Quest to Find MIAs Keeps Vietnam in U.S. Conscience : War: Government is urged to do more to find out if any Americans are still alive. Full accounting seems unlikely.

HONOLULU —  There were no tears of joy, no dashes across the airport runway, no hugs or leaps into the air. No yellow ribbons, either. No speeches, no bands, no parades.

On this recent morning at Hickam Air Force Base, a dozen steel coffins bearing what may be the small human remains of 16 U.S. soldiers were somberly, silently loaded off a giant C-141 aircraft that had just arrived from Vietnam.

Larry Burress was there to greet them. Every month or so the 51-year-old Burress, a three-tour Vietnam veteran who wears black leather motorcycle gear and sports a gray ponytail, motors up to Hickam to snap a final salute to his returning comrades.

“I’m glad to see these bodies coming back,” he said. “But I wonder how many are still alive back there. I don’t doubt that they are.”

Like countless others around the nation--the friends and families of the 2,248 Americans still listed as missing in action in Southeast Asia--he wants the government to spend more effort determining whether any Americans are alive rather than just returning what can be found of their remains.

Forget the bones, he says. Bring home the troops.

Twenty years after the United States pulled its troops out of Vietnam, the war will not let go of the nation’s conscience. Having already lost 58,191 men and women in that star-crossed war, America seems doomed never to know the fates of all those who are still unaccounted for.

It is not for want of trying. The U.S. government is combing the mountains and jungles of Southeast Asia for live or dead Americans. It is hoping to satisfy the families that have spent two decades demanding to know what happened to their loved ones. So far, it hasn’t.

Meanwhile, the Vietnamese are producing bones and excavation sites and records. They are trying to persuade the United States to restore diplomatic relations with Vietnam and end its trade embargo. So far, they haven’t.

The result is a painful treadmill of an investigation that keeps open the sores of the war, blocks diplomatic relations and pleases no one.

In January of last year, the Pentagon began a three-year, $100,000-a-year experiment to investigate reports that missing Americans had been sighted. So far the task force has identified the remains of 19 missing soldiers. But it has found no Americans alive.

And this January a Senate committee determined that “there is, at this time, no compelling evidence that proves that any American remains alive in captivity in Southeast Asia.”

But the panel’s vice chairman, Sen. Robert C. Smith (R-N.H.), changed his mind after traveling there this summer and now believes some men were left behind after all. His allegations that some Defense and State Department officials attempted a cover-up have triggered a Justice Department investigation.

To put pressure on the Vietnamese to cooperate, the U.S. government has enforced a trade embargo ever since the end of the war. Now American business, which regards Vietnam as potentially a multibillion-dollar market, is urging the government to re-establish diplomatic relations and drop the trade embargo.

Irwin Jay Robinson, chairman of the Vietnam-American Chamber of Commerce, argues that Vietnam would respond by cooperating more closely with the search for POWs and MIAs. The Vietnamese, Robinson said in a recent article in the Vietnam Business Journal, “feel very friendly toward our country and are very anxious to achieve a rapprochement with us.”

But POW support groups counter that without the embargo, Vietnam would turn its back on the search for missing Americans. “Normalization with Hanoi would send a signal to the world that seizing hundreds of Americans was OK, and it would be open season on Yanks everywhere,” said Joe L. Jordan, executive director of the National Vietnam POW Strike Force.

John Parsels, a former Army helicopter pilot who spent three years as a captive in Hanoi, developed the same conviction after revisiting Vietnam this summer in search of his father-in-law, who has been missing since he parachuted out of his plane in 1967. The embargo, Parsels said, is the only club the United States can hold over Vietnam.

“Their whole economy is in shambles,” Parsels said. “Their bridges are on their last legs. Their roads are nearly impassable. If we can maintain this, we can force the Vietnamese to do something positive on the issue, like come up with live POWs.”

The Clinton Administration, like those it followed, is siding with the POWs. Winston Lord, assistant secretary of state for Asian and Pacific affairs, said the United States “must have tangible progress on this (POW/MIA) issue before any further steps can be taken in improving U.S.-Vietnamese relations.”

Until recently, the POW and MIA support groups lined up four-square behind the government’s efforts. Today, some have grown tired of waiting, angry that their loved ones were identified by the military from just a tooth or a bit of an arm bone found at a crash site.

Some have come to despise Pentagon officials and Pentagon statistics and Pentagon-ese. Some are becoming desperate, as demonstrated by several family members who held a fast last month in a makeshift bamboo cage at Camp Lejeune, N.C.

Their enemy is Lt. Col. Johnie Webb. A tall man with an intimidating presence, a decorated Army quartermaster in Vietnam, Webb is deputy commander of the Central Identification Laboratory here.

Since 1975, Webb has been in the business of retrieving human remains of soldiers and trying to attach names to the thousands of decaying bones stored in cardboard boxes that fill his lab.

In the mid-1980s, his lab was lambasted by outside experts and Congress’ General Accounting Office. There was evidence that skeletal material had been lost or misidentified. The qualifications of some of the lab’s anthropologists were questioned. The allegations resulted in a shake-up at the facility, with stricter research guidelines and record-keeping.

Sam Dunlap, a former lab anthropologist who first blew the whistle on the lab procedures, said in a recent interview that Webb and his lab employees would cut any corners to trim another name off the list of the missing. “They are simply trying to write everybody off as fast as they can,” said Dunlap, who now works at Georgetown University.

Webb, however, said a new, intricate investigative process has been put in place that brings family members into the review system and ensures that identifications are sound and irrefutable. He also hopes that new DNA tests will resolve more cases.

