senior analysts from the DPMO are meeting with officials from a German film company in Berlin which is contracted to the Vietnamese government to archive films. The films, from the wartime period, are known to contain limited footage of American POWs. The analysts plan to review the films themselves, as well as all catalog entries of films in the collections. Many, if not all, of these films have already been reviewed in Hanoi in 1992 and 1993. The purpose of the meeting with the German company is to ensure access to the complete collection. Analysts with Det 2 of the JTF-FA are also working with the Vietnamese government in Hanoi to ensure that all such films are reviewed.
14 MAY 99: North Korea returned the remains today of what are believed to be six US soldiers killed nearly a half-century ago during the Korea War. About 30 visiting American veterans of the 1950-53 Korean War saluted as the remains contained in aluminum caskets were handed over at the border village of Panmunjom. Four North Koreans clad in civilian clothes handed each casket over to UN honor guards. Once transferred, the caskets were draped with UN flags as a military chaplain read verses from the Bible. The remains were being sent to a US Army laboratory in Hawaii for possible identification. The soldiers are believed to have served with the US Army's 38th Infantry Regiment, 2nd Infantry Division, the US military command in Seoul said. US officials said the remains were discovered by a joint U.S.-North Korean search team within the last month along the Chong Chon River, 100 miles north of Pyongyang, the North's capital. The US Eighth Army and Chinese communist forces fought in the area in November 1950, they said. The recovery was the first of six joint searches scheduled for this year and the 10th since collaborations began in 1996. In all, the joint searches have yielded 35 sets of remains believed to be US soldiers. Three have been identified.
18 MAY 99: US military officials turned over two Yugoslav prisoners of war to Belgrade-based International Committee of the Red Cross officials at the border near Horgos, Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. ICRC representatives also accompanied the former POWs from Germany to Horgos. While in US custody, the POWs were treated in accordance with the provisions of the 1949 Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War.
21 MAY 99: The Department of Defense today announced a policy to facilitate the use of DNA technology to identify Korean War and World War II remains previously classified as "unknown" and interred in national cemeteries. In 1995, the Department certified the use of mitochondrial DNA technology as a reliable forensic tool, and has improved and refined the use of mtDNA technology since then. The cemetery with the greatest number of gravesites containing unknown remains is the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, commonly called the Punchbowl. This cemetery contains 864 remains of unidentified soldiers from the Korean War. Most of these remains were received by the United States at the ceasefire in 1953. Another 204 were turned over by the North Koreans between 1991 and 1994 and are currently in the possession of the Central Identification Laboratory, Hawaii. The records associated with each of the unknown remains in the Punchbowl cemetery will undergo rigorous evaluation before a decision is made to disinter. CILHI will first determine if there is strong circumstantial evidence associating a serviceman's name with a set of remains. Since mitochondrial DNA is expected to be used to identify most of these remains, a comparison blood sample must be obtained from a family member from the serviceman's maternal bloodline. Scientists believe approximately 70 cases may be candidates for disinterment. The CILHI will direct the disinterment and will seek to identify each of the remains through forensic identification processes, including DNA. This laboratory identified the remains of Blassie in 1998. For the past five years CILHI has applied the science of mtDNA to approximately 45 per cent of its cases.
22 MAY 99: A three-person team from CILHI visited the US Army's Casualty and Memorial Affairs Operations Center and DPMO recently to review and copy Korean War records from the 8204th Army Unit, which was the US Army Mortuary at Kokura, Japan. The 8204th was CILHI's predecessor during the Korean War. DPMO archival researchers recently found these records based on a tip from a National Archives and Records Administration archivist. The Kokura Mortuary records include: ground field search cases documenting ground losses and efforts to recover the remains of deceased US servicemen, aircraft loss data, documentation on UN cemeteries in North and South Korea, and documentation dealing with the recovery and positive identification of remains during the Korean War and during Operation Glory. The DPRK returned over 4,000 sets of remains of UN personnel during Operation Glory in 1954.
24 MAY 99: Academy Award-winning actor and director Tom Hanks presents RETURN WITH HONOR, the new film produced and directed by Academy Award-winning filmmakers Freida Lee Mock and Terry Sanders. The film will be released in June in Los Angeles and New York and will open nationally throughout the summer. RETURN WITH HONOR tells the powerful story of American fighter pilots shot down over North Vietnam and their challenge to survive with honor as POWs, some for as long as eight and a half years. The film also tells of the wives left behind, who for years did not know, "whether they were wives or widows." Hanks states, "Time and history have reduced the individual stories of the American POWs during the Vietnam War into a generic experience of men we do not know. This film turns those experiences into powerful, moving and shocking recollections told to us in the first person and for the first time by friends, relatives, brothers and husbands." With riveting accounts from an ensemble cast of dozens of pilots, RETURN WITH HONOR includes the POWs Everett (Ev) Alvarez, the first shot down and the longest imprisoned, senior ranking officers Jim Stockdale and Jerry Denton, Korean war ace Robbie Risner, Naval Academy graduate John McCain and many more. RETURN WITH HONOR was filmed in Vietnam and in communities across the United States. In Hanoi, the filmmakers were given access to footage never seen before, of the shootdowns, capture and captivity of POWs, filmed 30 years ago by North Vietnamese cameramen.
