Word: viets
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...tacitly refuses to recognize Viet Nam until all questions about missing Americans have been satisfactorily resolved. Meantime, U.S. experts have met Vietnamese officials 21 times in Hanoi since 1982 to discuss the recovery of American remains. The meetings have led to two joint searches and a list of 40 U.S. servicemen who died in captivity...
...that Hanoi was misled by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger into expecting at least $3 billion in U.S. assistance after the war. The Politburo may now hope to squeeze some of that money out of the U.S. by alternately cooperating and dragging its feet on the MIA issue. Viet Nam seemed to be following that cynical strategy last July when it abruptly halted plans for a joint excavation of crash sites. The move may have been provoked by Washington's refusal to agree to low-level diplomatic ties until Viet Nam completes the withdrawal of an estimated...
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...