U.S. Successful in Recovering Vietnam War Remains

April 10 -- The fatal crash of a helicopter mission to recover the bodies of U.S. servicemen missing since the Vietnam War is bringing new attention to the soldiers and civilians putting their lives on the line a quarter century after the war's end to bring home missing Americans.

Through a Pentagon program called Joint Task Force Full Accounting, created in 1992, 604 sets of remains believed to be unaccounted-for Americans have been returned to the United States.

As recently as October, the remains of 11 U.S. Air Force servicemen classified as missing-in-action from the Vietnam War were identified and being returned to their families for burial. More are expected to return May 4.

"The recovery effort has continued at a fairly steady pace," says Larry Greer, a spokesman for the Defense Department's Prisoner of War/Missing in Action Office, who says there are as many as 1,000 sites that await investigation.

A team of seven task force investigators and nine Vietnamese died April 6 when their Russian-made helicopter crashed in Vietnam. They were an advance team for future recovery sites and included the incoming and outgoing heads of the program there. It was the first loss of life for the program.

"These joint teams have maintained a truly remarkable safety record, particularly given the dangerous and difficult terrain in which they work," Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said Sunday.

Their loss will be a blow to the program, says Ann Mills Griffith, founder of the National League of POW/MIA families. Of the three military personnel who died, she said, "It's not easy to replace people like that, they're all volunteers. There's an awful lot of commitment on the part of these guys who operate in the field out there."

Currently, 1,981 Americans remain unaccounted for in Southeast Asia, many of them pilots believed lost on land or over the ocean. Some 600 of those are believed to be lost at sea are not expected to be recovered.

Coordinated Efforts