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Vietnam repatriates U.S. soldier remains
The suspected remains of an American soldier killed during the Vietnam War were flown home on Thursday, four decades after U.S. troops first landed in the country to fight.
Under rainy skies, a U.S. military honor guard loaded a flag-draped aluminum coffin onto an Air Force C-130 at Danang International Airport, in central Vietnam, before it headed off to a forensics laboratory in Hawaii for further identification.
"We want to continue the commitment" to account for all the missing in action from the war, said Lt. Col. Lentfort Mitchell, commander of the office for missing U.S. servicemen in Vietnam.
In addition to the remains, two boxes of artifacts were also shipped back, he said. The remains were recovered during excavation efforts in central and southern Vietnam.
Next week marks the 40th anniversary of U.S. troops landing in Danang on March 8, 1965, the official start of a decade-long war that ended in 1975. The war took the lives of 58,000 Americans and an estimated three million Vietnamese.
Also Thursday, a U.S. military team of about 100 people flew into Danang as part of continuing U.S. efforts to locate about 1,800 soldiers still listed as missing. Since 1973, more than 700 sets of remains have been recovered and identified.
This year marks the 30th anniversary of the end of the war in April 1975, with the fall of Saigon, the capital of the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese government, to communist forces. |
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