Posted on 11/21/2006 7:54:28 PM PST by FLOutdoorsman
Soldiers fresh from duty in the Gulf are finding catharsis in searching for the bodies of 1,800 men lost in Vietnam 35 years ago.
On a hillside in South-East Asia, where America fought a brutal, costly and traumatic war, the US military is back. Giant figures pouring with sweat are digging in a jungle clearing as pounding rap music echoes through the trees. They are watched with awed fascination by tiny Lao Tung women squatting in a row, waiting for the foreigners to fill their buckets with soil and hand them by human chain to a row of sieves.
The last time that Americans were in this part of Laos they were fighting an undeclared secret war, unknown to the American public at the time and barely remembered today. The older women recall hiding from the B52s that rained bombs.
This time there isn’t an M16 or a uniform in sight. What is unfolding in the jungle is part duty, part catharsis. It is a slow, painstaking pursuit against the longest of odds. It is integral to understanding the US and its military.
The young Americans have come because of unfinished business from their nation’s most harrowing military engagement. Their mission is to find the bodies of 1,800 servicemen still unaccounted for in the Vietnam War.
Many of those digging and sifting have come after serving in Iraq, anxious to do the right thing by their forebears while also hoping that the generation of soldiers that follows will not forget them.
Denny Danielson first arrived in South-East Asia as a scared 20-year-old “grunt” from Iowa on a search-and-destroy mission. He is now a forensic anthropologist on his 54th mission, dedicated to finding the remains of his brothers-in-arms who didn’t make it home.
He sees comparisons in the war that he fought and the conflict in Iraq, though not necessarily those of their detractors. “Iraq is like Vietnam in some ways. We are trying to help people who don’t always want to be helped,” he said.
Those they are searching for, the missing in action, or MIA, were soldiers or special forces teams killed in remote jungles, or the dead left during retreats from the battlefield. In Laos many of the MIA were aviators shot down over the Ho Chi Minh trail.
But they are more than names, ranks and serial numbers. Those who never returned hold a powerful grip on the national psyche. America promises the soldiers that it puts in harm’s way that it will always bring them home — alive or dead. It is a question of national honour, the commitment of a nation that prizes the life of each of its warriors and promises them a resting place in the beautifully tended gounds of Arlington National Cemetery. And it is this that makes the men and women of the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) determined to search for the remains of every last one of them and, if possible, bring them home for a military funeral and burial on American soil.
Mr Danielson’s Marine Corps unit spent a year fighting and dying in Vietnam in 1966. After his military service he became an archaeologist specialising in Native American sites.
As the Marines dig and the hill folk shift buckets Mr Danielson strides restlessly across a jungle clearing stripped bare of vegetation and carefully marked into squares, deciding where to excavate next. Buried somewhere on a hillside hundreds of square metres in area he hopes to find the remains of the pilot and navigator of a Phantom jet shot down by North Vietnamese cannon during a reconnaissance mission in 1969.
The aircraft’s fuselage was long ago sold for scrap metal and after a high-impact crash and explosion, followed by decades lying in acidic soil, there will not be much more to find than rusty lumps of metal, charred bone fragments and teeth, although if the team is lucky they may unearth a wedding ring or a watch. Bereaved families often receive no more remains than enough to fill a matchbox.
Tonnes of soil must be laboriously excavated to find enough human remains for a positive DNA test at the JPAC forensic anthropology laboratory in Hawaii, the biggest of its kind in the world. Burnt bone fragments rarely provide enough material, so finding a molar or a piece of skull in the sieve is a cause for whoops of celebration from the diggers.
Much of the search for MIA has been concentrated in Vietnam, initially fuelled by the double injustice felt by returning veterans that their service in an unpopular war was derided by many Americans and that their fallen comrades were being abandoned.
Hollywood latched on to stories of surviving US servicemen, feeding the popular imagination with a series of films including three Missing in Action films starring Chuck Norris, and Rambo: First Blood Part II, starring Sylvester Stallone, all about the rescue of MIA.
For those picking their way through the Laos jungle in the hope of giving a tiny fragment of a former life the dignity of a formal remembrance, this is far from a forgotten battlefield. Mr Danielson, a quietly spoken but driven man, is fired by a personal sense of mission. “When I was a Marine we were able to take our dead with us after combat,” he said, “but in Vietnam that wasn’t always the case. Doing this work is a chance to come back for my fallen comrades from that war, and that makes it the best job I have ever had. It is the noblest job and the most rewarding.”
