Decades Later, America Still Trying to Leave No Man Behind
WASHINGTON, April 21 -As the nation prepares to mark the 30th anniversary of the end of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, the government is still actively searching for the 1,835 prisoners of war and missing military personnel who-dead or alive- remain somewhere in Southeast Asia.
The nerve center of the search is the Pentagon’s Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office, based in Arlington, Va., which uses its 600-member staff spread throughout the world to sift through pages of documents, years of memories, grains of soil and strands of DNA in an attempt to uncover clues that would bring the missing persons home.
While all of the cases of missing service men are active, the more details that are known about the case, including when, where and how the person went missing and if the missing were last seen alive or dead, the greater likelihood the U.S. government will be able to convince a former enemy that it should dig up the country looking for lost soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen, said Larry Greer, spokesman for the Missing Personnel Office.
“We would not allow the Vietnamese to come into the United States and start digging up what they thought were grave sites in the middle of the Pentagon,” Greer said in an interview. “Likewise they don’t allow us to, but what they do is they try to provide us information gathered by their sources so we can be satisfied, if we trust the information, that we know enough about the case in there, and then we can decide to pursue it.”
For example, in the case of Col. Sheldon Burnett, who was recently buried in Arlington National Cemetery 34 years after his death in Laos, the government knew the approximate location of his disappearance, had eyewitness testimony from comrades and former enemies and received the cooperation of the Laotian and Vietnamese governments. This information allowed them to pursue the case and find Burnett’s remains.
Burnett was the fourth missing New Hampshire soldier to be found in Indochina. Six Granite staters are still missing, according to the Pentagon office’s Web site.
Excavations, such as the one in the Laotian jungle that led to the recovery of Burnett’s remains, can start only after an investigation has been narrowed to a specific area and enough evidence exists to suggest “there is a good chance we’re going to find the remains,” Greer said. “We can’t send a very expensive team of 100 people, 100 specialists, into an area and say, ‘OK, everybody go out and just start poking.’ ”
The search includes not only Vietnam servicemen, but also the 128 Cold War missing, the 8,152 Korean War missing, and the more than 78,000 missing from World War II. Many of those missing from World War II were lost at sea, either in sunken ships, downed aircrafts or island-hopping campaigns. Nearly 300 World War II missing have been identified since 1976.
For some groups the office’s carefully considered approach, mixing economic prudence with sensitive diplomacy and a slow investigative process, is not good enough. They say the government should be spending and doing more to bring those lost service people home.
“Over 90 percent of the total areas where people are lost are areas controlled by Vietnam,” said Ann Mills Griffiths, the executive director of the National League of POW/MIA Families, which represents only families of those missing from the Vietnam War. “We’re still not seeing a response from the Vietnamese, nor are we seeing pressure on them by the man in charge of POW/MIAs at the Department of Defense.”
Recently, Griffiths’ group expressed lack of confidence in deputy assistant secretary of Defense Jerry Jennings, who heads the POW/MIA office, complaining that he seemed unable to work with families of the missing and seemed to be easing the pressure on host nations, such as Vietnam, to turn over information that could lead to the whereabouts of missing U.S. servicemen, she said.
In the group’s March newsletter, Griffiths writes about Jennings’ “distinct lack of warmth in his demeanor toward the individual families.”
Furthermore, she writes, “Mr. Jennings’ tenure has been more destructive than helpful, especially in terms of alienating other departments, agencies and senior U.S. and foreign officials, including regional U.S. ambassadors.”
The group’s 2004 policy assessment concluded that “current leadership positions in the Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) have espoused the view that normalization somehow negates the need for steady, determined persistence to gain Vietnam’s full cooperation, relying instead on Vietnamese rhetoric and a changed atmosphere in U.S.-Vietnam relations.”
Since the end of the Vietnam War, 748 of the 2,583 initially missing have been accounted for, according to the office’s Web site.
Jennings could not be reached for comment because he is on indefinite medical leave, but Greer, the department’s spokesman, responded for the department.
“I’ve been here 10 years and worked for three senior leaders” including Jennings, Greer said. Jennings “has traveled more, and met with more senior officials of more foreign governments, than any of our previous leaders,” he added. “He has led initiatives into areas where doors were previously closed to us and to our recovery operations.”
In the 10 years the United States has been working in North Korea, the office has recovered remains of more than 200 soldiers. Additionally the office has achieved access to documents in Russian, Vietnamese and Laotian archives, which had not been available before, Greer said.
Keeping government leaders opening doors is also the goal of veterans’ groups, such as the Vietnam Veterans of America, whose announced mission is to make sure the government does not forget its missing. The group has advocated increasing the funds for the Missing Personnel Office so that more teams can be sent into the field to search for fallen comrades in all wars.
“We want the fullest possible accounting of POWs and MIAs; this is the highest goal of our organization,” said Bernard Edelman, the veterans’ organization’s associate director of government relations. The group also sends members to Indochina to exchange information with Vietnamese soldiers about the location of missing servicemen on both sides in the hope that the information gathered could be of use to teams searching for remains.
“Basically, what we are trying to do is to bring closure to the families,” Edelman said. “We have to work with the Vietnamese, the Laotians and the Cambodians if we’re going to get people in there to explore different sites.”
Efforts to bring a full accounting of war missing costs the government $105 million a year, Greer said. This covers not only the cost of excavations but also the expense of identifying remains sent to labs in Hawaii and Virginia through DNA and other means and of tracing artifacts, such as buttons, fabric, and boots, back to the war, branch, and unit of the deceased serviceman.
“People say we shouldn’t be spending anything,” Greer said, “but American veterans, American families, American service personnel in uniform say, ‘You are doing exactly what we want you to do, this is a national commitment that we are going to hold you accountable for.’. They want to be sure the government does not leave anyone behind, even if it takes 60 years for us to get the answers; they say, ‘Get them out, bring them home.’”
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