In a speech in San Jose early this month, former President Nguyen Van Thieu, now living in London, suggested that if political changes are not forthcoming in Hanoi, the refugees should be prepared to head home, shoulder weapons and seize control again. The passion in the Vietnamese exile community is a puzzle to many Americans. There is no logic to this,'' says Douglas Pike, a retired State Department analyst who assiduously read accounts of every reported MIA sighting but was never able to come up with verification by a second source. There are no Americans here. The Vietnamese people long ago gave up looking for their own missing.
Bodies decompose quickly in the subtropical climate.
Although no U.S. official will say so publicly, the widespread conviction is that there are no more live Americans. Still, the National League of Families issues regular status reports of sightings on a hundred or so of the 2,303 men listed as missing in action or unaccounted for in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Since a Japanese lieutenant hid on a Philippine island for 30 years after World War II before surfacing, anything is possible. But it is more likely that any Americans still in Vietnam remain there for conjugal reasons and have led retiring lives. Either that or the people sighted were really East Europeans or the now grown Amerasian offspring of former G.I.s.