Vietnam has not made a demand on the USA that the USA account for all Vietnamese missing in action by making an allegation that some of them might be still held as prisoners in dreadful conditions somewhere in the USA or its client states, as the USA has. The demand that the U.S, government has made on Vietnam -- a country it _invaded_ -- is in fact unprecedented in history. France declined to join the POW myth made in America, even though the U.S. government invited it to do so (see H. Bruce Franklin, _M.I.A. or Mythmaking in America_, pp. 24-27).
Have you ever thought about what the Vietnamese people might feel about the American POW myth & demand based upon it? The Vietnamese had to cooperate with Americans, due to the Vietnamese government's desire to have the American economic sanctions lifted.
***** In November 1985, while American audiences were still packing movie theaters to cheer Rambo, the first joint Vietnamese-American search of a [U.S. bomber] crash site in Vietnam began. The American team included four experts from the U.S. Army's Central Identification Laboratory, two explosive experts, a medic, and two Army engineers to operate the technological equipment they brought with them, including metal detectors, metal cutting tools, water pumps, and a 21,000-pound excavator. The site was in the small farming village of Yen Thuong, nine miles north of Hanoi, where a B-52 had crashed during the Christmas bombing thirteen years earlier.
On the night of December 20, 1972, that B-52 was preparing to drop its forty tons of bombs on Hanoi. But as it approached the city, it was hit, first by fire from a MiG fighter and then by a volley of two or three surface-to-air missiles. With an internal fire, its right wing in flames, without electrical power, unable to communicate, and lacking even its intercom system, the plane spun out of control. All six crewmen were reported as missing in action.
Two of the men, however, did manage to bail out, copilot Paul L. Granger and bombardier-navigator Thomas J. Klomann. Both were immediately captured. Granger was sent to Hoa Lo Prison (the Hanoi Hilton), where he says he spent the majority of his time "playing cards and chess" until he was released three months later in the last plane from Hanoi. Klomann gives this account of his captivity:
Apparently, I was unconscious when I landed and was taken to a North Vietnamese hospital. I didn't regain consciousness for about a week and remained semi-conscious for another two weeks. The other POWs had asked the Vietnamese to feed me intravenously, which they did, and also take care of a large bed sore which had developed on my tailbone. They also gave me leg splints to keep my feet from dropping. I spent a little less than two months in Hanoi and was among the first to be returned.[2]
The other four crewmen have remained part of the total of MIAs reported in the media since.
That is the story of the lost bomber and its crew from the American point of view. For the villagers on the ground in Yen Thuong, it was a different story.
Nguyen Duc Tru, who was then forty-three, vividly remembers that night, when suddenly "there was a great explosion and a big fire." "Dust and smoke covered the whole village," and the people, believing they were being bombed, took refuge in their air raid shelters. But eight villagers did not escape, for they were killed by the crashing bomber. Two of these were the husband and twelve-year-old son of Nguyen Thi Teo, who were in their little house, which was totally demolished as the wreckage of the giant plane with its forty-ton bomb load exploded deep into the earth itself.
In the morning, all that remained were scattered pieces of metal and a deep crater filled with water. A few days later, another part of Yen Thuong village was more than half destroyed by B-52 bombs, and many more villagers were killed. None of the survivors could have been more grief-stricken than Nguyen Thi Teo, who for two weeks wept and could eat nothing but rice soup. Perhaps the members of the National League of Families who lost either a husband or a son could understand, for she had lost both a husband and a son.
When the American-Vietnamese team arrived in Yen Thuong in November 1985, hundreds of peasants flocked to gaze at the nine-ton excavator as it drove down the narrow dirt country road and came to the site of the 1972 crash, which was now Nguyen Thi Teo's vegetable garden. But to gain access to the dig, the team first had to demolish two houses that stood in the way. One of them was the new home of Nguyen Thi Teo, now sixty years old....
(endnotes omitted, H. Bruce Franklin, _M.I.A. or Mythmaking in America_, Brooklyn, NY: Lawrence Hill Books, 1992, pp. 173-5) *****
During the war, American bombs and bombers killed the Vietnamese & destroyed their houses. Americans are, however, not satisfied with such ordinary exploits. They must go that extra mile that no other nation in the world has. They want to keep demolishing houses of the Vietnamese people even after the war, if they stand in the way of a sick American obsession fed by racist imagination.
Yoshie