“It’s no secret that at one time or another, the government did lie to families of people lost in the Vietnam War,” Webb acknowledged. “We lied and said we were not in Laos, we were not in Cambodia, and it’s hard for families to accept things now if they were lied to once before.”

Nancy Gourley of Alaska, the sister of Warrant Officer Gregory S. Crandall, still cannot. She was incensed when she had to bury her brother’s remains in Arlington National Cemetery last month, 22 years after he was shot down over Laos. All that was inside the coffin was a single tooth.

Lou Ann LaBohn of Washington, the sister of Staff Sgt. Gary LaBohn, had her brother’s name removed from a tombstone at Arlington. She said only one tooth from among the bone fragments buried there matched with any of the seven-man crew that crashed in Laos in 1968, and the tooth did not belong to her brother.

“They told me for years they didn’t know where he was or what had happened to him or whether he might be found,” she said. “It was all lies. All lies. All lies from the start.”

Webb says that even in the absence of bone fragments, the Army can determine from bits of clothing or plane ejection seats or other material that no one could have survived a particular crash or battle. The Army lab, he says, is fighting against time and decaying evidence.

“War is ugly,” he said. “We’ve done all we can do. There’s nothing more we can give them.”

Cooperation with Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia is slowly opening more sites for excavation by field investigators, led by the task force commander, Maj. Gen. Thomas H. Needham.

Once the commander of an airborne battalion in Vietnam, the general realizes he is racing against the clock, aware that with 2,248 Americans still unaccounted for, it is unlikely that all will be identified in his lifetime.

“We are working under terrible conditions, and we are doing our best,” he said.

His teams rough their way into remote mountain and jungle areas, tracking down reports of live Americans or setting up excavation digs to sift for signs of death. They work in dense terrain, fighting disease, insects, humidity and subtropical weather. They are besieged by local villagers who want to trade bones for cash or a flight to the United States.

“By 10 in the morning, you’re already sweating,” said Army Sgt. Chuck Doan, one of the field investigators. “The terrain is very tough and there are high mountains and sometimes you can’t get to places.”

Army Maj. Robert A. John recalled how villagers pressure them for reward money, displaying bags of bones that could be animal or human, but not necessarily American. U.S. field anthropologists, who were once handed small bits of remains that later were shown to come from an old woman’s grave in a local cemetery, must make difficult on-the-spot analyses of skeletal material, he said.

And that’s not all they have to contend with. An unclassified report of the most recent field activities said investigators receive tips, such as the one of “the severed head of an American on top of a thorn bush.”

The Center for Security Policy and the U.S. Veteran News and Report, two Washington-based organizations pushing for more accountability, accuse Needham’s group of trying to “bury rather than exhume the truth” about what happened to the missing.

J. Thomas Burch Jr., a Washington attorney and chairman of the National Vietnam Veterans Coalition, wants the United States to push its way into the prison camps, hospitals and secret work sites, where he believes American prisoners may be held.

“I hate to talk about bones and remains,” Burch said. “I want to talk about the live ones. We can talk about the dead ones later.”

Dana Duyka of Texas is convinced that her father, Air Force Col. David Williams, is alive even though she was notified in August that some “little tiny bone fragments” likely to belong to him had been found at his crash site.

She is worried that the government will claim the fragments are his even though raw and unverified military intelligence reports indicate he may have survived the crash and been taken prisoner. The reports, apparently based on information supplied by Vietnamese, say that he is working in the rice fields “as a water buffalo to pull the plows,” that his fingers have been cut off and that several villagers identified him from a photographs.

“My biggest fear is not that my father is dead,” his daughter said. “My biggest fear is that he is still alive, walking around somewhere, and there is nobody to help him.”

Many family members are splitting from the National League of Families because they believe the organization has become too apologetic for the government.

Ann Mills Griffiths, the league’s executive director, said her organization is still pushing officials to do more. She is adamant that the trade embargo against Vietnam not be altered until that country is more forthcoming on missing American soldiers. While she compliments the Army identification lab for correcting its past mistakes, she believes the field activities need to be increased.

The defectors have formed the National Alliance of Families. Headed by Dolores Alfond, who like Griffiths has a brother missing from the war, it staged the hunger demonstration last month outside Camp LeJeune, calling on Clinton to keep the embargo in place.

Based in Alfond’s home in Bellevue, Wash., the alliance accuses U.S. leaders of engaging in a cover-up to perpetuate the myth that no soldiers were knowingly left behind--a charge the government denies.

The alliance has strong support from Smith, a Vietnam veteran and vice chairman of the Senate committee. Although the panel found “no compelling evidence” that Americans are alive, Smith, returning this summer from a visit to Vietnam, said there is “very compelling evidence” of live prisoners. He cited confirmation of prisons that the Defense Intelligence Agency previously said did not exist. The Justice Department is reviewing his allegations that 10 government officials lied to the Senate committee.

Smith’s mistrust is echoed by Army Col. Millard A. Peck, who retired in disgust two years ago as chief of the Special Office for Prisoners of War and Missing in Action.

In a stinging letter to his superiors, Peck wrote: “Any soldier left in Vietnam, even inadvertently, was, in fact, abandoned years ago, and the farce that is being played is no more than political legerdemain done with smoke and mirrors to stall the issue until it dies a natural death.”

But Needham, his field investigative teams, experts at the identification lab and top Pentagon officials insist that all is being done to find anyone who might be alive and to bring home all those who died.

In an interview here after the quiet ceremony on the air base runway, after the new boxes of human remains were carted off to the lab, Needham said family members are being brought into the investigative process, that government records are being turned over to relatives and that outside consultants hired by families are being allowed to examine the skeletal remains.

“For some people, there will be a full accounting,” he said. “For others, there won’t be. I tell them we did the very best we could. And that’s all that I can say.”