CRYSTAL CITY, Virginia - More than 1,800 US soldiers remain missing in action from the Vietnam war, and 30 years after its humiliating withdrawal finding the remains is a matter of national honor for the United States.
The Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office, located just outside Washington, has 120 staff focussing on the search. There are also nearly 500 military and civilian staff trying to identify soldiers missing in various conflicts since World War II.
"We can't overlook the slightest possibility, however long it has been. This is a national priority," said Larry Greer, a spokesman for the missing personnel office in Crystal City, Virginia.
Most of the time, the office is charged with the gloomy assignment of identifying human remains. The work demands time and patience, as researchers look through US and Vietnamese archives and take witness testimony before digging for dead soldiers.
Of 88,000 US soldiers missing since World War II, 1,835 fought in Vietnam. Since 1975, 748 Vietnam War soldiers have been found and identified, while the remains of hundreds more are still in labs undergoing forensic identification.
The Defense Department spends 105 million dollars a year to find missing troops.
Greer, an former Air Force officer who served in Vietnam in 1971, welcomed Vietnamese cooperation in the somber search.
"It is very effective for us to interview former Vietnamese officers or soldiers who shot down our airplanes," he said. "The Vietnamese kept good logs of these actions, that we can correlate with our records."
The more trips are taken to Vietnam, the more leads emerge.
"Sometimes a villager comes up to you during a search and tells you, very discreetly, 'go to the cemetery and under this tree, an American pilot was buried'," Greer said.
Identifying remains also takes time: DNA is taken from skeletons and compared to that of a relative, or pieces of clothing or equipment are analyzed in a lab to determine who they belong to.
"Sometimes a zipper, button, a piece of rubber from a boot, a scrap of clothes can generate an amazing amount of information," Greer said.
When the body is formally identified, the remains are returned to the soldier's family.
"We deal a lot in death, bones and sorrow," he said. "But we also get to tell the good news to the families. It helps them close the book."
"Coming out of the Vietnam war, the US government did a poor job of keeping the families informed about their loved ones who were prisoners or missing. It's very clear some families were lied to, sometimes with good intentions. They were afraid the enemy would know too much."
The secrecy helped generate conspiracy theories about the missing that "still linger on today, although they are believed to be not credible," Greer said.
To dismiss any conspiracy theories, the US search teams investigate any rumor of a missing soldier sighting.
"These reports come to us occasionally, but 99.9 percent of them prove to be not Americans held against their will," Greer said.
"Sometimes they are Caucasians from a relief organization, a Swedish docker, a French truck driver, you name it. And locals think: He must be American," he said.
04/27/2005 12:08 GMT