Victims probably on advance team
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By Karen Blakeman
Advertiser Staff Writer
The seven Americans and nine Vietnamese killed yesterday in the mountains south of Hanoi were likely part of an advance team of specialists doing advance work on a jungle site to be excavated in the hopes of finding the remains of servicemen killed in Vietnam.
The team, part of a project known as Joint Task Force-Full Accounting, was established in 1992 in response to the politically sensitive issue of finding more than 2,000 servicemen missing in action after the war ended in 1975. Its purpose is to find and recover the remains of those who died in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and China.
The task force, with headquarters at Camp H.M. Smith in Halawa, has detachments in Hanoi, Bangkok, and Vientiane, Laos. Its budget is between $5 million and $6 million a year.
It consists of 161 investigators, analysts, linguists and other specialists from all four branches of the military, and is supported by archaeologists, anthropologists and other forensic investigators from the U.S. Army Central Identification Laboratory in Hawai'i.
Peter Miller of Kailua, an anthropologist who works for the Army laboratory and who returned two weeks ago from the task force's 64th mission to Vietnam, said he believes the crash victims were members of the advance team out of Hanoi, possibly the team charged with making preparations for the lab's 65th mission.
"I'm anxious to know who they are," Miller said. "The Hanoi detachment isn't that big: Seven people would be a big chunk (of the American contingent)," he said.
Hanoi advance teams, including linguists and photographers, follow on the work done by investigators who identify potential sites through research, interviews with witnesses and information contained in war archives, Miller said.
They then fly to the site, photograph it, and document the layout of the area in preparation for the recovery teams that will fly in to excavate.
"Anything so that the (Army lab) team isn't going in blind," he said.
The advance team also obtains the proper clearances and unravels red tape with local village leaders and other representatives of political jurisdictions. The team would also secure any heavy equipment required for the excavation, he said.
Miller said much of the terrain in the Quang Binh province south of Hanoi is mountainous and treacherous for helicopter travel, but that the helicopter used by the team, a large, Russian-built MI-17, is rugged and well maintained by the Vietnamese government.
"It's a sturdy, robust hunk of metal," Miller said. "It's a workhorse."
According to information released by the U.S. Pacific Command at Camp Smith, the task force has recovered more than 500 sets of American remains.
