Word: phe
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Dich warned that it would be a long and difficult journey. A U.S. investigator who had made the trek agreed. But a new witness -- Luong Van Phe, who was chief of police in Truong Tien village at the time of the crash -- had surfaced. He claimed that he knew precisely where the graves were and had even found some personal effects...
...detachment in 1965. During questioning at Phu Yen the day before, he had clearly remembered burying the two airmen three days after the crash -- a delay caused by a dispute between two neighboring villages over which should get the credit for two dead enemies. But the newly discovered witness, Phe, distinctly recalled burying both men the day after the crash, in separate graves, even though the regular soldiers were ready to put them in a common grave. "I am a member of the Thai minority," he explained, "and for us it is not proper to bury two people...
...Phe and Pin continued to argue at the crash site, squatting on what appeared to be the cowling of one of the F-4's engines. Hin, the hamlet party chief, tended to agree with Phe but said he had left before the burial to attend a meeting in Phu Yen. When he returned to the crash site several days later, the men had been buried. Pin said the graves lay deep in the jungle up the mountainside -- though he could not remember exactly where. According to Phe, however, the site was only 15 ft. away. He quickly located...
Early in 1991 Phe and three of his sons had done some digging at the Scharf crash site. They trekked to Suoi Pai from their village on the other side of the mountain and made a few small excavations on either side of the plot that someone else had already uncovered. Sifting through the dirt from the earlier dig, Phe says, he found a zipper "still working" and some eyelets from a boot. A tantalizing lead, but, as is so often the case in these investigations, another dead end. On the way back down the mountain, says Phe, his sons...