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TONG MAU (Cambodia): In the middle of a remote Cambodian paddyfield near the Vietnam border, 10 sweaty Americans are digging a large hole.
To the handful of straw-hatted rice farmers tending nearby crops, the efforts of these burly men and women from a land far away arouse mild interest and bemusement.
To the Americans, the task is deadly serious — a solemn duty owed to those who laid down their lives for their country.
At the bottom of the hole, the diggers believe, are the remains of a US “Huey” helicopter pilot shot down 33 years ago during the Vietnam War. They have come to take him home.
“It is a very sacred mission,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Michael Dembroski, who coordinates the US military’s continuing efforts to recover the remains of all missing in action, or MIA, personnel left over from the American war in Indochina.
“Everybody is a buddy and it’s just something that at a minimum we owe the people who every day put their lives on the forefront to help our country,” he said, squinting against the harsh glare of the midday sun.
With the prospect of war in Iraq looming larger by the day, US troops can take some comfort in their military’s commitment to “search and recovery operations”, some of which are still looking for men lost in World War Two.
“They know that if something unfortunate does happen to them, then 110 per cent will be given to give some solace to their families — even if that means just recovering their bodies,” Dembroski said.
MORE THAN 1,900 MISSING: Out of an original 2,585 personnel listed as MIA immediately after the Vietnam War, 1,902 US soldiers, pilots and civilians remain unaccounted for in the paddyfields and jungles of southeast Asia.
The vast majority are in Vietnam, but 391 men are still recorded as missing in Laos, to the west of America’s Cold War foe, and a another 58 in Cambodia.
Knee-deep in mud and toiling in the unforgiving tropical heat, their “POW/MIA: You are not forgotten” tee shirts drenched in sweat, Dembroski’s search team on MIA Case 1441 hopes the total missing in Cambodia will drop to 57 before the month-long dig is over.
“What we’re looking for is the grave — and I’m pretty confident we’ll find it,” said Franklin Damann, the civilian anthropologist leading the dig.
Every ounce of thick, dark clay dug out of the crash site, a circle 20 metres (65 feet) in diameter etched into the paddyfield, is washed and sifted through a rack of sieves by the search team aided by as many as 30 Cambodians poring through the sludge.
Bullet casings, webbing, seat springs and cogs all come to light, some hardly recognisable as metal, others gleaming.
“We’re right around the middle of helicopter now because everything we’re seeing is from the central compartment. We’re finding a hell of a lot of M60 projectiles and the cartridges which were burnt up in the fire and exploded,” Damann said.
What the diggers really want to find are human remains — a lock of hair, bone, or a tooth perhaps — that will enable the verification, normally through DNA testing, of the pilot’s identity at a special lab in Hawaii.
Once positively identified, the body parts are returned to the dead soldier’s family for a final burial on American soil with full military honours.
“I’ve got a mom and a dad and brothers and sisters and I know what they mean to me, and so it doesn’t take much to know what we are doing here means to others,” Damann said. “Handing back someone you’ve found? Yeah, that’s a pretty emotional moment.”
CAMBODIA UNDERSTANDS: Despite the secret American bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War to sever Vietnamese communist supply lines, the Cambodians appear keen to try and close another dark chapter in the history of both countries.
The traumas of the genocidal “Killing Fields” episode, in which 1.7 million Cambodians died under the brutal rule of the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s, has created a nation that knows about victims and tragedy.
“More than any people in the world, the Cambodians understand the missing,” said Jerry Jennings, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence for POW/Missing Personnel Affairs, who recently travelled to the crash site in the southeastern province of Svay Rieng.
Without the help of local officials, who arrange for the payment of compensation to farmers whose rice paddies are dug up, and witnesses of the original crash, the Americans admit the task would be near impossible.—Reuters
