Binding Up Old Wounds

摘要

Imagine if the government of Vietnam believed that one of its estimated 300,000 missing in action (MIAs) had been mistakenly buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Would the United States allow the Vietnamese to go into Arlington in the middle of the night and dig up old bones? Be serious. Yet Vietnamese officials have allowed American officials to do the equivalent. A joint team of Americans and Vietnamese have dug up Vietnamese military cemeteries as part of a pursuit of the impossible—a full accounting of the 2,204 American MIAs in Indochina. While they found no GIs in the cemeteries, the overall level of cooperation by the Vietnamese is now extraordinarily high.