25 MAY 99: The Justice Department may soon be spending up to $4.3 million for reparations to ethnic Japanese -- most of them from Latin America -- who were placed in internment camps during World War II. About 3,000 ethnic Japanese were rounded up from 13 Latin American countries during World War II and forcibly brought to the United States. The US government had hoped to exchange the group for US prisoners of war held by Japan. The exchange program never developed and the Japanese Latin Americans were instead housed in camps with thousands of Japanese Americans. The US government never provided an official explanation for the internments. While interned Japanese Americans ultimately received an apology and $20,000 each from the US government, Latin American detainees were deemed ineligible for reparations because they were not US citizens at the time they were held. A settlement in the case was reached last summer, with the government agreeing to pay $5,000 to each.
26 MAY 99: Three former American prisoners of war were reunited aboard a red, white and blue float Thursday for a ticker-tape parade at Disneyland. Thousands waved miniature American flags while SSgt. Andrew Ramirez, SSgt. Christopher Stone and Spec. Steven Gonzales smiled and gave the "thumbs-up" sign as their float wound through the park's Main Street. The three soldiers were part of a UN peacekeeping force when they were captured by Yugoslav forces March 31 as they patrolled the Macedonia border. They were freed May 2 after an American religious delegation led by the Rev. Jesse Jackson negotiated their release. "I've never been treated so great," Ramirez said. "It's so nice to see everyone here supporting us and know that they supported us during our capture."
27 MAY 99: Two former POWs who have risen to high office -- Sen. John McCain and Rep. Sam Johnson -- celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Geneva Conventions on Thursday, but both said the human rights accords were largely ignored by their North Vietnamese captors. At ceremonies sponsored by the American Red Cross, Johnson, R-TX, said even Yugoslavia has adhered to the conventions' requirement for humane treatment of prisoners during wartime more than North Vietnam did during its war with America. Johnson said neither he nor McCain saw legitimate Red Cross workers during their years of captivity, and neither was treated according to the Geneva Conventions. McCain said that although North Vietnam "at one time or another violated most of the conventions," the international accords put meaningful pressure on his captors. "War is wretched beyond description, and only a fool or a fraud could sentimentalize its cruel reality," said McCain. He said the North Vietnamese worried that their cruelties might be discovered. "When word of torture and mistreatment began to slip out to the American press in the summer of 1969, our public relations-minded captors began to treat us better," McCain said. "I'm certain we would have been a lot worse off if there had not been the Geneva Conventions around, which an international consensus formed about some very basic standards of decency that should apply even amid the cruel excess of war."
28 MAY 99: The next DPMO Family Update will be held in St. Louis on July 17. Family members who wish to attend should contact their respective military service casualty offices.
29 MAY 99: POW/MIA Family Meetings to be held as follows: National League of Families, (202) 223-6846, June 16-19, Washington Marriott Hotel, Washington, DC; National Alliance of Families, (425) 881-1499, June 17-19, Sheraton Center City Hotel, Washington, DC
30 MAY 99: Legislation Update (Sponsor/Cosponsor): S. 484 - Campbell, Judd, Helms, Brownback, Bunning, McConnell, Hutchinson, Grams, Schumer, Mack, Allard, Smith, Torricelli. H.RES.16: King, Cramer, Oberster, McCarthy, Frost, Bilirakis, Lazio, Kelly, Luther, Calvert, LaHood, Canady. H.R. 172: Gilman, Taylor, Talent, Rohrabacher. H.R.1926: Hefley, Rohrabacher, McCarthy, Shows, Holden, Diaz-Balart, McHugh, Ortiz, Schaffer, Fossella, English, Green, Whitfield, Granger, Burton, Kelly, Gutierrez, Davis, Fletcher, Forbes, Cunningham, Shays, Filner, McCollum, Hilleary, Lucas, McGovern, King, Lewis, Hunter, Hostettler, Tancredo, Talent.
31 MAY 99: MEMORIAL DAY 1999 - "We tend to think only in terms of what war has cost us, but by comparison, to what is has cost so many people, our price pales." Lt. Col. William Nolde, last serviceman officialy killed in the Vietnam War in his last letter home.
30 MAY 99: REMINDER -
DOD/DPMO Family Update - JUN 1999 - Annual Family Meetings - Washington, DC
POW-MIA Issue Update June 1999