[Vnbiz] U.S. digs for those missing in Vietnam

[Phan, Tai]

Published: Nov 17, 2006 12:30 AM



U.S. digs for those missing in Vietnam


Craig Simons, Cox News Service
TAY TRACH, VIETNAM - Somewhere near this farming village, an American pilot lies in the red earth.
In the spring of 1972, North Vietnamese anti-aircraft rockets hit a U.S. Navy A-6A Intruder jet returning from a bombing run in central Quang Binh province. The aircraft splintered in midair; wreckage scattered across fields where locals harvested rice.

Villagers found and buried the pilot, according to a U.S. government report of the incident. After the last U.S. combat troops left Vietnam in 1973, the airman was listed as missing in action -- one of 1,807 MIAs from the war whose remains are thought to lie in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and China.

Now, at what is essentially an archaeological dig, a team of U.S. and Vietnamese specialists is trying to find his remains, so he can go home and his family and friends can find peace. The name of the airman was withheld because his next of kin have not been notified of the recovery effort.

It is one of 10 such sites in Vietnam this year operated by the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, a unit that is a testament to the U.S. military's commitment to recover its soldiers. It is a promise President Bush will highlight when he visits JPAC's Vietnam headquarters in Hanoi this weekend.

Bush's visit, coming as the U.S. is mired in Iraq, will stir memories of the losses of past wars: Besides the soldiers unaccounted for from the Vietnam War, JPAC lists roughly 87,500 U.S. service members as missing from all the conflicts between World War II and the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

More than half of that total is considered unrecoverable: About 43,000 World War II fatalities are "entombed" in the Pacific Ocean. Soldiers from other wars, including 468 from the Vietnam War, were lost over the Pacific and other oceans.

The government of Vietnam agreed in 1992 to allow the United States to search for MIA remains. Most can be found, said Lt. Col. Rumi Nielson-Green, a JPAC spokesperson.

"The goal is to bring everybody home," Nielson-Green said. "Sometimes that means we've got to look for a tooth in a jungle."

The Tay Trach dig

At the site near the hamlet of Tay Trach, that is the job of George Eyster, a soft-spoken, 30-year-old Army major from Tallahassee, Fla.

Eyster has spent the past seven weeks working with a team of Vietnamese counterparts, 14 Americans and 90 local villagers to comb the soil.

They are looking for shards of bone, teeth or personal effects such as dog tags or pieces of clothing that could be sent to the United States for positive identification and burial.

The team contends with poisonous snakes, and a typhoon disrupted recent work. The area -- just north of the demilitarized zone that once separated South and North Vietnam -- has been farmed since the war ended, so the researchers don't worry much about hitting unexploded bombs.

For Eyster, a helicopter pilot who flew in Iraq before being assigned to JPAC a year ago, the work is a righteous duty.

"From an individual soldier's point of view, we all feel we have a guarantee from the government and our buddies that no one will be left behind," he said. "When I go into harm's way, my mind is more at rest to know I will be returned to my country if something happens."

His JPAC team arrived at the site in October and began to use a combination of archaeology and forensic science. Vietnam's acidic soil can discolor bones and teeth, turning them the color of stones and bits of wood.

A complex task

The first job was to determine where parts of the plane might have impacted the earth and where the body was most likely buried, said Laura Miller, a forensic anthropologist who taught at New York University before joining JPAC. After analyzing witness reports and looking at the crash site, she identified dozens of 4-meter-square target areas.

Miller's experience is crucial because little physical evidence remains. After the plane crashed, locals collected most of the remains for scrap.

Everything left behind was likely scattered as farmers tilled their fields each year. "If they came across something, they probably threw it towards the edges of the field," she said.

On Wednesday, locals and soldiers shoveled from pits Miller had marked off with string and carted it to tents where Americans and Vietnamese sifted the dirt through quarter-inch wire mesh.

Possible human remains were given to Miller to examine, and non-organic material was given to Roger Antrim, the team's "life support investigator" whose job is to identify pieces of equipment used by pilots in 1972.

Sitting in a tent near the work site, Antrim displayed evidence the team had so far collected: Fragments of a Pratt & Whitney engine, a broken pair of scissors, a sliver of a flight suit harness.

"If we get enough information, we can start to piece things together," Antrim said.

If the airman's remains are found, they will be transferred to JPAC's headquarters at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii for DNA testing and other identification