Word: viet
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...warm spring morning in 1972, while the Viet Nam War raged abroad and caused dissension at home, an unlikely assortment of public figures gathered in Arlington National Cemetery to pay their final respects to a man very few Americans had ever heard of. Secretary of State William Rogers, Senator Edward Kennedy and conservative columnist Joseph Alsop were there, as were General William Westmoreland and Daniel Ellsberg, who was about to stand trial for leaking the Pentagon papers. They had come to mourn John Paul Vann, one of the nation's proconsuls in Viet Nam, who had died in a helicopter...
Hanoi denies holding any American POWs, and foreign diplomats in the capital tend to believe it. On a visit to Viet Nam earlier this year, TIME correspondent William Stewart asked a group of recently freed Vietnamese political prisoners whether they had seen or heard of American captives. All said they had not. One senior Vietnamese official said that while he had heard occasional reports of Americans in the countryside, he believed that any actual sightings were of deserters or mixed-race children of U.S. servicemen...
...Hanoi has also shown a willingness to cooperate. Viet Nam has returned some 70 sets of remains so far this year, in contrast to only eight for all of 1987. When examined, though, just 18 of the remains gathered over the past two years have so far been identified as those of Americans. The rest belonged to Asians or were unidentifiable. The discrepancy could indicate that Hanoi hastily collected and sent the remains to show its desire for improved relations with Washington...
Most missing U.S. soldiers were lost during battles in what was then South Viet Nam, where the heaviest ground fighting took place. But the U.S. seemingly squandered a chance to gain valuable information when it failed to pursue the MIA issue between the time of the cease-fire in 1973 and the fall of South Viet Nam in 1975. In the north, where many airmen vanished, mountainous terrain continues to hamper searches, and the highly acidic soil quickly erodes remains. Search operations are time consuming and expensive for impoverished Hanoi. "The Vietnamese haven't got much incentive to make searches...
That sort of comment raises the hopes of families such as that of Lieut. Colonel Anthony Shine, who vanished in 1972 while piloting an Air Force reconnaissance jet near the border of Laos and Viet Nam. Shine has been listed as missing in action ever since. "It's not knowing for sure that makes it tough," says Colleen Shine, 24, the flyer's daughter. "There's always the chance that he might walk into this room." For Colleen Shine and thousands like her, that uncertainty remains more terrible than accepting the death of a loved...