Word: crash
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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More than a decade after U.S. military forces quit Viet Nam, a team of American recovery specialists was permitted to enter Laos for a two-week examination of the crash site of an AC-130 Spectre gunship. The area was being scoured for the remains of 13 U.S. crewmen still listed as missing in action. The joint mission, which included Laotian soldiers and government officials as well as U.S. specialists, worked at its task in a dense patch of jungle 25 miles northeast of the city of Pakse. The search is a continuation of the U.S. Government's long-term...
Gold light slants through tall trees and casts long shadows across the tufted stalks of elephant grass as we arrive at the crash site in the late afternoon. Suddenly, the dense undergrowth gives way to an unnatural clearing of dirty gray sand littered with the half-recognizable detritus of the shattered gunship: broken wheel struts, a bent propeller blade, rusted armor plating, scraps of the fuselage. Resembling patches of smudged snow, remnants of the plane's once white fiber-glass insulating material are scattered everywhere. Earlier, crews of olive-clad Laotian soldiers and Americans in T shirts and grimy Levi...
...dank Laotian jungle, very little seems clear. While some identification of the human remains and personal effects will probably be possible, the evidence the Pentagon technicians are finding is not as good as they hoped. The fires and explosions at the crash site were too fierce to leave much of anything. "This probably had the most intense impact and secondary explosions of any crash site I've ever investigated," says Army Major Johnie Webb, head of the Pentagon's Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii, where the remains will be taken. "That is going to make identifications even more difficult...
...Charge d'Affaires Theresa A. Tull points out that the U.S. recently donated 5,000 tons of rice to Laos to help it survive a bad harvest. But Tull is firm when asked if the U.S. plans to open financial doors for Laos on the basis of the one crash-site excavation. "We need more than a single event," she says. "We need a sustained pattern of cooperation...
...Southeast Asian allies will probably continue to make available small quantities of MIA remains, using the maneuver as a way of gaining political or financial leverage. But political machinations are not important to the men who do the digging in the jungle. "We've got several more crash sites that we would like to look at," says Harvey. Behind him Laotian soldiers pluck bone shards from the sifting pans and hand them to a U.S. soldier who puts them in a canvas bag the size of a woman's purse. "But so far we've got one site...