From: mdo@socrates.umd.edu ("Mike T. Do")
Newsgroups: soc.culture.vietnamese
Subject: [NEWS] All MIAs Long Dead, Say U.S. Searchers
Date: 11 Nov 92 07:06:26 GMT
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Send at 2:05 EST (11/11/92)
From The Washington Times (11/09/92)


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BY KATHLEEN CALLO
REUTERS NEWS AGENCY

HANOI - American experts searching here for clues of missing U.S. solders
say the sad but true story is that servicemen described for years by the
media and some senior officials in Washington as missing actually died in
the war.
    These experts, most of them military men involved in exhaustive
investigations here since 1988, say they are fed up with rumors about some
still being held prisoner.
    They say they are relieved that what they believe is the real story is
finally coming out.
    Unsubstantiated claims made in the United States by private groups and
family members about American prisoners still being held in Indochina have
reawakened bitter emotions over the war and helped block the normalization
of relations between Washington and Hanoi.
    "It is a populist delusion," one U.s. government expert said.
    "The sad thing about this issue is that when you look at it really
closely, you realize there's nothing there.  It's a nonissue," he said of the
claim that prisoners exist.
    "Everyone who has been working on this issue for a long time knows these
men are dead, but we can't say that," another American official said, also
requessting anonymity.
    Former Vieet Cong guerrillas and Vietnamese villagers have described to
U.S. investigators over the past five years how some American servicemen were
shot dead after parachuting into remote areas.
    Others died of disease in jungle prison camps, were shot while trying to
escape or were executed, according to detailed testimony given during joint
U.S.-Vietnamese search efforts.
    But U.S. experts say some family members in the United States, who have
formed a vocal lobby, refuse to believe crediblee accounts of how their men
died.
    Investigators say they are encouraged by what they consider Washington's
new, more rational approach to the issue - to talk more openlly about the
years of research and investigations that have been undertaken to find out
what happened to missing men.
    They welcomed the U.S. government's recent decision to declassify tens of
thousands of documents on the issue.
    Foreign journalists in Vietnam who two years ago found it more difficult
to get permission from the U.S. government than from Hanoi authorities to
accompany American experts on search trips are now getting more access.
    One American soldier working in Vietnam recently - the U.S. serach teams
are mostly military - said he was glad to see journalists covering their
activities and to describe their work to people back in the United States.
    "It's depressing to realize that most Americans don't know we're here
doing this," he said.
    Americans seeking  an end to the U.S. emargo against Hanoi said they were
hopeful that Washington would move faster to resolve the MIA issue and to
normalize relations now that the U.S. presidential election is over.
    "Today, finally, I am convinced we can begin writing the last chapter of
the Vietnam War," President Bush said Oct. 23, 11 days before being defeated
by Bill Clinton.
    The comments by Mr. Bush, in reaction to the Vietnamese government's
granting access for U.S. investigators to thousands of wartime photographs,
also raised optimism that the issue would soon be resolved.
    Lt. Col. Jack Donovan, head of the U.S. MIA office in Hanoi, brought
foreign journalists by helicopter in October to a remote mountain in northern
Vietnam where American experts were excavating the site of a U.S. aircraft
crash from 1965.
    "It's the one message that I try to get across to every journalist who
comes through - that there are a lot of hard working Department of Defense,
military and civilian personnel working over here to try to resolve this
issue of unaccounted [men]," he said.
    James Coyle, who headed one of the other six teams working in Vietnam in
October, described how American investigators sometimes spent years on one
case, searching for witnesses and piecing together information on the fate of
a serviceman.
    He said he did not think most Americans knew of the detailed
investigations he and other U.S. experts were doing.
    "But it's to be hoped that information such as that being broadcast by
the news services and the fact that the work we're doing has now been
unclassified means some of tfhis information will get out to the American
people, and that they'll begin to realize the kind of work we've been doing
and how long we've been doing it,' he said.
    U.S. teams are scheduled to finish an initial investigation by mid
January of 135 so-called discrepancy cases in which American servicemen were
know to have or might have survived plane crashed and been captured.
    Evidence found so far has proven or indicated the men died, although in
some cases no evidence at all was found.
    While it remains politically risky for the U.S. government to state
publicy that all those men are dead, Washington is gently trying to get out
that message.
    The U.S. MIA Office in Hanoi was called the U.S. Office for MIA-POW
Affairs when it was set up last year.
    U.S. officials said the name was recently changed to get away from the
term POW, which implied AMerican prisoners still existed.
    A military task force set up in Honoluly in January to resolve the issue
also originally considered using the term MIA-POW in its title.  It was later
decided to call it the JointTaskForce-FullAccounting.
    "When you say 'MIA', it's misleading and gets people's hope up by
suggesting the man could still be alive.  When you say 'unaccounted for,'
that means his remains were never recovered or he was never accounted for,"
a U.S. military officer said.

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