Another Vietnam veteran toiling in the tropical heat is Chief Medic Robert Wickboldt, 62, from Texas, who also served in Iraq this year. He said: “This work means closure for the families who lost people out here. It means so much to them.”
Both men are looked up to by the young servicemen and women digging the iron-hard ground, nearly all of whom are veterans of the war in Iraq.
With comrades dying on Iraqi and Afghan battlefields, the presence of so many serving soldiers recently returned from there is hardly surprising. The fate of the MIA from a previous generation is a pressing matter of troop morale. Those on active duty expect their fallen comrades to receive a proper burial Marine Sergeant Winston Fulloch, 28, from New York, has completed two tours in Iraq and expects to be sent to Afghanistan soon. “My mother just says she’s glad I’m here in Laos for now,” he said.
Other teams are searching near by for the remains of 14 Americans who died when a giant Hercules Spectre gunship was hit by a missile in 1972, and for the graves of two pilots of a downed spotter aircraft from 1968.
Witness evidence from villagers has suggested that their bodies were buried near their aircraft by Vietnamese troops.
The search for the 1,800 missing is becoming a race against time as memories fade, witnesses die and remote crash sites are increasingly pillaged for scrap sold in the booming economy of Vietnam over the border. But it still throws up astonishing findings.
In September the remains of Air Force Major Burke H. Morgan, of Manitou Springs, Colorado, were flown back to the United States and buried with full military honours beside his wife, Mary, at the US Air Force Academy. Major Morgan had taken off on an armed reconnaissance mission over Laos on August 22, 1967. After leaving Nakhon Phanom air base, in Thailand, he and a fellow officer made radio contact for the last time, shortly after midnight. Subsequent searches of their last-reported location, in Xiang-khoang province, failed to locate the crash site.
However, in 1993 a joint team from the US and Laos travelled to the province. They interviewed three men who remembered the crash in 1967 and the burial of the crew members. The men also stated that one of the bodies had been disinterred in 1986. The remains were finally traced to a Lao official who had been holding them, awaiting directions from the authorities.
Scientists were able to positively identify bone fragments and dental remains for burial in America.
Some in Laos and Vietnam grumble about the large sums of money spent on finding dead Americans when their countries are still littered with unexploded bombs that continue to kill farmers.
The military museum in Vientiane, the capital of Laos, still exhibits dramatic wartime photographs of the struggle against the “criminal imperialists” who flew the aircraft. Many of the guerrillas who shot them down were in the women’s firepower battalions, tiny figures in the photos crouched under huge Soviet machineguns.
But old hatreds have faded. Jason Heyman, a 28-year-old Marine staff sergeant, has been guided to the jungle graves of Americans by the former North Vietnamese soldiers who killed them.
He said: “Soldier to soldier, they were just doing their job. I’ve had to kill in Iraq and I know they were doing what they thought was right to defend their country.”
Casualties of a secret war
# Joint PoW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) has a staff of 400 and a budget of $49 million (£26 million) to search for missing American war dead worldwide
# Most of its missions are in South-East Asia and the Pacific, although it also has missions to Russia, Europe and Korea. It once recovered victims of an American Civil War naval battle
# Its highest priority is finding living American PoWs held in South-East Asia, although there has never been a credible report of one. The search for troops missing in action (MIA) began as soon as the Vietnam War ended but was stepped up under political pressure from Vietnam veterans when relations between America and its former enemies thawed in the 1990s
# There are still 78,000 Second World War MIA, 8,100 from the Korean War, 1,800 from the Vietnam War, 120 from the Cold War and one from the Gulf War
# About six MIA are identified each month, including Vietnam War dead, and usually about 1,000 active case files are under consideration at any one time. To locate crash sites and graves JPAC historians examine military records from the war and investigators in the field question villagers and former North Vietnamese soldiers
# The American public was not told that its military was fighting in Laos in the 1960s and 1970s. North Vietnamese forces moved supplies and troops along the Ho Chi Minh trail on its territory to the battles in South Vietnam. The CIA recruited tribal mercenaries to fight them
# Between 1964 and 1973 US aircraft flew 580,000 bombing missions over Laos and dropped more than 2 million tonnes of explosives. About 30 per cent failed to detonate. Cluster bomblets continue to be a particular menace. There may be 9 million unexploded bomblets in Laos and they still kill people
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The Words
http://www.Freerepublic.com/~ALOHARONNIE
The Pictures
http://www.RickRescorla.com/The%20Statue.htm
The Heroism
http://www.ArmchairGeneral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=24361
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No. Joke.
JOHN KERRY =
Pictures of a vietnamese Re-Education Camp
http://www.Freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1308949/posts
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