Word: mia
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...bones are being warehoused in Vietnam. Moreover, the central government's efforts to collect remains held by its citizens have been halfhearted at best. A week after our trip to Suoi Pai, we traveled to Ho Chi Minh City and put out the word that we were interested in MIA bones. Leads flooded in. A Vietnamese military officer passed along photocopies of the personal effects of three servicemen that supposedly came from graves dug up by impoverished soldiers in Kontum province...
Later in Hanoi, Bell commiserated with us about the frustrating journey: "That's pretty typical. We get right down to the wire and then can't find the remains." He said the American MIA office in Hanoi would like to excavate the Scharf crash site, because even if most of the bones have been removed, it is possible that a few teeth or other fragments might remain. But it would be next to impossible to lug the necessary gear up the mountain, and Vietnam's Soviet-built helicopters are too large and unreliable to risk setting down in that treacherous...
...always been good business for defense contractors and arms dealers. But the Vietnam War gave rise to a dismal new enterprise: the MIA industry, which plays on the farfetched notion that there are dozens of American prisoners still being held captive in Southeast Asia or China or the former Soviet Union. The industry thrives on false leads, bogus photographs and unprovable allegations about the fate of the 2,273 U.S. servicemen still unaccounted for 17 years after the war ended. Its toxic by-products are the protracted pain of the relatives of the MIAs and continuing public confusion about...
...recent weeks the MIA industry has been given a new lift by retired Major General Oleg Kalugin, former head of counterintelligence for the KGB, who was forced to resign in 1990 after he became one of the agency's most truculent public critics. Kalugin has told several U.S. news organizations, including the Los Angeles Times and the New York Daily News, that the KGB questioned "at least" three American POWs in Vietnam in 1978, five years after Hanoi said it had returned all living prisoners...
Even if Kalugin's account, like so many tantalizing tales before it, leads to a dead end, it has given new life to the MIA industry. Wild claims about the fate of the POWs flourish because of the virtual impossibility of determining what happened to every single American who disappeared in Vietnam. After previous conflicts, the U.S. learned to live with similar uncertainties: the graves of the unknown soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery are monuments to the tens of thousands of fighting men left unaccounted for after World Wars I and II and the Korean War. Yet perhaps because...