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Article: With no government help, families forced to search for remains of Viet Cong MIAs.(Knight Ridder Newspapers)
- Article from:
- Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service
- Article date:
- July 11, 2000
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2000 Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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HANOI, Vietnam _ The death certificate has been typed onto thin brown paper, with thick carbon-paper keystrokes. The document is creased and smudged from three decades of folding and weeping, but this much remains clear: Le Duy Hien, age 26, was killed on May 5, 1968.
Hien is one of about 300,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers still missing in action from what is known here as the American War. The Vietnamese government, strapped for money then and now, has never been able to mount much of a search-and-recovery effort for its MIAs, and the official program has been so limited and patchwork that the Ministry of Defense doesn't even have reliable figures on ...