Missing In Action United States

Hanoi dismissed as a "concoction of insults" allegations that Vietnam may have massacred hundreds of U.S. prisoners, and it again branded the document that sparked the allegations a fake. The document purports to show that Vietnam was holding 1,205 U.S. prisoners in 1972 when it claimed that it held only 368. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Ho The Lan indicated, however, that the government is ready to discuss the document with White House envoy Gen. John W. Vessey Jr.

President Clinton's decision to unblock multilateral lending to Vietnam will make it easier for Hanoi to find clues about missing U.S. servicemen, a senior Vietnamese official said. Ordinary people--former soldiers or villagers--will be more willing to help now that the United States has made a gesture to improve relations, Nguyen Xuan Phong, head of the Foreign Ministry's American department, said in an interview.

A senior Senate Republican, saying he believes evidence suggests that American prisoners are still alive in Vietnam, accused Pentagon investigators Sunday of doing a sloppy job investigating reports of "live sightings" of the missing men. But Sen. Robert C. Smith (R-N.H.) also appeared to be moderating his opposition to the lifting of a U.S. trade embargo against the Vietnamese government.

A high-level U.S. delegation on Friday handed over documents seized from the North Vietnamese to help Hanoi search for its 300,000 soldiers missing from the Vietnam War. The gesture was also meant to win Vietnamese assurances of continued good-faith efforts to locate missing U.S. servicemen. The microfilmed documents turned over Friday consisted mostly of North Vietnamese materials ranging from battle plans to personal diaries. American officials said they were part of a collection taken by U.S.

The Defense Department said Monday that several photographs purportedly showing Vietnam-era U.S. prisoners of war were lifted from a 20-month-old issue of a Soviet magazine and are not pictures of missing Americans. The discovery was made by a U.S. team in Cambodia investigating a now-widely circulated snapshot said by family members to show three U.S. pilots shot down over Indochina.

The Senate, responding to a flurry of recent claims that Americans are being held prisoner in Southeast Asia, voted Friday to create a select committee to delve into the long-simmering issue of U.S. servicemen missing in action. The committee will have 12 members equally divided between the two parties and will go out of existence late next year unless renewed. "We hope to be able to have the answers by then (next year) although we can't predict that," said Sen. Robert Smith (R-N.H.

As troops, war machinery and supply trucks, stretching from horizon to horizon, rolled into position Saturday for a long-awaited ground assault into Kuwait, U.S. and allied warplanes bombed Iraqi forces so hard just across the front lines that they rocked U.S. Marines in their foxholes.

Allied warplanes raked Iraqi troops with some of the heaviest bombing of the Persian Gulf War on Saturday, scattering one unit of the elite Republican Guard and blowing up airfields, tanks and armored personnel carriers. But the Iraqis, vowing to retaliate with everything from kitchen knives to "weapons of mass destruction," shot down two American planes--the first in two days. They used antiaircraft fire, but U.S. officers said it came from scattered guns and was not centrally controlled.

The U.S. Pacific Command on Wednesday identified the remains of two American servicemen listed as missing in the Vietnam War. Air Force Capt. Michael L. Hyde of Boulder City, Nev., was lost over South Vietnam on Dec. 8, 1966. Army Sgt. 1st Class Vernon Z. Johns of Baltimore was reported missing in South Vietnam on Feb. 3, 1968, the command said.

The Pentagon announced plans Tuesday to significantly increase the number of personnel involved in resolving the cases of more than 2,200 U.S. servicemen still missing in Southeast Asia. Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams insisted that the decision to beef up the operation has been "in the mill for a long time" and did not come in response to recent publicity that has drawn new attention to the long-simmering issue.