Word: laotians
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...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 effort to discover the fate of 2,483 Americans unaccounted...
...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's had cut a working area roughly the size of a baseball diamond, first by clearing the dense undergrowth and then by dropping to their hands and knees in shoulder-to-shoulder skirmish lines for a preliminary search of the area...
...about ten feet deep. This is the impact point where the AC-130 crashed to earth. To facilitate the search, the team first sliced the ground open with hunting knives and then cut away the soil an inch at a time. Now the men pass shovelfuls of dirt to Laotian soldiers waiting with sifters, who shake the dirt back and forth. The Americans wrap a winch line around a nearby tree to help pull a piece of rusted metal out of the hard-packed soil. "I don't have any idea what it is," says Navy Lieut. Commander Loren...
...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...
...concession may be intended to deflect further U.S. criticism of its attacks on Khmer resistance camps in neighboring Kampuchea. Laos' accommodating attitude may be in response to recent U.S. overtures, including an American shipment in December of 5,000 tons of rice to alleviate the effects of a poor Laotian harvest. But no major breakthrough of the M.I.A. problem in Laos or Viet Nam seems near. "The timing has made everyone open their eyes," says one U.S. official in Bangkok. "But nothing has happened that hasn't been in the works for a long time...