From: mdo@socrates.umd.edu ("Mike T. Do")
Subject: [NEWS] Hanoi Gives Personal Effects of GIs To Visiting U.S. Senate Delegation (CORRECTION)
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Date: 20 Nov 92 16:43:58 GMT

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From The Washington Post (11/18/92)
By Thomas W. Lippman
Washington Post Staff Writer

HANOI, Nov 17 - Social Security cards.  Photos of girlfriends and smiling
little boys back home.  Driver linsences.  Love letters. Catholic prayer cards.
A training manual titled "Survival."  These were among itmes collected by
Vietnamese troops from death American soldiers a generation ago and turned
over to a U.S. Senate delegation today in a emmotional meeting in Hanoi
Military Museum.
    Col. Pham Duc Dai, 64, a veteran who is the director of Vietnam's military
museums, handed over plastic bags of flight suits, the battered leather-covered
diary of a downed American pilot, a yellow immunization card and volumes of
photographs of meticulously catalogued equipment and clothing that once
belonged to American combat troops.
     Then, in a final grand gesture, Dai produced a black and yellow flight
helmet that he said now-Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) was wearing when his plane
was shot down and he was taken prisoner in 1967.
     Suddenly, information that could help close the books on the fate of the
2,265 U.S. servicemen still listed as unaccounted for from the Viet Nam War is
pouring out of Vietnam's long-secretive military establishment.  Senior
government officials told members of the Senate Select Committee on POW-MIA
Affairs here that Hanoi wants friendship and even partnership with Washington,
and will go to extraordinary lenghts to get over the last remaining hurdle to
normalized relations-the POW-MIA issue.
     This morning, Foreign Minister Nguyen Manh Cam delivered five documents
that Pentagon investigators here have been seeking since last spring:  detailed
records of U.S. planes that crashed or wer shot down over North Vietnam and of
the crews that died in them.  Many of those planes disappeared without a trace,
members of the Senate delation said, and the Vietnamese records should clear up
questions about the fate of their crew members.
     "We hope our efforts will continue and relations will be soon normalized-
the sooner the better," Cam said.
      Later Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), Hank Borwn (R-Colo.) and Thomas
Daschle (D-S.D.), along with Maj. Gen. Thomas Needham, commander of the
Pentagon's joint task force on the MIA issue, were allowed to tour Hanoi's
Citadel, a closed military enclave never visited by U.S. officals.
      The Citadel visit was largely symbolic, but, in the context of the MIA
issue in the United States, important because the military city has underground
bunkers and bomb shelters where some prisoner of war activist believe the
Vietnamese have been holding Americans captive.  In 1986, the son of a
Vietnamese doctor who went to the Citadel to treat a general reported seeing
Caucasians in captivity and being told they wer Americans, but Kerry said today
that he and his teams are convinced that the report is not credible.
      Adjacent to the Citadel is the mausoleum of Ho Chi Minh.  Last summer,
after reexamining aerial photographs of the area between the tomb and the
Citadel wall, the Pentagon's Defense Nuclear Agency concluded that there was
"a below-grade infrastructure far more elaborate that what one would exptect
from simply a mausoleumm.  this infrastructure includes ... buried passageways
between structures, facade-type annex structures which are actually windowless
buildings, matching square structures which may or may not be part of a
ventilation or emergency egress system, and what appears to be alternate
entrances to the facility."
      Although some POW activists have said they believe the mausolleum was
used as a subterranean prison for Americans, the structure's use is not clear.
      "We didn't go to the Citadel to find somebody alive," Kerry said, but to
examine the process by which U.S. investigators are working with the Vietnamese
to check on "live sighting reports."  He said  he and his fellow senators saw
various utilitariran rooms in the mausoleum but no sign that anyone had ever
lived there.
      In an effort to convince skeptics that the Vietnamese are serious about
divulging whatever information they have-and that no live Americans are being
held-the senators and Prime Minister Vo Van Kiet agreed "in principle" today to set up a program of visits to Vietnam by family members of missing servicemen.
      The United States and Vietnam "want to work for a common objective-
friendship, cooperation and better relations," Kiet said.  "I see no reason why
we should continue  to have abnormal relations."
      The military museum, located just outside the Citadel, has become the
repository for all the records, photographs and "artifacts" of American
casualties.  In a bare room upstairs, U.S. researchers equipped with computers
are cataloguing the data for shipment to Needham's headquarters in Hawaii.
      In a small warehouse behind the museum, Dai threw open closets full of
U.S. military flight suits and racks of M-16 rifles and other weapons.
      Dai also presented to Kerry Dai's own diary from 1967, when he was a
young officer in Quang Ngai Province, South Vietnam.  In it, he had entered
details of an ambush in which four Americans were killed and local children hid
their bodies from helicopter-borne recovery teams.  Dai had recorded the names
of all four men-names that Neeham's team will now check to see if they can at
last be removed from the roster of the vanished.


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