THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, July 11, 1995 TAG: 9507110298
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: FROM WIRE REPORTS
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long : 122 lines
After spending more time and money accounting for missing Americans in Vietnam than in any other war, the Pentagon says it has whittled the list of highest-priority unresolved MIA cases to 55.
President Clinton's expected announcement today that he will normalize diplomatic relations with communist Vietnam, 20 years after the fall of Saigon, will not mean an end to the Pentagon's efforts to account for the missing.
In fact, the Pentagon expects closer relations to lead to a fuller accounting. James Wold, head of the Defense Department's POW-MIA affairs office, said Monday that he expects more frequent visits to Vietnam by American veterans and others with an interest in searching for information about the missing.
``It will facilitate that sort of thing once relations have been normalized,'' said Wold, himself a Vietnam veteran.
Many families of the Americans still listed as missing aren't so sure and argue that the United States should not normalize relations with Vietnam until its government does all it can to answer their questions.
Ann Mills Griffiths, executive director of the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia, says that if Vietnam wanted to, it could have located and returned the remains of hundreds of missing Americans and given answersabout many others.
``If the president is provided an honest, objective assessment of Vietnam's cooperation on this issue, he will decide that it is premature to normalize,'' Griffiths insists.
But proponents of President Clinton's move to restore full diplomatic relations reply that the Vietnamese government has taken extraordinary steps to help account for those lost in the war.
Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., calls joint U.S.-Vietnam efforts to help find the missing ``the most significant person-to-person accounting of any war in human history.''
Robert L. Beisner, a professor of diplomatic history at the American University, says those who insist on more information about the missing Americans are not being realistic.
``I think it's incredible to expect the enemy to know what happened to every person who got killed in a war,'' Beisner said. ``A lot of people who get killed in wars are obliterated.''
The statistics used to measure progress in accounting for the missing from Vietnam can be confusing. For example, while the Pentagon says there are 55 ``discrepancy cases,'' that figure reflects only those servicemen who were last known alive on the ground in Vietnam and whose ultimate fate remains unknown. It does not include men presumed dead but whose remains are still missing.
The Pentagon has given highest priority to resolving the ``discrepancy'' cases because it believes the Vietnamese government has information that bears on them.
Much of the debate over restoring diplomatic relations with Vietnam centers on disagreements about whether Vietnam has told all it knows about these MIAs.
There also are 81 ``discrepancy cases'' in Laos and 18 in Cambodia.
The Pentagon uses a separate figure to reflect the total number of servicemen unaccounted for from the war, including men who the Pentagon says it knows for certain died in Vietnam but whose remains have yet to be recovered.
The number of servicemen listed as unaccounted for from Vietnam is declining, but progress has been uneven. Today it stands at 1,618. That is 310 fewer than when the war ended. Of the 310 cases in which remains have been recovered and positively identified, about half have been accomplished since 1988.
Wold told a congressional committee last month that since Clinton took office in January 1993, 37 sets of remains from Vietnam have been identified: eight in 1993, 26 last year and only three so far this year.
The Pentagon believes no servicemen are still being held as prisoners of war in Vietnam, although some people insist there is evidence to the contrary. These critics say the Pentagon expends too much effort searching for remains and too little investigating claims of live Americans sighted in Vietnam.
The work on identification of repatriated remains, plus the field expeditions in Vietnam to locate and recover remains, has become more expensive.
The Pentagon says it spent $38.7 million on accounting for the missing from Vietnam in 1992, $43.4 million in 1993, $58.7 million last year and $53.6 million this year.
Wold asserts that one indication of greater cooperation from Vietnam since Clinton lifted the trade embargo in February 1994 is the progress made in resolving the ``discrepancy cases'' of missing servicemen last seen alive in Vietnam.
Wold said the fates of 18 individuals in that category have been confirmed since the embargo was lifted, reducing the total to 55. There were 196 of these cases at the end of the war, by the Pentagon's reckoning.
Over the past three years, 167 sets of remains have been returned to the United States from Vietnam, including 99 recovered on joint U.S.-Vietnamese field expeditions. The 68 others were turned over unilaterally by Vietnam.
Vietnam also has been more responsive to U.S. requests for documents relating to American MIAs, Wold said. Hundreds of pages of documents turned over in recent weeks have provided new leads for American investigators, Wold said.
Besides the 1,618 Americans listed as unaccounted for in Vietnam, there are 499 in Laos, 77 in Cambodia and eight in China. ILLUSTRATION: POWs and MIAs
VIETNAM
2,483
(at end of war)
1,618
(today)
KOREA
5,178
(at end of war)
1,269
(Today)
WWII
139,000
(throughout war)
78,000
(today)
KEYWORDS: MIA POW VIETNAM by CNB