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Subject: U.S. Outpost in Hanoi Seeks Word of MIAs;In Vietnam, a Detachment of Seven
Date: Mon, 23 Nov 92 09:54:16 EST
Message-ID: <7.1992Nov23.095416@AmeriCast.com>

U.S. Outpost in Hanoi Seeks Word of MIAs;In Vietnam, a Detachment
of Seven Americans Sifts Through the Mists of War and Time<By
Thomas W.  Lippman=Washington Post Staff Writer=

HANOI - To any American who was in Vietnam during the war, the
compound known as The Ranch would look eerily familiar.

The sign at the gate says "US MIA OFFICE." But the cluster of
three tiled-roof buildings behind a wall at the end of a noisy,
muddy street on the outskirts of the capital looks like nothing
so much as one of the District Senior Adviser compounds the Unit-
ed States set up throughout South Vietnam to coordinate the ill-
fated "pacification" program during the war.  Those establish-
ments, with their basketball hoops, air conditioners, commissary
food, field radios, resident lieutenant colonels and civilian
advisers to Saigon government "counterparts," were outposts of
canned beer and "can do," where the mission was to win hearts and
minds while the troops were winning the war.

The Ranch seems very much the same, minus uniforms and weapons,
and the attitude is still "can do," but its mission is very dif-
ferent: to dig through the rubble of the military failure and
find out what happened to the American servicemen who have never
been accounted for. It is the first and so far the only U.S.
government installation in Vietnam since Saigon - now Ho Chi Minh
City - fell to communist troops in 1975.

For its residents - all volunteers - The Ranch is the center of
their lives and their work, a fulltime quest for information
about Americans who never came home.  Hanoi is not a cushy as-
signment, but The Ranch represents the lap of luxury compared to
their previous home, a rat-infested downtown hotel.

Each resident has his own bedroom with bath. A Vietnamese woman
prepares three meals a day. The electric power is reliable. A big
morale booster arrived last week in the form of a television sa-
tellite dish, which brought in "Jake and the Fatman" with Indone-
sian subtitles and, finally, Cable News Network.

On the first day, the detachment - after months of isolation in
Vietnam's dreary capital - were able to see themselves on televi-
sion, because CNN had a crew here filming a visit by three
members of the U.S. Senate's Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs.

The Senate committee is evaluating the Pentagon's efforts to ac-
count for the 2,265 American servicemen still listed as missing
from the war. The detachment at The Ranch, the key component of a
program budgeted for more than $19 million in fiscal 1993, is the
frontline of that effort.

In the search for news of missing Americans, The Ranch's five
military and two civilian per-It is the first and so far the only
U.S. government installation in Vietnam since Saigon fell in
1975.<

>

sonnel travel throughout Vietnam to investigate reported sight-
ings of Caucasian or black men under circumstances suggesting
they might be prisoners of war still being held. The Americans
also interview Vietnamese civilians who claim to possess the
remains of dead Americans or know where remains can be found and
catalogue all the archives and photographs from the war that
Vietnam is now making available from its military museums and the
records of its army units.

When the U.S.  military sends in teams from Hawaii for to search
for air-crash sites for clues to the fate of U.S. air crews, it
is The Ranch that coordinates their visits.

Last weekend, a U.S. team that had been camped at a crash site
7,000 feet up on a remote mountainside in Laos for a month, re-
turned with 350 bone fragments, eight sets of teeth and an iden-
tification card that should help close the books on the
aircraft's crew.

According to Air Force Maj. Roger Overturf, a Hawaii-based
spokesman for the MIA unit, crash site excavations in Cambodia
and Laos are conducted with the permission of the governments of
those countries. The vast majority of the 2,265 listed as missing
are in Vietnam, but in places the border is unmarked and in oth-
ers men are known to have been lost on missions into the two
countries bordering Vietnam where the United States was never of-
ficially at war.

In Cambodia, Overturf said, some planned missions have been
scrapped because of the danger of confrontation with Khmer Rouge
units that control the northeastern part of the country. U.S.
participants in the field missions are unarmed, Overturf said.
The host country is responsible for security.

Vietnamese officials told the visiting senators that they have
urged people all over the country to come forward with informa-
tion about Americans whose deaths they witnessed or whose remains
they might have. When Vietnamese appear with information, pur-
ported personal effects or what they say are human bones, they
are interviewed by Air Force Sgt. William H. "Buddy" Newell, the
resident Vietnamese language specialist.  "The majority of people
who come in here don't have anything of value to us," Newell
said. "Even the real dog tags, only a very small percentage have
any value" because their owners long since returned home or have
been positively identified as killed. "Or they'll have a story -
back in 1967, somebody shot somebody," Newell said. "We do get
valid remains brought in occasionally," he said, "but you get
great big cow bones too," offered by Vietnamese who believe they
will receive some financial reward for turning in American bones.

There is no such reward, as Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) chairman
of the Senate MIA commitee, reminded the Vietnamese in a telev-
ised news conference last week.<08:50 11-23C9999-----

Copyright 1992, The Washington Post.  This story is from the
Washington Post's Capitol Edition On-Line and is not to be ar-
chived or redistributed.

For more information, send-email to American Cybercasting Cor-
poration (usa@AmeriCast.COM)