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The 2007 Veterans Initiative Trip to Vietnam And Laos
BY GARY JONES AND BILL DUKER
The latest Veterans Initiative trip to Vietnam and Laos took
place in October and November 2007. The team members were
VVA Vice President Jack Devine; Gary Jones, the chair of
VVA’s POW/MIA Committee; Bill Duker, the director
of the committee’s Veterans Initiative Program; and
Bob Maras, the former chair of VVA’s Veterans Initiative
Task Force.
We took with us items that VVA members had sent
to the national office. We took an NVA uniform with associated
field gear, two color photos of Viet Cong prisoners in
the Dong Tam area, and a grave site location in the Cam
Lo area said to contain 158 bodies. We also brought from
VVA members the specifications and map of a grave site
in Dak To and some confiscated Vietnam War documents in
Vietnamese.
This exceptionally well-documented information
could account for 165 Vietnamese KIAs and three POWs. With
this latest group of materials, we now have provided information
on a potential total of 9,439 KIAs and 1,092 POWs to our
counterparts, the Vietnamese Veterans Association.
Before
we left, we paid a visit to the DoD’s POW/MIA
Office in the Pentagon, where we received an excellent briefing
on what was happening in Vietnam. From this briefing we took
talking points and insights with us that proved very useful.
At every opportunity we brought up the issue of support from
both sides in achieving our mission of the fullest possible
accounting for MIAs. It is not taboo to mention POWs around
the Vietnamese. A priority at all our meetings is a discussion
of those Last Known Alive (LKA).
It is our impression that
the Vietnamese, particularly on the veteran and local levels,
fully intend to do whatever they can to help us identify
American MIA remains. This is good news. The Vietnamese did,
in fact, provide information to us about possible American
MIAs, which we have forwarded to the Pentagon’s Joint
POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) for investigation.
We arrived
in Hanoi on October 11, and the first order of business was
to recuperate from thirty hours of travel and to organize
our itinerary for the mission. Our first stop was with our
sponsors, the Vietnam Union of Friendship Organizations/Vietnam-USA
Society.
Since VVA began the VI program in 1994, there has
been an evolution in the attitude on all sides from entitlement
to humanitarian and now to what can only be called spiritual.
That is reflected in the relationship between the American
veterans and the country of Vietnam. Our relationship with
them is now founded more on trust and less on economics.
This gives the Veterans Initiative an advantage that other
groups do not have. We found this to be true throughout our
trip-from the northern reaches of Vietnam to the Delta. Every
group of veterans and government officials we met assured
us that they would encourage cooperation in our effort to
recover missing American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines.
At
each stop we were impressed by the rapidity and depth of
change in Vietnam. The people and the government are a study
in the rapid development of international relations. Our
requests to them have been positively received and not ignored.
We are confident that a lot of what’s behind
this is the trust we have built as a veterans’ organization
in our mission to help families, both American and Vietnamese.
The
American Embassy and JPAC report similar observations. The
working relationship between the Americans and Vietnamese
on this and many issues improves every year. Bob Maras’s
work with Bill Nelson, the Vietnam veteran who is the head
of HBO, is one example. We have proposed that HBO develop
a documentary on the Veterans Initiative and its impact on
the growing positive relationship between our governments.
At each stop, Jack Devine and Bob Maras brought up the proposed
documentary, and it met with promises from the Vietnamese
to participate and cooperate.
In Hanoi, we visited the Ministry
of Defense. We were invited to go to a museum and school
on ordinance disposal. In the course of locating, investigating,
and recovering remains, a very serious threat is unexploded
ordinance (UXO), which has saturated the country from the
French wars, World War II, and the American war. Children
are particularly vulnerable.
This became a talking point
for us at all stops. The Vietnamese UXO people have a dire
need for education, location, and safety equipment. They
also would welcome information from American veterans on
UXO location or placement.
As we progressed into the I Corps
area and south, we were struck by how strongly people responded
to our interest in the subject. We will bring the unexploded
ordinance issue to the VVA membership. While this issue carries
with it tremendous humanitarian value for the children and
farmers of the country, it also carries a serious threat
for American personnel in the MIA recovery operations and
has caused delays in several efforts, including at Kham Duc.
Another
change for us was that on this trip we worked less with local
provincial governments and much more with officials from
local Foreign Affairs departments. This may have been due
to recent flood and typhoon needs in the communities. It
was a good thing, though, in that the Foreign Affairs people
were often very much in tune with the efforts we were making
to develop the relationships we have with our Vietnamese
veteran counterparts.
In Laos, we found that developments
on all levels are not as far along as those in Vietnam. Still,
there has been great progress and all signs are that it will
continue. There is some indication that the Lao are beginning
to recognize us, if not completely trust us yet. This is
similar to what has happened in Vietnam. JPAC reports that
the Lao have been supportive from the beginning and that
cooperation between the Laotian government and JPAC is improving.
The
personnel manning the American embassies in both countries
are exceptional. We were treated with great skill and respect,
and the briefings were on target and very useful. They listened
carefully to the experiences we had as we moved around Vietnam
and Laos. The JPAC personnel are our brothers and sisters,
of course, and are extraordinarily committed to this mission.
It is a true honor for VVA to be associated with them, and
they deserve all the assistance we can provide.
The team would
like to thank the Veterans Association in Laos, which is
considering its own losses and how to deal with them. Unfortunately,
they are poorly prepared to work on recovery problems. We
had no information on Laotian MIAs to give them. However,
they have been very cooperative in working with JPAC in the
field to try to locate American losses.
The veterans and people
of Vietnam we have worked with since 1991 are sincerely and
deeply appreciative of our efforts to help them with accounting
for their lost warriors. In response to our efforts, they
have seriously pursued a policy of helping us find ours.
There
is work to be done. We need more access to their records,
and we have communicated that to them. Given the progress
made to date due to VVA’s efforts, we believe that
there is a good chance that cooperation will continue to
improve, which will yield concrete results in the field.
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